Based on anthropological fieldwork among protesters against the Covid policy in Germany, this paper elaborates the symmetry of accusations made against each other by proponents and opponents of the state-imposed protection measures against the backdrop of an asymmetrical distribution of power. The social dynamics that emerged during the pandemic are often understood as the result of a knowledge controversy that most participants thus categorize as a media problem. A key finding of my research on protests against the German Covid policy (...) is that, as in my research on the controversy over mediumism, the controversy is about the agency of human and nonhuman actors and carried out to a great extent based on the same values on both sides, which at the same time accuse each other of not conforming to these values. The protesters are part of a heterogeneous minority that in large parts embodies the values of the majority and, in a way, exceeds them, i.e., a minority that is hypercritical and has extreme expectations about the values of the majority society – in this case: of solidarity, science, transparency, rationality, and coherence. From its marginal position, the minority develops a canny eye for the unfulfilled promises of the majority: its contradictions and conscious or unconscious double standards are perceived as bigotry against the backdrop of the aspiration to absence of contradiction. Therefore, this minority suspects that the motivations and goals behind the measures taken are other than just the protection of health, while the majority in turn see the minority’s commitment to society and democracy as (self-)deception and also suspect hidden motives and actors behind it. This mutual suspicion leads to a hysterical state of doubt and distrust, which is rooted in the nature of mediality. (shrink)

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Determining what constitutes an anticipatable incidental finding from clinical research and defining whether, and when, this IF should be returned to the participant have been topics of discussion in the field of human subject protections for the last 10 years. It has been debated that implementing a comprehensive IF-approach that addresses both the responsibility of researchers to return IFs and the expectation of participants to receive them can be logistically challenging. IFs have been debated at different levels, such as the (...) ethical reasoning for considering their disclosure or the need for planning for them during the development of the research study. Some authors have discussed the methods for re-contacting participants for disclosing IFs, as well as the relevance of considering the clinical importance of the IFs. Similarly, other authors have debated about when IFs should be disclosed to participants. However, no author has addressed how the “actionability” of the IFs should be considered, evaluated, or characterized at the participant's research setting level. This paper defines the concept of “Actionability at the Participant's Research Setting Level” for anticipatable IFs from clinical research, discusses some related ethical concepts to justify the APRSL concept, proposes a strategy to incorporate APRSL into the planning and management of IFs, and suggests a strategy for integrating APRSL at each local research setting. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, microenterprise development programs have proliferated in the United States, where they are widely praised as strategies for economic development and poverty alleviation, especially for low-income women and welfare mothers. Based on research in a highly respected urban center for women, this article argues that microenterprise development is more detrimental and problematic than it is purported to be. Two reasons are isolated. First, gender constraints mean women tend to choose small-scale, undercapitalized, and barely profitable “pink-collar” businesses, largely home-based (...) operations based on work women are already doing as part of their gender-specific role. Second, microenterprise training programs reinforce this business segregation by discounting the sociocultural conditions women bring with them to business and instead emphasizing the personal growth of individuals. The result is that women are encouraged to maintain their economic vulnerability and social peripheralization rather than become part of the mainstream business world. (shrink)

English summary: German linguistics, formerly internationally inspiring, fell into a deep crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the First World War, those in the field have been looking for ways to regain its lost scientific and social recognition. This desire for relevance was particularly clear when practitioners of the different approaches to linguistic innovation competed for the scarce resources of public research funding. The remaining funding documents of the German Research Foundation demonstrate which specific linguistic approaches were (...) proclaimed as critical by researchers, and which were honored by outside funders during changing political contexts. Thus, the history of German philology and the development of its dynamics is here - for the first time - traced from the perspective of public support for research, from the time of the Weimar Republic until the first decades of the Federal Republic. German text. German description: Die ehemals international impulsgebende deutsche Sprachwissenschaft geriet am Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts in eine tiefe Krise. Seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg suchte das Fach nach Wegen, die verlorene wissenschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Anerkennung wieder zu erlangen.Dieser Wille zur Relevanz zeigte sich besonders deutlich, wo die verschiedenen Neuerungsansatze der Sprachforschung um die knappen Mittel der staatlichen Forschungsforderung konkurrierten. An den erhaltenen Forderakten der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft ist abzulesen, welche spezifischen Aufgabenstellungen die Sprachwissenschaft in wechselnden politischen Kontexten jeweils 'nach aussen' proklamierte und 'von aussen' honoriert bekam.So wird hier aus der Perspektive der staatlichen Forschungsforderung die Geschichte der deutschen Sprachforschung in ihrer Entwicklungsdynamik erstmals von der Weimarer Republik bis in die ersten Jahrzehnte der Bundesrepublik nachgezeichnet. (shrink)

Los mecanismos de bombeo en microingeniería aparecieron al principio de la década de los 90. El principio detrás de esto es el de flujo acústico. ¿Ha descubierto la Naturaleza este invento de hace 2.700 millones de años? Algunas cianobacterias marinas de la especie Synechococcus nadan 25 diámetros por segundo sin ningún medio visible de propulsión. Especulamos en este artículo que vibraciones de amplitud de nanoescala del estrato S (una cáscara cristalina que cubre las membranas exteriores en las cepas móviles) y (...) con frecuencias del orden de 0,5-1,5 MHz (y esto es factible por los motores moleculares), podrían producir velocidades de deslizamiento del fluido, en el exterior de la frontera de la región Stokes. Dentro de esta capa límite (que para nuestra sorpresa resulta ser relativamente ancha) el comportamiento del flujo es rotacional (y en consecuencia, ventajoso desde el punto de vista biológico). Adicionalmente a este supuesto mecanismo que se podria llamar “nadando cantando”, mostramos otros posibles ejemplos biológicos de corrientes acústicas. Sir James Lighthill ha sugerido que el flujo acústico también se da en la cóclea del oído de los mamíferos, y son muy sugerentes los nuevos hallazgos en las células ciliadas externas. Otras posibilidades son flujos acústicos producidos por vibraciones de las membranas en células de levadura, mejorando su química (¡cerveza y pan!), el contoneo de los glóbulos rojos en los tubos capilares y el bombeo de fluido producido por las diatomeas. (shrink)

Living in modern biopolitical risk culture might be seen as synonymous with living in prognosis time, in the sense that risk of illness is endlessly forecast (prognosticated) in the broad social arena. ‘Safety,’ in this context, is framed as the anticipatory guarding against risk or disease in order to ‘make live.’ Thinking of risk and safety in these ways is limited, however, in that the prognosis cannot account for the individual’s life or death drama. This paper asks: how are we (...) to understand the constellation of risk, prognosis, and safety in relation to ‘the subject in breast cancer prognosis’? (shrink)

Ever since the start of the Corona pandemic, different and often conflicting views have emerged about the virus and how to appropriately deal with it. Such epistemic, societal, and economic criticisms, including those about government imposed measures, have often been dismissed as dangerous forms of conspiratorial disinformation that should be (and have been) excluded from the realm of reasonable political discussion. However, since these critiques of emerging hegemonic knowledge and policies often involve significant and complex questioning of epistemic and political (...) claims, and since corresponding plausibilities change over time, such clear distinctions between correct knowledge and foolish, fraudulent, and/or dangerous, disinformation are not easy to draw. In fact, they can be considered political acts in these epistemic disputes over the pandemic. These conflicts, which we refer to as the “Corona Truth Wars,” are not just about knowledge, but have turned into societal conflicts and even outright identity wars that run through families, circles of friends, organizations, and entire societies. In this special issue, we illuminate these dynamics by bringing together a range of scholars who have been struck by the complexity of these controversies and their far-reaching social consequences. Far from understanding these controversies as simple dichotomies between truth and disinformation, or between disinterested science and manipulative politics, these scholars are interested in the various ways in which these dimensions are intertwined. Building on a long tradition of exploring (scientific) knowledge controversies, the six contributions to this special issue show how epistemic struggles over truth are not only fought in the realm of science, but increasingly manifest and interact in everyday politics, social media platforms, daily talk shows, and family dinners. The scholars brought together in this issue, with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and from different geographical regions (Denmark, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Israel), present their studies on the various epistemic and social conflicts that have emerged during the Corona pandemic of the last three years. (shrink)

This paper examines cancer through the lens of abjection. While cancer can be understood as an abject lifeform, we explore what we name the abject ontologies created through both cancer detection technologies/practices and cancer treatment, specifically the drug combination Adriamycin and Cytoxan. We ask: what are the abject ontologies produced through living with and living on from cancer diagnosis and treatment? Our concern is to map how cancer undoes our supposedly stable categories inherited from modernist logic, challenges our very ideas (...) of what it means to be human, and demands an ethical reorientation of public cancer discourse. (shrink)