_Dislocating Cultures_ takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding. Questioning the problematic roles assigned to Third World subjects within multiculturalism, Narayan examines ways in which (...) the flow of information across national contexts affects our understanding of issues. _Dislocating Cultures_ contributes a philosophical perspective on areas of ongoing interest such as nationalism, post-colonial studies, and the cultural politics of debates over tradition and "westernization" in Third World contexts. (shrink)

Uma Narayan attempts to clarify what the feminist notion of the 'epistemic privilege of the oppressed' does and does not imply. She argues that the fact that oppressed 'insiders' have epistemic privilege regarding their oppression creates problems in dialogue with and coalitionary politics involving 'outsiders' who do not share the oppression, since the latter fail to come to terms with the epistemic privilege of the insiders. She concretely analyzes different ways in which the emotions of insiders can be inadvertantly (...) hurt by outsiders and suggests ways in which such problems can be minimized. (shrink)

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives are spaces where diverse work relations are performed. From a postcapitalist perspective, these initiatives attempt to create alternative-capitalist and non-capitalist work relations next to capitalist ones. While analyses of work relations in CSA abound, it remains uncertain how such diversification is made possible and how it is shaped by the micro-politics of and power relations in these initiatives. This paper addresses this gap by analysing how power shapes transformations to postcapitalist work relations in CSA. It provides (...) substantial empirical evidence of multiple manifestations of power enabling or constraining postcapitalist work relations through a comparative case study of three CSA initiatives in Portugal. Results show that while CSA creates postcapitalist work relations that are non-alienated, non-monetised and full of care, they insufficiently unmake unbalanced power relations established in capitalist work relations. This paper argues that, when establishing postcapitalist work relations, the selected CSA initiatives could benefit from actively deconstructing internal hierarchies, de-centralising decision-making power from farm owners and addressing oppressive power relations that are ossified in their local and cultural context. (shrink)

A speech perception experiment provides evidence that the linguistic relationship between words affects the discrimination of their talkers. Listeners discriminated two talkers' voices with various linguistic relationships between their spoken words. Listeners were asked whether two words were spoken by the same person or not. Word pairs varied with respect to the linguistic relationship between the component words, forming either: phonological rhymes, lexical compounds, reversed compounds, or unrelated pairs. The degree of linguistic relationship between the words affected talker discrimination in (...) a graded fashion, revealing biases listeners have regarding the nature of words and the talkers that speak them. These results indicate that listeners expect a talker's words to be linguistically related, and more generally, indexical processing is affected by linguistic information in a top-down fashion even when listeners are not told to attend to it. (shrink)

Affirmative action is a public policy purposed to compensate the victims of injustice at the cost of priviledged groups; hence to some it appears as opposing the notion of equality and being against human dignity. Thinkers like Leslie Pickering Francis and John Rawls, on the other hand, argue that affirmative action policies should be implemented for the sake of the oppressed and under-represented groups. Louis P. Pojman in his article “The Case Against Affirmative Action” sets forth nine arguments against strong (...) affirmative action. This paper sets out to challenge Pojman’s arguments one by one, and prove the author’s thesis in support of strong affirmative action. (shrink)

There are a variety of discourses and practices that position Western feminists as people who have a moral and political obligation to concern themselves with the welfare, suffering, or empowerment of non-Western subjects, often women, and intervene to “do good” on their behalf. Conversely, there are virtually no discourses and practices that assign moral and political obligations to non-Western feminists to intervene in matters involving the welfare or suffering of Western subjects, including women. A central goal of my paper is (...) to make this asymmetry explicit and distinguish it from charges such as “essentialism” more commonly made against Western feminist representations of their Others. I explore the consequences of discourses and practices that construct Western subjects as entitled to and obligated to concern themselves with the world entire, while not extending this global scope of concern to non-Western subjects. I critically examine, among other things, the roles assigned Western-funded NGOs in enabling Western subjects to engage in practices of “doing good” and I explore alternative possibilities that are more explicitly “political.” Along the way, I examine certain blind spots in Western political theory that appear connected to the picture of Western subjects as obligated to “do good” in distant places. My analysis engages substantially with Alison Jaggar’s essay, “Saving Amina,” drawing attention to matters of agreement and possible disagreement. (shrink)

The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us.

As web analytics become increasingly common in newsrooms worldwide, it is imperative to understand how they are employed to meet news organizations’ journalistic and business goals. This study examines the evolution and applications of web analytics in newsrooms through a comprehensive analysis of relevant literature. It situates the rise of web analytics in the larger historical, social, and financial context. It explores the strategies news organizations adopt to integrate web analytics in news production. After discussing the impact of analytics on (...) news production, the project juxtaposes the pessimistic ethical concerns—primarily the prediction of market logic uprooting journalistic logic—surrounding the use of web analytics in newsrooms with ground realities. Finally, in view of the analysis, we reflect on the ethical concerns against analytics, the state of editorial autonomy in newsrooms, the implications of newly empowered audience for news ecosystem, and conclude with a practical view of analytics in newsrooms. (shrink)

Maximize Presupposition! is an economy condition that adjudicates between contextually equivalent competing structures. Building on data discovered by O. Percus, I will argue that the constraint is checked in the local contexts of embedded constituents. I will argue that this architecture leads to a general solution to the problem of antipresupposition projection, and also allows I. Heim’s ‘Novelty/Familiarity Condition’ to be eliminated as a constraint on operations of context change.

According to one view of linguistic information, a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: by asserting the content as new information; or by presupposing the content as given information which would then have to be accommodated. This distinction predicts that it is conversationally more appropriate to assert implausible information rather than presuppose it. A second view rejects the assumption that presuppositions are accommodated; instead, presuppositions are assimilated into asserted content and both are correspondingly open to (...) challenge. Under this view, we should not expect to find a difference in conversational appropriateness between asserting implausible information and presupposing it. To distinguish between these two views of linguistic information, we performed two self-paced reading experiments with an on-line stops-making-sense judgment. The results of the two experiments—using the presupposition triggers the and too—show that accommodation is inappropriate relative to non-presuppositional controls when the presupposed information is implausible but not when it is plausible. These results provide support for the first view of linguistic information: the contrast in implausible contexts can only be explained if there is a presupposition-assertion distinction and accommodation is a mechanism dedicated to reasoning about presuppositions. (shrink)

In recent months, pharmaceutical manufacturers have brought legal challenges to a provision of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) empowering the federal government to negotiate the prices Medicare pays for certain prescription medications. One key argument made in these filings is that price negotiation is a “taking” of property and violates the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. Through original case law and health policy analysis, we show that government price negotiation and even price regulation of goods and services, including (...) patented goods, are constitutional under the Takings Clause. Finding that the IRA violates the Takings Clause would radically upend settled constitutional law and jeopardize the US’s most important state and federal health care programs. (shrink)

This paper is intended to explore the Rorty’s notion of truth and its vicinity and divergences with Putnam’s notion of truth. Rorty and Putnam, both the philosophers have developed their notion of truth against the traditional representational notion of truth but their strength lies in its distinctive characterization. For Putnam, truth is the property of a statement which cannot be lost but the justification of it could be. I will also examine the importance of Putnam’s idealized justificatory conditions without which (...) he may succumb to the charge of relativism at the same time how does Putnam overcome the tension between metaphysical and relativistic stances of truth. For Rorty, truth is not representational rather it is social, which means the justification for a true belief is not external but internal to the community of believers. I would further examine how Rorty tries to dispel the charge of relativism which is hard to overcome. Finally, I shall try to defend the concept of truth which is free from metaphysical baggage and relativistic threats; and in this enterprise Rorty walks half the way and Putnam completes the journey. (shrink)

Huey P. Newton remains one the left’s intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton’s thought by shedding light on his theory of empire, and the present-day value of returning to his thought. The article centres on how Newton’s critique of what he called ‘reactionary intercommunalism’ prefigures many of the elements found in the work of Hardt and Negri on empire. This (...) comparison will be used to show how Newton not only foresaw elements of the rise of contemporary neoliberal globalization, but also offered an idea of political solidarity and revolutionary politics for such a context. The article concludes by highlighting how Newton’s ideas about the need for a war of position based on ‘survival pending revolution’ presents a more theoretically and empirically salient conceptualization of resistance than his successors. (shrink)

Academic research studies examining the ethical attitudes and behaviors of salespeople have produced several frameworks that explore the ethical decision-making processes to which salespeople adhere when faced with ethical dilemmas. Past literature enriches our understanding; however, a critical review of the relevant literature suggests that an emotional route to salesperson ethical decision-making has yet to be explored. Given the fact that individuals’ emotional capacities play an important role in decision-making when faced with an ethical dilemma, there is a need for (...) empirical research in this area. We address this issue by outlining and testing an emotion-based model to study the ethical attitudes and behaviors of salespeople in a relational selling context. Building on the cognitive-affective model proposed by Gaudine and Thorne (J Bus Ethics 31:175–187, 2001 ), we outline a framework that incorporates higher order prosocial emotions: capacity for concern and capacity for guilt. We include salesperson’s role clarity within the organization as a moderator to examine person–situation interaction. (shrink)

To note that the study of Sanskrit narrative literature, in particular the Epics and Purāṇas, has been plagued with the propensity towards diachronic dissection would be little more than a truism in most scholarly circles. Yet it is with this truism we are forced to begin as we strive to shed the old skin of colonial era receptions of these texts. While there have been notable efforts made to embrace Sanskrit narrative as synchronic wholes, there isn’t much in the way (...) of a systematic methodology for doing so. This paper, therefore, is aimed at charting a methodology for synchronic study of Sanskrit narrative literature, paying particular attention to narrative frames. It advances five avenues of thematic import based on the structure of Sanskrit narrative: inception import, association import, exposition import, framing import, and impetus import. Examples are primarily drawn primarily from the Mahābhārata and the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa. Note that key terms arising from the discussion in this chapter are bolded throughout and appear in a “terminology guide” appended to the end of this study for the sake of reader reference. (shrink)

Used wisely the concepts of race and ethnicity in research have great potential, but used unwisely they can do immense damage. We need to consider the potential issues that might require a change of emphasis or application of ethics in a multi-ethnic society. Doing no harm (non-maleficence) is the most important ethical pillar in the ethnicity and health field. Ethnic differences can be used in damaging ways. Without the ethic of beneficence in place it is better not to draw attention (...) to ethnic differences. Respect is the pre-condition for autonomy. Autonomy of ethnic minority populations to live in their own traditional way is not easy to achieve in multi-ethnic societies. There are difficult issues in multi-ethnic societies that require great sensitivity to create a sense of fairness and justice. Justice is the core value that underpins equity. There is a deep paradox – to promote equality, we may need to treat people and groups unequally. Ethical codes need to be modified to emphasize the importance of including ethnic minority populations in research and not bypassing them, as has been happening. It is correct, for example, that potential research participants' personal details are guarded. If such a person, however, does not read it may be unethical to send written information about a project. It may be more ethical to tele phone or even call at the doorstep of such a person. The history of racism in research is worrying, not least the fear that it might return. We need a governing code of conduct. Ethical research can help ethnic minority groups to move from the shadows of society and participate in a vibrant, healthy, multi-ethnic society. (shrink)

Study of Siddhāntabindu of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, being the exegesis of Daśaślokī of Śaṅkarācārya, work on Advaita Vedanta philosophy.

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

I point to a colonial care discourse that enabled colonizers to define themselves in relationship to "inferior" colonized subjects. The colonized, however, had very different accounts of this relationship. While contemporary care discourse correctly insists on acknowledging human needs and relationships, it needs to worry about who defines these often contested terms. I conclude that improvements along dimensions of care and of justice often provide "enabling conditions" for each other.

Many feminists of color have demonstrated the need to take into account differences among women to avoid hegemonic gender-essentialist analyses that represent the problems and interests of privileged women as paradigmatic. As feminist agendas become global, there is growing feminist concern to consider national and cultural differences among women. However, in attempting to take seriously these cultural differences, many feminists risk replacing gender-essentialist analyses with culturally essentialist analyses that replicate problematic colonialist notions about the cultural differences between "Western culture" and (...) "non-Western cultures" and the women who inhabit them (Narayan 1998). Seemingly universal essentialist generalizations about "all women" are replaced by culture-specific essentialist generalizations that depend on totalizing categories such as "Western culture,' "non-Western cultures," "Indian women," and "Muslim women." The picture of the "cultures" attributed to these groups of women remains fundamentally essentialist, depicting as homogeneous groups of heterogeneous peoples whose values, ways of life, and political commitments are internally diverge. (shrink)

This essay analyzes why women whose immigration status is dependent on their marriage face higher risks of domestic violence than women who are citizens and explores the factors that collude to prevent acknowledgment of their greater susceptibility to battering. It criticizes elements of current U.S. immigration policy that are detrimental to the welfare of battered immigrant women, and argues for changes that would make immigration policy more sensitive to their plight.

As the term "family values" achieves prominence in the rhetoric of political debate, the social issues at the heart of today's political controversies deserve to be studied in depth. This volume brings together a group of philosophers, political scientists, and legal scholars to explore a wide range of specific topics dealing with the legal, ethical, and political dimensions of familial relationships. Topics addressed include the rights of unwed fathers, the nature of children's autonomy, children's rights to divorce their parents, parental (...) rights with respect to medical treatment and religious education of children, surrogate parenting, same-sex parenting, and single-parent families. Collectively, the essays point out that many contemporary issues pertaining to the having and raising of children pose genuinely hard choices for public policy makers, for those who make and enforce the laws, and for citizens who would like to engage in informed and critical democratic debate on these issues. (shrink)

Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. I argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance. Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between "Western" and "Third World" cultures.

On the tenets of Sankhya philosophy in the light of Vijnanabhiksu's bhāṣya and Yoga varttika.

On the sāṅkhya and yoga systems of Indian philosophy as interpreted by Vijñānabhikṣu, fl. 1545-1550, in his Sāṅkhyapravac̣anabhāṣya and Yogavārttika.

In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808–59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the last five years of his service. By following his career and his mesmeric turn, the article describes Esdaile's subsequent public experiments in mesmeric anaesthesia in collaboration with indigenous practices and practitioners of (...) trance induction in the 1840s which led to the creation of a special mesmeric hospital in Calcutta. Although very successful, it eventually ceased to function, apparently victim to new and cheaper chemical anaesthetics. Mobilizing the insights of science studies scholarship into the processes of scientific experimentation, this article seeks to shed new light on the necessary professional, social and political investments for the making and mobility of scientific knowledge across social and cultural boundaries in a colonial setting. (shrink)

Public benefit corporations are National Health Service, that is, state, entities whose function to provide healthcare in discharge of public duties. If we regardvalue as the output of such organisations, it seems logical to connect the values of the organisation to thevalue produced by such organisations. But, on closer examination there are competing underlying logics in play: (1) those based on promoting organisational efficiency and efficacy; and (2) those based on the idea of building service provision around the clinician–patient relationship. (...) Underlying these logics are differing value sets. These clash. Because of the clashing of underlying moral frameworks the connection between values andvalue becomes hard, if not impossible. This paper argues that (1) the clash in these moral frameworks must be addressed by the organisation rather than between individuals or groups of individuals within the organisation; (2) alloying duties within hybrid professionals submerges but does not resolve these conflicts; (3) one approach could be to impose on the organisation itself an ethical imperative to promote, enhance and protect from deterioration the welfare of the patients; (4) a board ethics committee is a possible organisational structure that could transparently and fairly balance clashes within the competing moral frameworks in a way that could reconcile the competing logics and (5) if such conflicts can be better resolved at the organisational level what the organisation must do to achieve its objectives will become clearer because what needs to be valued would naturally emerge connecting values,value and what is valued. (shrink)

Rural queer studies, viewed through the lens of relational agriculture, offer critiques of heteropatriarchal norms in farming and highlight strategies used by queer farmers to manoeuvre discrimination and thrive in rural areas. This paper responds to recent calls for further scrutiny of the experiences of gender and sexually underrepresented groups in community-supported agriculture (CSA). It investigates the empowerment of rural queer people in CSA Guadiana, South Portugal, through the experiences of 12 queer members. I collected data through participant observation, semi-structured (...) interviews and a focus group and analysed them through open coding, followed by focused coding. Results indicate that CSA Guadiana, despite not originally designed for this purpose, facilitates various forms of empowerment and active engagement among queer members, particularly influenced by the leadership of queer producers and recurrent gatherings in queer-owned farmland. Three key lessons of queer empowerment in CSA Guadiana emerge from the analysis and contribute to debates on the politics of recognition, queer community action and visibility in the rural context: (i) self-confidence to perform queerness may be restricted to a selective rural community; (ii) partnerships between producers and co-producers may enable reciprocal queer empowerment; and (iii) queer leadership in agri-food community action may quietly represent gender and sexual diversity in the countryside. These findings offer the rural queer literature novel insights into the complexities, contradictions and limitations of empowerment experienced by queer farmers, artisanal food producers and consumers in a rural CSA. (shrink)

This essay traces the parallel, but unrelated, evolution of two sets of reactions to traditional idealist history of science in a world-historical context. While the scholars who fostered the postcolonial approach, in dealing with modern science in the non-West, espoused an idealist vision, they nevertheless stressed its political and ideological underpinnings and engaged with the question of its putative Western roots. The postidealist history of science developed its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread of modern (...) science, paying little heed to postcolonial debates. It then proposes a historiographical approach developed in large part by historians of South Asian politics, economics, and science that, without compromising the preoccupations of each of the two groups, could help construct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understanding of the global workings of the sciences. (shrink)

Senior service colleges provide professional education to prepare military and government civilians for public service at the senior levels of strategy and policy. Inclusive in the program of study...