A growing number of Irish women have chosen to write in Irish for reasons varying from a desire to promote and preserve the Irish language to a belief that a marginalized language is an appropriate vehicle of expression for marginalized women. Their work explores aspects of womanhood relating to sexuality, relationships, motherhood and religion. Some feel hampered by the lack of female models. Until recent years there were few attempts on the part of women to explore the reality of women's (...) lives through literature in Irish. The largely subordinate role played by women in literary matters as teachers, translators, and writers of children's literature reflected the position of women in Irish society since the achievement of independence in the 1920s. The work of earlier women poets has, for the most part, lain buried in manuscripts and is only recently being excavated by scholars. The problems of writing for a limited audience have been partially overcome in recent years by increased production of dual-language books. The increase in translation has sparked off an intense controversy among the Irish language community, some of whom are concerned that both the style and content of writing in Irish are adversely influenced by the knowledge that the literature will be read largely in translation. Nevertheless, translation also has positive implications. Interest in women's literature is helping to break down the traditional barriers between Irish literature in Irish and in English. The isolation of Irish literature in Irish is further broken down by the fact that women writers in Irish and their critics operate in a wider international context of women's literature. (shrink)

Offers an overview of the life and teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who believed that the concepts of religion, class, nationality, and traditions are barriers to truth.

The work of literary structuralists, particularly Roland Barthes, provides sharper insights into ethnomethodology than symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, or phenomenology. Further, it suggests that the metaphor of text may be fruitful for analysts of everyday life. Greater theoretical benefits derive from that metaphor, however, if one applies it using the ideas of literary theorists outside the structuralist tradition.

Canadian and American population-based research concerning sexual and/or gender minority populations provides evidence of persistent breast and gynecologic cancer-related health disparities and knowledge divides. The Cancer's Margins research investigates the complex intersections of sexual and/or gender marginality and incommensurabilities and improvisation in engagements with biographical and biomedical cancer knowledge. The study examines how sexuality and gender are intersectionally constitutive of complex biopolitical mappings of cancer health knowledge that shape knowledge access and its mobilization in health and treatment decision-making. Interviews were (...) conducted with a diverse group of sexual and/or gender minority breast or gynecologic cancer patients. The LGBQ//T2 cancer patient narratives we have analyzed document in fine grain detail how it is that sexual and/or gender minority cancer patients punctuate the otherwise lockstep assemblage of their cancer treatment decision-making with a persistent engagement in creative attempts to resist, thwart and otherwise manage the possibility of discrimination and likewise, the probability of institutional erasure in care settings. Our findings illustrate the demands that cancer places on LGBQ//T2 patients to choreograph access to, and mobilization of knowledge and care, across significantly distinct and sometimes incommensurable systems of knowledge. (shrink)

(2007). A Rview Of “Asian Americans in Class: Charting the Achievement Gap Among Korean American Youth”. Educational Studies: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 68-71.

In order to better understand the meaning of Socrates’ philosophic life, Nichols explores the theme of caring that is prominent in Socrates’ Apology. What is the relation between the examined life that he says is the only one worth living for a human being and the care he claims and shows for others, especially the young of Athens? Nichols discusses Socrates’ illustrations of philosophic caretaking from the Symposium, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus, both his own caretaking activities as well as his teachings (...) about love and generation, the art of words, and midwifery. Finally, she argues that the god who “commands” an answer to his oracular riddle, as Socrates interprets it in the Apology, serves as a model for the union of questioning and caretaking central to Socrates' life of philosophizing. Through his presentation of Socrates, Plato therefore offers an alternative to the Eleatic Stranger’s view of divine and human care in the Statesman that forms a backdrop to Socrates’ defense in the Apology. (shrink)

Corine Pelluchon is professor of philosophy at Paris-Est-Marne-La-Vallée and one of the foremost feminist political philosophers and bioethicists in France. Her major works, which have been translated into Spanish, German, Korean, Greek, Italian, and Japanese, include L’autonomie brisée. Bioéthique et philosophie, La raison du sensible. Entretiens autour de la bioéthique, and Eléments pour une éthique de la vulnérabilité. Les hommes, les animaux, la nature.Recently, Bloomsbury published a translation of Les...

The author applies Albert Hirschman's "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" framework to the dilemmas faced by humanitarian aid workers in complex settings where local or international political and military realities may "taint" the purposes and uses of aid. She reviews the pro and con arguments surrounding the difficult choices of whether to go or not, whether to stay or leave and whether to speak out or remain silent in such circumstances. Because international humanitarians insert themselves into circumstances that are not their (...) own where they see there is need for a humanitarian response, the author suggests a fourth category of choice should be added to Hirschman's three - namely that of "engagement." This option involves entering and/or staying, coupled with a quiet, off-the-record voice intended to work with and try to change from within nefarious circumstances. Concluding that none of the four options is "pure" in that all have direct impacts on the welfare and likelihood of survival of suffering people, the author argues for making each decision on its own particular merits, weighing both the personal/moral and practical/political realities of that situation. She offers guides for how such decisions may best be made, relying on differences of analyses and opinion offered by colleagues to provide grounding for one's own difficult choice. (shrink)