Willingness to take risk is one of the most important aspects of personal financial decisions, especially those regarding investments. Recent studies show that one’s perception of time, specifically the individual level of Present Hedonistic and Future Time Perspectives (TPs), influence risky financial choices. This was demonstrated for both, Time Perspective treated as an individual trait and for experimentally induced Time Perspectives. However, on occasion, people might find themselves under the joint influence of both, chronic and situational Time Perspectives and little (...) is known about interactions between them. The paper focuses on the interplay between chronic and induced levels of Future and Present Hedonistic TPs in explaining people’s propensity to take investment risks. An experimental study using a Polish national random-quota sample was conducted. The results showed that situationally induced Future TP lowered the preferred level of portfolio riskiness while situationally induced Present Hedonistic TPs resulted in exactly the opposite effect, and that the higher level of chronic Present Hedonistic TP was linked to higher investment risk preferences. The role of the chronic Present Hedonistic TP was moderated by the situationally induced Future (approaching significance) and Present Hedonistic TPs. The induction of these TPs resulted in reduction of the propensity to take investment risks. The study adds to the literature on psychological factors influencing the propensity to take financial risk. The results are also important for researchers who experimentally manipulate variables that might be also considered as chronic traits. They indicate that whether the manipulation is congruent with one’s natural tendencies may have a differential impact on subsequent measures. (shrink)

I address Sinnott-Armstrong's argument that evidence of framing effects in moral psychology shows that moral intuitions are unreliable and therefore not noninferentially justified. I begin by discussing what it is to be epistemically unreliable and clarify how framing effects render moral intuitions unreliable. This analysis calls for a modification of Sinnott-Armstrong's argument if it is to remain valid. In particular, he must claim that framing is sufficiently likely to determine the content of moral intuitions. I then re-examine the evidence which (...) is supposed to support this claim. In doing so, I provide a novel suggestion for how to analyze the reliability of intuitions in empirical studies. Analysis of the evidence suggests that moral intuitions subject to framing effects are in fact much more reliable than perhaps was thought, and that Sinnott-Armstrong has not succeeded in showing that noninferential justification has been defeated. (shrink)

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic - Tomasz Fisiak Yeats’s Genres and Tensions: A Review of Charles I. Armstrong’s Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History - Wit Pietrzak Review of Anna Pochmara’s The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance - Antoni Górny “Artful Exaggeration” - Krzysztof Majer Interviews Bill Gaston Transcultural Theatre in the UK - Uilleam Blacker Talks to Joanna Kosmalska.

Science communication via testimony requires a certain level of trust. But in the context of ideologically-entangled scientific issues, trust is in short supply—particularly when the issues are politically ‘entangled’. In such cases, cultural values are better predictors than scientific literacy for whether agents trust the publicly-directed claims of the scientific community. In this paper, we argue that a common way of thinking about scientific literacy—as knowledge of particular scientific facts or concepts—ought to give way to a second-order understanding of science (...) as a process as a more important notion for the public’s trust of science. (shrink)

BackgroundNational guidelines require programmes use subjective assessments of social support when determining transplant suitability, despite limited evidence linking it to outcomes. We examined how transplant providers weigh the importance of social support for kidney transplantation compared with other factors, and variation by clinical role and personal beliefs.MethodsThe National survey of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and the Society of Transplant Social Work in 2016. Using a discrete choice approach, respondents compared two hypothetical patient profiles and selected one for transplantation. (...) Conditional logistic regression estimated the relative importance of each factor; results were stratified by clinical role and beliefs.ResultsFive hundred and eighy-four transplant providers completed the survey. Social support was the second most influential factor among transplant providers. Providers were most likely to choose a candidate who had social support, always adhered to a medical regimen, and had a 15 years life expectancy with transplant. Psychosocial providers were more influenced by adherence and quality of life compared with medical/surgical providers, who were more influenced by candidates' life expectancy with transplant. For providers concerned with avoiding organ waste, social support was the most influential factor, while it was the least influential for clinicians concerned with fairness.ConclusionsSocial support is highly influential in listing decisions and may exacerbate transplant disparities. Providers’ beliefs and reliance on social support in determining suitability vary considerably, raising concerns about transparency and justice. (shrink)

We examine the unique nature of agency problems within publicly traded family firms by investigating the earnings management decision of dominant family owners relative to non-family. To do so, we draw upon literature demonstrating that family owners are loss averse with respect to the family’s socioemotional wealth, or the affective endowment derived from firm ownership and control. Our theory and findings suggest that potential reputational consequences of earnings management lead family principals to engage in less of this practice relative to (...) non-family firms, and that founder family firms are less likely than non-founder family firms to use earnings management. Moreover, the family-firm effect varies with the firm size, the degree of CEO entrenchment, and the firm’s stock structure. We provide important insights regarding differences between family and non-family principals in the use of unethical accounting practices, thereby extending agency theory and advancing an underdeveloped research area. (shrink)

DESCARTES’S PASSIONS OF THE SOUL AND THE CONTEMPORARY DISPUTE ABOUT THE NATURE OF EMOTION In my article I discuss the connection between the Cartesian theory of passions of the soul and the contemporary dispute between the cognitive and non-cognitive theories of emotions. Defenders of the cognitive theory of emotions identify emotions with judgments. On the other hand, non-cognitivists claim that emotions are feelings caused by changes in physiological conditions relating to the autonomic and motor functions. Both cognitivists’ and non-cognitivists’ approaches (...) meet serious problems. In the paper, I want to show that the Cartesian theory of passions can be considered an anticipation of contemporary views and a compromise between the cognitive and non-cognitive theories of emotions. Keywords: DESCARTES, NATURE OF EMOTION, SOUL, COGNITIVE AND NON-COGNITIVE THEORIES OF EMOTIONS. (shrink)

In recent years, countries have begun to establish ministries of transitional justice as part of political transitions from authoritarianism to democracy or from conflict to peace. This may reflect a broader historical trend in the administration of TJ, which has evolved from isolated offices within a particular ministry to ad hoc cross-ministry coordinating bodies to the establishment of dedicated ministries. The reasons for the establishment of specific ministries to pursue TJ, what we call ministerialization, have not attracted scholarly attention. This (...) article explores the causes and likely consequences of this development. In particular, it applies international relations, comparative politics, and public policy theories to explain the phenomenon. Contrary to some TJ literature that is concerned about hegemonic transnational discourse, international actors have played little to no role in shaping how TJ is bureaucratically managed. Rather, based upon fieldwork in Solomon Islands and Tunisia, the article concludes that ministerialization has been the result of domestic policy entrepreneurship. For TJ ministries to become a norm, however, more transnational actors will need to be convinced of the benefits of such an institutional arrangement. (shrink)

This book is a qualitative, interpretive, phenomenological, and interdisciplinary, examination of food and food practices and their meanings in the modern world. Each chapter thematically focuses upon a particular food practice and on some key details of the examined practice, or on the practice’s social and cultural impact.

During an initial palliative care assessment, a dying man discloses that he had killed several people whilst a young man. The junior doctor, to whom he revealed his story, consulted with senior palliative care colleagues. It was agreed that legal advice would be sought on the issue of breaching the man’s confidentiality. Two legal opinions conflicted with each other. A decision was made by the clinical team not to inform the police.In this article the junior doctor, the palliative medicine specialist, (...) a medical ethicist, and a lawyer consider the case from their various perspectives. (shrink)

The article presents partial results of nationwide research devoted to teaching ethics. It discusses the place of ethics in the Polish education system and the development trends visible since its introduction (1991). When it comes to legislature, acts and ordinances of the Minister of National Education were analyzed. Next to legal acts also judgments of the Constitutional Tribunal, regulating the principles of teaching and assessing the subject of ethics, were discussed. An important aspect of these regulations, due to their practical (...) consequences, is the positioning of ethics as an alternative to the religious education. Statistical data were also analyzed, allowing for a nationwide assessment of the development of interest in the ethics as a subject of school teaching – an increase in the number of schools in which the subject of ethics is taught (depending on the stage of education and the type of school), as well as an increase in the number of full-time equivalent for ethics teachers. The last-mentioned increase, although significant since 2014, is nevertheless small in absolute numbers; ethics still remains a niche subject. Over the years, one can observe an improvement in its status and an increase in social demand. However, the current definition of ethics as an optional subject means that the level of participation still remains low. (shrink)

Children’s linguistic and social skills develop through play with siblings, but there is little research into sibling interaction using naturally occurring data. This conversation analytic case study presents an evidence-based account of how an older sibling responds to verbal challenges from her younger sibling during free play at home. The older sibling employs prosodic, rhetorical and linguistic devices to deflect challenges while avoiding conflict. She does this by acknowledging the grounds of the challenge, before invoking privileged information or epistemic differences (...) to reject it. Structurally, the older sibling inserts extended digressions which obfuscate challenges by engaging the challenger and switching topic. These phenomena blur the traditional accept/reject response dichotomy. The findings provide insight into the complexity of a 5-/6-year-old’s challenge-defence strategies and highlight the importance of face preservation and mitigation of disagreement. We propose that the ability to respond to challenges while maintaining intersubjectivity is a component of communicative competence. (shrink)

Author: Wojciechowska Anna Title: COLLABORATORS, CO-AUTHORS OR INDEPENDENT THINKERS? JOHN STUART MILL AND HARRIET TAYLOR MILL (Współpracownicy, współmyśliciele czy niezależni myśliciele? John Stuart Mill i Harriet Taylor Mill) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 139-158 Keywords: J.S. MILL, HARRIET TAYLOR (MILL), SOCRATIC DIALOG, COLLABORATORS Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:This article raise almost unnoticed in the literature problem of a creative relation between J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor (...) (Mill). The author concentrates her attention on their views concerning the situation and rights of women. Comparing the views of a partners, states that thanks to the method which was combination of Socratic dialog and collaborative self, they created an incredible arrangement resting on the literary collaboration. (shrink)

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. (...) Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life--understood as both a biological and social phenomenon--it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Political theorists are often interested in the problems that arise in more than one context; for example, problems that arise on a global level or among different cultural contexts. However, when political theorists engage with such problems, they face a methodological challenge. They need to decide how to evaluate differences both across and within the contexts in which the studied problem arises and determine how to create theories that are sensitive to the pluralism of real-life experiences. This article investigates the (...) methodological challenge of selection, and offers a method for accommodating difference across and within different contexts. To demonstrate both the significance of this challenge and the suitability of the proposed solution, this article focuses on a set of empirically inspired arguments concerned with the normative questions of urban life. Even though their authors declare an explicit focus on the pluralism of lived experiences when constructing a theory, the selected arguments reflect a surprisingly narrow scope of urban experiences. This article investigates this tension. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value.

The manuscript is based on a series of structured interviews with female scientists from around the world who have made significant contributions to psychology and have an impact on their cultural areas. The authors interviewed female scientists and researchers from a similar age group, but from different regions of the world, to capture the factors influencing careers of interlocutors from a similar period and enabling cultural inference. Both the universal and the cultural barriers faced by female scientists/researchers in career development (...) and the factors that have contributed to success in psychology are discussed. Universal and cultural factors served in this manuscript as a guideline for gender equality programs in academia to overcome gender stereotypes, support early career development, support women in reaching leadership positions, and enhance women’s visibility. (shrink)

The analysis of sexual differences in the representations of illnesses and patients in Polish medical literature in the 1840s shows that female and male patients were depicted in different ways. While female bodies were shown as open, vulnerable and malleable, male bodies were fortified, closed, and resistant. These two modes of representation entail two different concepts of illness: while women’s illnesses were caused by external factors, men’s maladies were believed to be the result of a distortion of inner balance. Interestingly, (...) in the period discussed, there was more and more scientific evidence to support the ‘feminine’ concept of illness. Doctors projected the new vision of malady only on women, equating femininity and modernity and depicting them as dangerous forces disturbing the previous autarky of the men’s world. (shrink)

Background Despite the bourgeoning of digital tools for bioethics research, education, and engagement, little research has empirically investigated the impact of interactive visualizations as a way to translate ethical frameworks and guidelines. To date, most frameworks take the format of text-only documents that outline and offer ethical guidance on specific contexts. This study’s goal was to determine whether an interactive-visual format supports frameworks in transferring ethical knowledge by improving learning, deliberation, and user experience.Methods An experimental comparative study was conducted with (...) a pre-, mid-, and post-test design using the online survey platform Qualtrics. Participants were university based early-stage health researchers who were randomly assigned to either the control condition (text-only document) or the experimental condition (interactive-visual). The primary outcome variables were learning, (measured using a questionnaire), deliberation (using cases studies) and user experience (measured using the SED/UD Scale). Analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics and mixed-effects linear regression.Results Of the 80 participants, 44 (55%) used the text-only document and 36 (45%) used the interactive-visual. Results of the knowledge-test scores showed a statistically significant difference between participants’ post-test scores, indicating that the interactive-visual format better supported understanding, acquisition, and application of the framework’s knowledge. Findings from the case studies showed both formats supported ethical deliberation. Results further indicated the interactive-visual provided an overall better episodic and remembered user experience compared with the text-only document.Conclusions Our findings show that ethical frameworks formatted with interactive and visual qualities provide a more pleasing user experience and are effective formats for ethics learning and deliberation. These findings have implications for practitioners developing and deploying ethical frameworks and guidelines (e.g., in educational or employee-onboarding settings), in that the knowledge generated can lead to more effective dissemination practices of normative guidelines and health data ethics concepts. (shrink)

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

Departing from the model suggested by Luyckx, Schwarz, Berzonsky et al., the relationships between identity and educational context, social participation, and identity information processing style were investigated. Participants were 972 students from six vocational schools in Poznań. The students, within these six schools, attended Grades I-III of three types of vocational schools: basic vocational schools, technical upper secondary schools, and specialized upper secondary schools. Three questionnaires were used: The Dimensions of Identity Development Scale, which measures five identity dimensions according to (...) the concept of Luyckx, Schwarz, Berzonsky et al., Social Participation Questionnaire, developed by Brzezińska, Rękosiewicz and Hejmanowski, enabling identification of the type of social participation, and the Polish adaptation of M. Berzonsky’s Identity Style Inventory 4 authored by A. Senejko, to examine identity styles. The results showed that the students from basic vocational schools and technical upper secondary schools were more often characterized by the normative identity style, whereas the students from specialized upper secondary schools manifested a greater tendency to engage themselves in exploration, both adaptive and ruminative. (shrink)

An imagined retrospective of apocalyptic art.

Reading is an affective and reflective relationship with a text, whether it is a new, groundbreaking monograph or one of those books that keeps getting pulled off the shelf year after year. Unlike traditional reviews, the pieces in this section may veer off in new directions as critical reading becomes an extended occurrence of thinking, being, and creation. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, by Simon Reynolds. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.

According to the paradigm view in linguistics and philosophical semantics, it is lexical semantics plus the principle of compositionality that allows us to compute the meaning of an arbitrary sentence. The job of LS is to assign meaning to individual expressions, whereas PC says how to combine these individual meanings into larger ones. In this paper I argue that the pair LS + PC fails to account for the discourse-relevant meaning of normative ‘ought’. If my hypothesis is tenable, then the (...) failure of LS + CS extends to normative language in general. The reason I offer that this is so is that semantics for normative language is, in an important respect, a substantive semantics. The ‘substantive’ in question means that the meaning of normative vocabulary in use is driven by metanormative views associated with a particular normative concept. SS rejects the model LS + CS and replaces it with a discourse-relevant semantics built around an interactional principle that ascribes to a particular surface syntactical form of ‘ought’ sentences a logical form that represents its discourse-salient normative content. In the paper I shall sketch how SS works and why it is worth serious consideration. (shrink)

The article seeks to analyze the portrayal of the Jews in two plays from the Chester mystery cycle: “Trial and Flagellation” and “The Passion.” The analysis acknowledges that the cycle is a mixture of, and a dialogue between, the universal standpoint emerging from the presentation of the biblical story of humankind and a contemporary perspective, pertaining to the reality of the viewers. Therefore, while pointing to the unique formal and structural uniformity of the cycle, which strengthens the idea of continuity (...) between the Old and the New Covenant and the role of the Israelites in the history of salvation, it also recognizes the potential of the plays to engage in the current stereotypes. The article examines how the Gospel account of Christ’s trial and death is modified through presenting the Jews as torturers, whitewashing the non-Jewish characters, and placing special emphasis on the question of Jewish ignorance. It is demonstrated how different theological and popular stances concerning the Jewish people are merged and reconciled in the Chester representation of the passion of Christ and it is argued that the plays in question retell the biblical story in such a way that the justification for the expulsion of the Jews from England could be derived from it. (shrink)

Private copying exception is an exception to copyright which is present both in Lithuanian national law and law of the European Union. Recent jurisprudence of Court of Justice of the European Union interpreted legal regulation of private copying exception in the laws of the European Union. The mentioned jurisprudence raised concern whether Lithuanian copyright laws on private copying exception and their interpretation in case law of Supreme Court of Lithuania are compatible with the European Union law. This paper analyses the (...) nature and intention of private copying exception, its reflection in Lithuanian and European copyright law and evaluates Lithuanian laws and case law in the light of recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The authors conclude that recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union on private copying exception shall not lead to any dramatic or substantial changes of Lithuanian national copyright laws. (shrink)

"Individual and social determinants of human development. The positive psychology perspective".

A blueprint for social change showing how we can reverse the destructive attitudes that threaten our world.

Paying research subjects for their participation in biomedical studies is an increasingly common and acceptable practice. Nevertheless, it continues to raise numerous conceptual, ethical, and pract...

How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of (...) not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion. (shrink)

Reigning regulatory frameworks for biomedical research impose on researchers and research ethics committees an obligation to protect research participants from risks that are unnecessary, disproportionate to potential research benefits, and non-minimized. Where the research has no potential to produce results of direct benefit to the subjects and the subjects are unable to give consent, these requirements are strengthened by an additional condition, that risks should not exceed a certain minimal threshold. In this article, I address the question of whether there (...) should be limits of permissible risks in non-therapeutic research involving competent and healthy subjects. Some commentators argue that competent and informed individuals should have a right to participate even in extremely risky research and that research ethics committees should never reject studies because they are too dangerous. To use David Shaw's expression, competent volunteers should have ‘a right to participate in high-risk research’. I argue that this idea is ill-founded, as it does not take into account the social mission and complex collaborative nature of research practice as well as the inequity of power between researchers and subjects. Imposition of limits on permissible risks for healthy volunteers is justified by the need to protect research enterprise and the need to protect the weaker party, namely the subjects. Also, I suggest that the best way to set boundaries on research risks is to leave the judgment of risk acceptability to research ethics committees. (shrink)

Background:Data representing people’s behaviour, attitudes, feelings and relationships are increasingly being harvested from social media platforms and re-used for research purposes. This can be ethically problematic, even where such data exist in the public domain. We set out to explore how the academic community is addressing these challenges by analysing a national corpus of research ethics guidelines and published studies in one interdisciplinary research area.Methods:Ethics guidelines published by Research Councils UK, its seven-member councils and guidelines cited within these were reviewed. (...) Guidelines referring to social media were classified according to published typologies of social media research uses and ethical considerations for social media mining. Using health research as an exemplar, PubMed was searched to identify studies using social media data, which were assessed according to their coverage of ethical considerations and guidelines.Results:Of the 13 guidelines published or recom... (shrink)

W niniejszym tekście autorka podjęła próbę analizy początku, jako jedynej opublikowanej do tej pory części, zapowiadanej przez Roberta Schindla powieści Der Kalte. Chodziło m. in. o odnalezienie odniesień do wcześniejszych utworów Roberta Schindla, w szczególności zaś do opublikowanej w roku 1992 i przeniesionej na ekran w roku 2001 powieści Gebürtig. Z jednej strony zwrócono uwagę na symbolikę „zimna”, obecną w obu utworach, z drugiej strony na tematykę rozliczenia z narodowosocjalistyczną przeszłością Austrii. W artykule wskazano również na nawiązania w Der Kalte (...) do wcześniejszych tradycji literackich, w tym przypadku do użytej dla wyrażenia własnych treści tradycji romantyzmu. (shrink)

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history (...) and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement. (shrink)

FADYL JK and NICHOLLS DA. Nursing Inquiry 2013; 20: 23–29 Foucault, the subject and the research interview: a critique of methodsResearch interviews are a widely used method in qualitative health research and have been adapted to suit a range of methodologies. Just as it is valuable that new approaches are explored, it is also important to continue to examine their appropriate use. In this article, we question the suitability of research interviews for ‘history of the present’ studies informed by the (...) work of Michel Foucault – a form of qualitative research that is being increasingly employed in the analysis of healthcare systems and processes. We argue that several aspects of research interviewing produce philosophical and methodological complications that can interfere with achieving the aims of the analysis in this type of study. The article comprises an introduction to these tensions and examination of them in relation to key aspects of a Foucauldian philosophical position, and discussion of where this might position researchers when it comes to designing a study. (shrink)