Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the freely (...) available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions. (shrink)

Drawing on postmodernist analyses, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries presents a feminist investigation into the marginalization of women within western discourse that denies both female moral agency and bodylines. With reference to contemporary and historical issues in biomedicine, the book argues that the boundaries of both the subject and the body are no longer secure. The aim is both to valorize women and to suggest that "leakiness" may be the very ground for a postmodern feminist ethic. The contribution made by (...) class='Hi'>Margrit Shildrick is to go beyond modernist feminisms to radically displace the mechanisms by which women are devalued. The anxiety that postmodernism cannot yield an ethics, nor advance feminist concerns is addressed. (shrink)

The methodology and theory developed by Koselleck has been successfully spread globally. Less attention has been devoted to reflections on the conditions and possibilities of universalizing his approach beyond the geographical area on the basis of which it was developed. This article proposes to reread Koselleck's three core contributions to the theory of history—the anthropological constants, the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, and the Sattelzeit—from a postcolonial viewpoint. Empirically it is based on the history of the South Asian Muslims, exploring how (...) Koselleck can help raise new questions, but also how the change in the geographical viewpoint may lead to a reconsideration of some of his assumptions. (shrink)

The article introduces the concept of ‘argumentational integrity’ as the basis for developing ethical criteria by which contributions to argumentative discussions can be evaluated; the focus is on the derivation, definition, and specification of the concept. The derivation of the concept starts out from a prescriptive use of ‘argumentation’, entailing in particular the goal of a rational as well as a cooperative solution. In order to make this goal attainable, contributions to argumentative discussions must meet certain conditions. It is assumed (...) that participants are not only intuitively aware of these conditions, but in fact expect of themselves and others that they will not consciously violate the conditions. This assumption leads to the most general definition of the norm of argumentational integrity: Speakers must not knowingly violate the argumentative conditions. On the basis of an empirical study drawing upon classifications of unethical strategies in popular rhetorical texts, the general norm is then specified in the form of 11 ‘standards of fair argumentation’. (shrink)

Taking its starting point from Dipesh Chakravarty's Provincializing Europe and in particular European analytical concepts, this article argues that it is time to move beyond the diagnosis of “inadequate, but indispensable.” I discuss three approaches that have been suggested for the development of analytical concepts for global history: the creation of equivalents across languages by the historical subjects; the identification of problems as a starting point to trace the language that has been developed to discuss them; and comparison. I then (...) propose a strategy, based on Rolf Reichardt's semantic nets, but taking it beyond its reliance on words, and words in one language only. I argue that these revised semantic nets have the potential to allow us to both trace connections between languages and generate concepts for our analyses, if and when needed, which are not necessarily universal in claim, but transcend source concepts in individual languages. (shrink)

While body modification might generally seem to take the form of denaturalizing a biological given, this article looks at the same practice as normalizing the always already unstable corpus. The dominant discourse of the post-Enlightenment relies on the notion of the centrality of the individual subject within the singular and separate body, where distinctions between self and other are secure. Against this the incidence of monstrosity in general, with its disordered crossing of the boundaries of the proper, offers a gross (...) insult. I look in particular at instances of conjoined twinning to demonstrate that the body can only be regarded as one by a process of material and discursive modification, which nonetheless finally fails to efface the trace of the monstrous other that frustrates the closure of the self-same. (shrink)

My focus on vulnerability and bioethics – which acknowledges but goes beyond mainstream feminist ethics - will take a phenomenological perspective that understands the self as having no meaning or existence beyond its embodiment. As such we are always open, and therefore vulnerable, to the constant changes of embodied experience. The transformations in embodiment are both necessary for development and continuous over the life course, but it is only when something breaks the cycle of normative development that the intimation of (...) vulnerability and disorder arise. Corporeal disorder operates in a highly individual and differentiated way as it manifests, for example, in the experience of disability, pain, ageing and dying. These are not exceptional moments of vulnerability in a life otherwise secure and predictable, but they do clearly set out the limits of the western imaginary, and more particularly of modern western biomedicine and conventional healthcare. In offering a critique of the positivist enterprise of biomedicine, I want to suggest a different understanding of the embodiment that has radical implications for bioethics. (shrink)

Globalisation makes the contingency of every interpretation of reality increasingly evident. This creates a tension between the subjective persuasiveness of an attitude and the awareness of its contingency. The article argues that this tension is a central theme of a future philosophy of religion. Proceeding from Armin Nassehi, Paul Ricoeur and Hans Joas, the first part analyses central implications of a growing contingency sensitivity. It shows that in this process cognitive and affective aspects are closely interwoven. The second part examines (...) the question how the reflexive knowledge of the contingency of a standpoint can be reconciled with the pre-reflective intuition of its privileged validity. With Hans Blumenberg’s concept of rhetorical consolation and Peter Jonkers’ notion of existential truth, the article discusses two solutions to this challenge. In conclusion, both are considered as examples of how philosophy of religion can contribute to substantiating the idea of a ‘contingent certainty’ (Joas). (shrink)

Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad By Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst, xii + 228 pp. Price HB £58.00. EAN 978–1784538552.

This volume explores the history of the Delhi college - considered the centre of Delhi Renaissance and the meeting ground between British and Oriental culture before 1857 - against the background of both traditional scholarship and the British education policy in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment the adequacy of (...) our approach. Many of these resources have been developed productively by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. The encouragement to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze results not in a turn back to the masculinist masters, but to a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an “authentic” representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. In turning to the problem of heart transplantation, I hope to demonstrate such a move at work in a specific material context. (shrink)

Where feminist critiques of bioscience have uncovered a whole set of operations that range round the Foucauldian notions of biopower and normativity, and have explored genetic discourse in particular to question the stability of self-identity, feminist bioethics has lagged behind. Despite an engagement with the technologies of postmodernity, including those associated with genetic research (and especially in its relation to reproduction), there has been, with relatively few exceptions, a reluctance to explore the implications of postmodernist theory. The difficulty is that (...) bioscience itself is now throwing up a problematic that destabilizes the central agent of ethical theory - the modernist sovereign subject. Using the field of genetics and the mapping of the human genome as a focal point, this paper suggests that bioethics should move on from conventional analytic strategies and, like feminist science studies, embrace uncertainty and complexity. The task is to fashion a new form of ethical response grounded in the notions of embodied connection and fluidity. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the question of whether it is possible that the encounter with the other could be mediated such that the interval of distance would lose its determining power. I reflect on some instances of extraordinary corporeality, most particularly the phenomenon of conjoined twins, in order to problematize the relation between subjects as they are embodied. Where the normative body is supposedly marked out by the closed boundaries of the skin, the figuration of the anomalous body as (...) potentially leaky and contaminatory positions it as being of prime concern to both medical and cultural discourse. Within those paradigms there are of course many pressing bioethical issues to debate, but my intention is to draw back from a problem-based scenario in order to consider the threshold of ethics in the self/other relation itself. (shrink)

During his prolific career, Reinhart Koselleck left his mark on a myriad of topics beyond the history of concepts: iconology, memory, and temporality. The first part of this piece is a never before published English translation of one of Koselleck’s numerous public interventions. Second, taking as a starting point his reflection about the end of the war and the impossibility to collectivize certain memories, this article links his considerations about the unsayable with his work on images and political sensuality. Going (...) beyond a simple analysis of Koselleck’s writings, the article opens a dialogue between the history of concepts and affective memories, offering news ways to link experiences, emotions, and practices while underlining the limits of communication and collective memory. (shrink)

The field of human organ transplantation, and most particularly that of heart transplantation where the donor is always deceased, is one in which the rhetoric of hope leaves little room for any exploration or understanding of the more negative emotions and affects that recipients may experience. Where a donated heart is commonly referred to as the ‘gift of life’, both in lay discourse and by those engaged in transplantation procedures, how does this imbricate with the alternative clinical term of a (...) ‘graft’? For recipients of donor organs, the experience of living on in the face of otherwise certain death is fraught with complex emotions, not only about the self and the now dead other, but the persistence of the other within the self. In contrast to our expectations of the feel-good narrative of the gift of life, recipients are often significantly troubled by the aftermath of the procedure, which may fundamentally challenge notions of personal identity, as well as having deep implications for our understanding of the relation between death and ‘staying alive’. Drawing on recent research into heart transplantation, I shall theorise the field through a reflection – drawing on both Mauss and Derrida – on the meaning of the gift, before moving on to consider whether a Deleuzian approach to both the assemblage and the ‘event’ of death might offer a more productive framework. (shrink)

Donna Haraway's enduring question—“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” —is ever more relevant in the postmodern era, where issues of bodies, boundaries, and technologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very understanding of what counts as human. Critical Disability Studies has taken up the problematic of technology, particularly in relation to the deployment of prostheses by people with disabilities. Yet rehabilitation to normative practice or appearance is no longer the point; (...) instead, the lived experience of disability generates its own specific possibilities that both limit and extend the performativity of the embodied self. I look at what is at stake in the challenge to the Western logos that comes specifically from the capacities of the disabled body, understood not as a less than perfect form of the normative, but as figuring difference in a nonbinary sense. Feminist theory has long contested the isomorphism of the logos, but I go beyond simply setting out the grounds for revaluing multiple variant forms. The feminist turn to Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze opens up the problematic to a celebratory positioning of difference and transcorporeality as the very conditions of life. (shrink)

The influential readings contained in this volume combine conceptual history - the history of words and languages - and global history, showing clearly how the two disciplines can benefit from a combined approach. The readings familiarize the reader with conceptual history and its relationship with global history, looking at transfers between nations and languages as well as the ways in which world-views are created and transported through language. Part One: Classical Texts presents the three foundational texts for conceptual history, giving (...) the reader a grasp of the origins of the discipline. Part Two: Challenges focuses on critiques of the approach and explores their ongoing relevance today. Part Three: Translations of Concepts provides examples of conceptual history in practice, via case studies of historical research with a global scope. Finally, the book's concluding essay examines the current state and the future potential of conceptual history. This original introduction provides the students of conceptual, global and intellectual history with a firm grasp of the past trajectories of conceptual history as well as its more recent global and transnational tendencies, and the promises and challenges of writing global history. (shrink)

The contemporary emergence of the concept ‘debility’, which pertains to a broad swathe of humanity whose ordinary lives simply persist without ever getting better, shares a time span with an acute critique of neo-liberal biopolitics. Where capital has historically relied on a population that through its labour necessarily becomes debilitated, the newer model of understanding references the intrinsic profitability of debility itself. The two dimensions overlap and co-exist, but what I shall pursue here are the implications of recognising that, at (...) the most fundamental level, it is in the interests of neo-liberalism to produce and sustain bodies as debilitated and therefore susceptible to a range of market commodities that hold out the promise of therapeutic interventions into the relative failures of physical, cognitive and affective embodiment. In previous work, I have argued strongly for the inherent vulnerability of all bodies, but in considering here a more overtly politicised context, it becomes possible to readdress the questions posed by Jasbir Puar: ‘which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, and which cannot?’ And at the present moment, writing at a time of imposed austerity, I would add, what, if anything, is lost in the deployment of the term debility instead of disability? (shrink)

What are the implications of microchimerism in sociocultural and ethico-legal contexts, particularly as they relate to the destabilization of genetic origins? Conventional biomedicine and related law have been reluctant to acknowledge microchimerism—the existence of unassimilated traces of genetic material that result in some cells in the body coding differently from the dominant DNA—despite it becoming increasingly evident that microchimerism is ubiquitous in the human population. One exception is maternal–fetal microchimerism which has long been recognized, albeit with little consideration of the (...) nonmedical implications. Most immediate issues concern the ongoing biomedical debate around whether microchimerism is beneficial in terms of enhancing the body’s range of immunological responses, harmful in provoking autoimmune diseases, or simply neutral with respect to subsequent health. That controversy remains unresolved, but whichever way it develops, I want to extend consideration by insisting that changing biological concerns cannot be separated from sociocultural and ethico-legal effects. Once the diversity of DNA coding in a singular body has been established, relations of kinship, the identification of legal parenthood, and the operation of surrogacy laws are of direct interest. The overriding problematic asks whether our ethical and legal apparatus is able to address such newly emerging questions. (shrink)

The paper contends that, despite critiquing certain aspects of modernist thought feminist bioethics has become stuck in its own inadequate paradigms that pay insufficient attention to either the theoretical insights of postmodernism, or to the capacities of biotechnology in the postmodern era to disrupt prior certainties. In the face of an incalculable expansion of both theoretical and material possibilities, feminist bioethicists working in the field of reproduction have remained largely unwilling to reconfigure notions such as embodiment, subjectivity, agency, and so (...) on. There is little recognition of a need for an openness to the shifting complexities, or to think without prior determination. Starting with a brief critique of the normative values of one governmental body concerned with biotechnology, I move on to suggest how postmodernism mightframe an appropriate bioethical response, both to the explicit material issues, and to a rethinking of ethics itself. (shrink)

In western discourse the notion of the contagious, the unclean or the contaminated is never just a neutral descriptor but carries the weight of all that stands against—and paradoxically secures—the categories of normative ontology and epistemology. Set against the ideal closure and invulnerability of the self's “clean and proper body,” this paper investigates the condition of disability as a potentially contaminatory threat. But the given precarious psychic constitution of the subject, and the ontological insecurity of self performativity, can we reconfigure (...) vulnerability not as a term of weakness, but as the very possibility of becoming? (shrink)

This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing (...) of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies. (shrink)

Objectives:Social isolation is increasing in aging societies and several studies have shown a relation with worse cognition in old age. However, less is known about the association in the oldest-old (85+); the group that is at highest risk for both social isolation and dementia. Methods:Analyses were based on follow-up 5 to 9 of the longitudinal German study on aging, cognition, and dementia in primary care patients (AgeCoDe) and the study on needs, health service use, costs, and health-related quality of life (...) in a large sample of oldest-old primary care patients (AgeQualiDe), a multi-center population-based prospective cohort study. Measurements included the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6), with a score below 12 indicating social isolation, as well as the Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) as an indicator of cognitive function. Results:Dementia-free study participants (n = 942) were M = 86.4 (SD = 3.0) years old at observation onset, 68.2% were women. One third (32.3%) of them were socially isolated. Adjusted linear hybrid mixed effects models revealed significantly lower cognitive function in individuals with smaller social networks (β = 0.5, 95% CI = 0.3-0.7, p <.001). Moreover, changes in an individual's social network size were significantly associated with cognitive changes over time (β = 0.2, 95% CI = 0.1-0.4, p =.003), indicating worse cognitive function with shrinking social networks. Conclusion:Social isolation is highly prevalent among oldest-old individuals, being a risk factor for decreases in cognitive function. Consequently, it is important to maintain a socially active lifestyle into very old age. Likewise, this calls for effective ways to prevent social isolation. (shrink)