By shifting the focus of analysis from forgetting and remembering to interpreting and making-meaning, Erdelyi allows theoretical consideration of repression to move beyond the heuristic assumption that personal memory is necessarily private memory. In this commentary, repression is considered to be a collective process in which memories are shaped by the need for coherence between individual and social narratives.

A critical review of four recent works that reflect current conflicts and tensions among feminists regarding new reproductive technologies: In Search of Parenthood by Judith Lasker and Susan Borg; Ethics and Human Reproduction by Christine Overall; Made to Order, Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds. and Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michelle Stanworth, ed. Their positions are evaluated against the background of growing feminist dialogue about the future of reproduction and the bearing of reproductive innovations on such related (...) issues as racism, sexuality, motherhood and abortion. (shrink)

Academics from diverse disciplines are recognizing not only the procedural ethical issues involved in research, but also the complexity of everyday “micro” ethical issues that arise. While ethical guidelines are being developed for research in aboriginal populations and low-and-middle-income countries, multi-partnered research initiatives examining arts-based interventions to promote social change pose a unique set of ethical dilemmas not yet fully explored. Our research team, comprising health, education, and social scientists, critical theorists, artists and community-activists launched a five-year research partnership on (...) arts-for-social change. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada and based in six universities, including over 40 community-based collaborators, and informed by five main field projects, we set out to synthesize existing knowledge and lessons we learned. We summarized these learnings into 12 key points for reflection, grouped into three categories: community-university partnership concerns, dilemmas related to the arts, and team issues. In addition to addressing previous concerns outlined in the literature, we identified power dynamics hindering meaningful participation of community partners and university-based teams that need to be addressed within a reflective critical framework of ethical practice. We present how our team has been addressing these issues, as examples of how such concerns could be approached in community-university partnerships in arts for social change. (shrink)

In the probing interviews in this vibrant new book, eminent scholars struggle with some of the most crucial issues facing contemporary intellectuals. Poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler discusses the “pain” of rigorous intellectual work, saying that it is “necessarily extremely hard labor,” as she examines the intersection of discourse and political action. Award-winning filmmaker, philosopher, and social theorist David Theo Goldberg reviews his life’s work, especially on issues of racism. Literary critic and feminist philosopher Avital Ronell sets out to disrupt (...) the standard logic of signification, to force readers into fresh ways of perceiving a subject at hand. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha discusses how critical literacy is intimately connected to the question of democratic representation, and he elaborates on how cultural difference can lead to a politics of discrimination. And neo-Marxist cultural critic Slavoj Žižek takes readers on an exhilarating journey through a wide range of critical subjects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Foucault's Bad Angels of HistoryLynne HufferDo not believe everything I say.... Look for multiple, resistant, rhizomatic readings. This is not the text I intended to produce, and it is not the same as the text you are reading. Read the white spaces, hear the silences, peer into the shadows, look beyond the margins. Reach for "[t]hat voice at the edge of things." I am there as well.—Juana María RodríguezWhat (...) I put into words is no longer my possession.—Susan HoweIn Mad for Foucault, I make much of the Foucauldian image of book-as-firecracker, bomb, or little explosion, something that lights up for a moment and then disappears into the series of events to which it belongs. If we take this seriously, it amounts to saying, as Rodríguez implies: there are multiple books here, or multiple bits of book, swirling through the ether like meteors. But if we think we might still find the "I" who wrote it, even "at the edge of things"—"I am there as well," Rodríguez says, in the spaces, the silences, and the shadows of the book—that "I" is fractured and dispossessed: "What I put into words is no longer my possession."I begin with an evocation of shattered light and the negative spaces it leaves in its wake as a way to organize my response to these inspiring and challenging commentaries on my engagement with Foucault and queer theory in Mad for Foucault. Both Hengehold and Winnubst offer a double focus, one that splits into questions directed at both the positive and the negative spaces of the book. [End Page 239] The positive space—that which leaps off the page, that which makes Winnubst squirm and raises disagreements for Hengehold—is my discussion of the place of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis in Foucault and in queer theory. I will treat this question of queer Freudo-Foucauldianism in Part 1 of my remarks below. But I also want to heed my interlocutors' invitation to enter the spaces opened up by the book's unsaids. In Part 2 I will address some of Hengehold's concerns about my silence on Foucault and Kant, and in Part 3 I will explore another silence, the historicity of race, in response to Winnubst's questions. This is not to imply that everything has to be said, as if there were some absolute limit between speech and silence. Nor is it to suggest that, once spoken, the silence that haunts me will disappear, like "a shadow in a daydream" (Foucault 1978, 19) dispelled.1. Queer Freudo-FoucauldianismNeither Foucauldian philosophy nor queer theory has paid much attention to History of Madness, despite its obvious importance in Foucault's thinking and in the story he tells about sexuality. One of the effects of bypassing Madness in both fields has been a lack of clarity about the role of psychoanalysis in Foucault's critique of the Western subject and in queer antifoundationalist thinking about sexuality. In that context, Winnubst raises some questions to contest my claims about the place of psychoanalysis in queer theory. Hengehold, for her part, provides a link between psychoanalysis and Kant via a queer Lacanian, death-driven antisocial thesis with "the austerity of a proto-Kantian code."First, regarding Winnubst's assertion that many psychoanalytic concepts work toward the same desubjectivation I find in Foucault: I agree that from a certain perspective, the Lacanian Real, the Borromean knot, the objet a, and the drive can be deployed in myriad contexts for desubjectivating projects of various kinds. As Foucault puts it in The Order of Things, along with anthropology, psychoanalysis is an "inexhaustible treasure hoard of experiences and concepts" (Foucault 1970, 373). But as I insist in my engagement with Judith Butler in Mad for Foucault, the performative, psychoanalytically driven disruption of identity is not the same as Foucauldian desubjectivation; we can see this most clearly if we contrast the undoing of subjectivity that madness signals with a Butlerian dialectical logic whereby the political agency of a subject is achieved by virtue of that subject's failure to cohere as an identity. That dialectical logic is reinforced by... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lynn Huffer's Mad For Foucault:An Analysis of Historical Eros?Laura HengeholdMad for Foucault is a remarkably beautiful book balanced on the edges between the personal, the impersonal, and the public and reflected through Foucault's own struggles to establish those divides. Huffer's goal in Mad for Foucault is to draw scholarly attention to the emotional and ethical content of Foucault's writing, as well as to assess the risks of queer (...) theory's dependence on dialectics and psychoanalytic theory. Reading History of Sexuality I in light of History of Madness, she argues, renders the ethical aspects of Foucault's early project clear and reveals the continuity with his later work on ethics, putting the central concerns of queer theory in a different light. But this continuity is only visible through attention to the lyrical force resulting from tensions between these edges, which also separate genders and epochs, as if Las Meninas were to draw the viewer's gaze toward a fractured mirror rather than a sovereign one.The elements of History of Sexuality I that have been most important for the queer theorists Huffer engages are Foucault's attempt to date the shifts from a perception of sinful acts to a perception of homosexual personality types, and his warning that reifying such personality types as "identities" in hopes of liberation from heterosexist oppression continues to support the social mechanisms that identify personal truth with sexuality. Some (associated with Judith Butler) have tried to develop an account of agency that owes less to the exclusions of traditional moral and psychological theories but risks establishing its own hierarchies of psychic "health." Others (Lee Edelman is exemplary) [End Page 226] have also argued that the affects associated with these acts and identities, and possibly the ethical attitudes arising from these affects, are historical effects that must be bracketed in the name of resisting biopower (Huffer 2010, 94-95).Both groups, Huffer argues, have merely performed a dialectical reversal within the order of sexualities inherited from the nineteenth century, without appreciating Foucault's effort to cast the very terms of that order into question—above all, in History of Madness (Huffer 2010, 113-16). What is more disturbing, both sides have enlisted psychoanalysis on their behalf, although Foucault remained skeptical of psychoanalysis. In History of Madness (2006a), Foucault's skepticism was justified in the name of the affective attachments of queer life and his deeply felt fascination for the traces of a sexual hybridity almost erased from European history. For Huffer, the real question posed by both History of Sexuality I and History of Madness is not, as queer theorists might believe, "why sexuality became a moral issue" (and how might it cease to be one) but who was buried when the nineteenth-century medicalization of sexuality replaced erotic experience with explanations of sexual abnormalities (2010, 229). She reads Foucault's work as a meditation on the ethical tragedy presented by the scattered ashes of even "infamous men."Although there are many themes I could address, I will let my comments be guided by Huffer's reading of the explicit and implicit critique of psychoanalysis found in Foucault's work, and its relation to Foucault's ambivalent Kantianism (2010, 127-33, 134). This critique comes from several directions. First, throughout all his works, including Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault criticizes interpretive approaches to the historical record and to human speech. Practices such as "commentary" reduce the variety of events that can be perceived in the historical field and turn some into the content or meaning of others, which are thereby privileged metaphysically as "more real." Second, Foucault criticizes power relations forcing some to confess and to interpret the products of their own confession in terms of the meanings religious or medical authorities insist on finding there. From the seventeenth century through the present, such authorities have identified work and family-oriented behavior as "reasonable" and have forced those whose behavior does not fit those terms to understand themselves as deviations from that norm (Huffer 2010, 105, 107-108).Third, according to Huffer, Foucault subjects belief in the psyche as scientific object and focus of work on the self to historical analysis... (shrink)

Recent studies lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the act of affirming one's egalitarian or prosocial values and virtues might subsequently facilitate prejudiced or self-serving behavior, an effect previously referred to as ?moral credentialing.? The present study extends this paradox to the domain of academic misconduct and investigates the hypothesis that such an effect might be limited by the extent to which misbehavior is rationalizable. Using a paradigm designed to investigate deliberative and rationalized forms of cheating (von Hippel, Lakin, & (...) Shakarchi, 2005), we found that when participants had credentialed themselves (vs. a nonclose acquaintance) via a set of hypothetical moral dilemmas, they were more likely to cheat on a subsequent math task, but only if cheating was highly rationalizable. When cheating was difficult to rationalize, moral credentialing had almost no impact on cheating. (shrink)

Imprecise definition of key terms in the “public participation” domain have hindered the conduct of good research and militated against the development and implementation of effective participation practices. In this article, we define key concepts in the domain: public communication, public consultation, and public participation. These concepts are differentiated according to the nature and flow of information between exercise sponsors and participants. According to such an information flow perspective, an exercise’s effectiveness may be ascertained by the efficiency with which full, (...) relevant information is elicited from all appropriate sources, transferred to all appropriate recipients, and combined to give an aggregate/consensual response. Key variables that may theoretically affect effectiveness—and on which engagement mechanisms differ—are identified and used to develop a typology of mechanisms. The resultant typology reveals four communication, six consultation, and four participation mechanism classes. Limitations to the typology are discussed, and future research needs identified. (shrink)

There is currently a great debate about whether the holobiont, i.e. a multicellular host and its residential microorganisms, constitutes a biological individual. We propose that resident microorganisms have a general and important role in the individuality of the host organism, not the holobiont. Drawing upon the Equilibrium Model of Immunity, we argue that microorganisms are scaffolds of immune capacities and processes that determine the constituency and persistence of the host organism. A scaffolding perspective accommodates the contingency and heterogeneity of resident (...) microorganisms while accounting for their necessity and unifying contributions to host individuality. In our symbiotic view of life, holobionts may not be organisms or units of selection, but macroorganisms cannot persist nor function as individuals without their scaffolding microorganisms. (shrink)

I argue that Nelson's feminist transformation of empiricism provides the basis of a dialogue across three currently competing feminist epistemologies: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theories, and postmodern feminism, a dialogue that will result in a dissolution of the apparent tensions between these epistemologies and provide an epistemology with the openness and fluidity needed to embrace the concerns of feminists.

Background: The concept of moral distress has been the subject of nursing research for the past 30 years. Recently, there has been a call to move from developing an understanding of the concept to developing interventions to help ameliorate the experience. At the same time, the use of the term moral distress has been critiqued for a lack of clarity about the concepts that underpin the experience. Discussion: Some researchers suggest that a closer examination of how socio-political structures influence healthcare (...) delivery will move moral distress from being seen as located in the individual to an experience that is also located in broader healthcare structures. Informed by new thinking in relational ethics, we draw on research findings from neuroscience and attachment literature to examine the reciprocal relationship between structures and agents and frame the experience of moral distress. Conclusion: We posit moral distress as a form of relational trauma and subsequently point to the need to better understand how nurses as moral agents are influenced by—and influence—the complex socio-political structures they inhabit. In so doing, we identify this reciprocity as a framework for interventions. (shrink)

Having learned my just war theory at Michael Walzer’s figurative knee, for many years I accepted the independence of jus in bello from jus ad bellum unthinkingly. Just war theory consists of two separate parts, one concerning the legitimate grounds for going to war and the other the rules of engagement once war had begun. This two-part view, the “independence thesis,” went hand in hand with the “symmetry thesis,” or “the moral equality of soldiers”: soldiers whose cause is unjust have (...) the same rights to fight and to kill as those whose cause is just. But troubling questions sometimes crowded in. Doesn’t the justice of a country’s cause affect what actions it can legitimately take? Can’t victims of aggression legitimately do things aggressors cannot? Most fundamentally, “how can there be permissibly violent means of pursuing impermissible ends?”[1] Walzer casts glances at these problems when he proposes the idea of a “sliding scale,” in which the rules of war yield “slowly to the moral urgency of the cause: the rights of the righteous are enhanced, and those of their enemies devalued.”[2] He rejects the sliding scale in favor of the weaker qualification, “supreme emergency,” in which the rules of war are overridden “only in the face of an imminent catastrophe.”. (shrink)

The relationship between ethics and economics has never been easy. Opponents in a tug of war, friends in a warm embrace, ships passing in the night—the relationship has been highly variable. In recent years, the friendship model has been gaining credence, particularly among U.S. corporate executives. Increasingly, companies are launching ethics programs, values initiatives, and community involvement activities premised on management’s belief that “Ethics pays.”.

We generalize the Unstable Formula Theorem characterization of stable theories from Shelah [11], that a theory T is stable just in case any infinite indiscernible sequence in a model of T is an indiscernible set. We use a generalized form of indiscernibles from [11], in our notation, a sequence of parameters from an L-structure M, , indexed by an L′-structure I is L′-generalized indiscernible inM if qftpL′=qftpL′ implies tpL=tpL for all same-length, finite ¯,j from I. Let Tg be the theory (...) of linearly ordered graphs in the language with signature Lg={<,R}. Let Kg be the class of all finite models of Tg. We show that a theory T has NIP if and only if any Lg-generalized indiscernible in a model of T indexed by an Lg-structure with age equal to Kg is an indiscernible sequence. (shrink)

Looking at the metaphorical similarities between abortion statutes and copyright law reveals reproductive laws' stake in property ideologies. "Fair use" provisions in copyright law are analogous to abortion rights, delimiting the extent to which a non-owner (one who copies, a mother) can exert control over material "belonging" to another. The similarity suggests that the way to understand abortion fury is as a manifestation of property rights.

To many people, the very idea of nationalism smacks of ethnocentrism or even racism. They suspect that violence, hatred, and distrust of the Other, embodied in a sharply divided world of "us" and "them," always lurk within the nationalist's heart. Recent world events have done nothing to allay these suspicions. Nationalism, on this view, is an evil to be overcome by a cosmopolitan stance that denies the significance of national boundaries. Yet positive values have also been associated with the nationalist (...) idea, as some recent accounts remind us.ii Democracy, autonomy, community, pluralism -- these goods have been connected with the development of nationalism over the past several centuries. Some of the values underlying nationalism also manifest themselves today in its dilute and more respectable cousin, multiculturalism. And it goes without saying that whatever its merits, nationalism exerts enormous power on the aspirations of many people around the world. (shrink)

This study compares involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories in depressed and never depressed individuals. Twenty depressed and twenty never depressed individuals completed a memory diary; recording their reactions to 10 involuntary and 10 voluntary memories over 14–30 days. Psychiatric status , psychopathology, rumination and avoidance were assessed. For both groups, involuntary memories more frequently lead to strong reactions than voluntarily memories. For both modes of retrieval, depressed individuals reported more frequent negative reactions than never depressed individuals and rated memories as (...) more central to identity with higher levels of rumination and avoidance. Depressed individuals retrieved both positive and negative memories during involuntary retrieval. These findings support the view that involuntary memory retrieval represents a basic mode of retrieval during healthy and disordered cognition, and that during depression, both involuntary and voluntary memories are central to identity and associated with rumination and avoidance. (shrink)