In the past twenty years, the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has made considerable progress toward illuminating the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. These insights have not yet been synthesized or presented in a form that systematically highlights the connections between S&TS and other social sciences. This timely collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field attempts to fill that gap. The book develops the theme of "co-production", showing how scientific knowledge both (...) embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations and discourses. Accordingly, the authors argue, ways of knowing the world are inseparably linked to the ways in which people seek to organize and control it. Through studies of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectiveson the nexus of science, power and culture. (shrink)

From Hippocrates to paternalism to autonomy : the new hegemony -- From autonomy to consent -- Consent, autonomy, and the law -- Autonomy at the end of life -- Autonomy and pregnancy -- Autonomy and genetic information -- Autonomy and organ transplantation -- Autonomy, consent, and the law.

'Gender Hurts' examines the wider social and political context and implications of the phenomenon of transgenderism. Jeffreys and Gottschalk propose that gender in western culture is socially constructed as the basis of male domination and that the concept of gender has the potential to hurt many.

A personal history of life, love and women’s liberation In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at her life as a participant in the women’s liberation movement, left politics and the creative radical culture of a decade in which freedom and equality seemed possible. She reveals the tremendous efforts that were made to transform attitudes and feelings, as well as daily life. After addressing the first British Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, she went on (...) to encourage night cleaners to unionise, to campaign for nurseries and abortion rights. She played an influential role in discussions of socialist feminist ideas and her books and journalism attracted an international readership. Written with generosity and humour Daring to Hope recreates grassroots networks, communal houses and squats, bringing alive a shared impetus to organise collectively and to love without jealousy or domination. It conveys the shifts occurring in politics and society through kernels of personal experience. The result is a book about liberation in the widest sense. (shrink)

Though feminists are correct to note that conventional standards of sexiness are oppressive, we argue that feminism should reclaim sexiness rather than reject it. We argue for an aesthetic and ethical practice of working to shift from conventional attributions of sexiness to respectful attributions, in which embodied sexual subjects are appreciated in their full individual magnificence. We argue that undertaking this practice is an ethical obligation, since it contributes to the full recognition of others’ humanity. We discuss the relationship of (...) ethical to aesthetic considerations and argue that the respectful notion of sexiness is a genuinely aesthetic one, even though it does not involve assessment in relation to standards. (shrink)

Nation states in the twenty‐first century confront new challenges to their political legitimacy. Borders are more porous and less secure. Infectious disease epidemics, climate change, financial fraud, terrorism, and cybersecurity all involve cross‐border flows of material, human bodies, and information that threaten to overwhelm state power and expert knowledge. Concurrently, doubts have multiplied about whether citizens, subject to manipulation through the internet, have lost the critical capacity to hold rulers accountable for their expert decisions. I argue that the primary threat (...) to democracy is not the public's epistemic incompetence but a slow dissolution of the deliberative practices that are essential for self‐rule. We need a radical reimagining of the sites, forms, and performances of democratic deliberation. For this purpose, the American state needs to reconstitute a public square open to citizens who are deemed to be epistemically competent and capable of informed judgment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adjudicating the Debate Over Two Models of Nature AppreciationSheila Lintott (bio)It seems commonplace to point out that we aesthetically appreciate a wide variety of objects: that is, art objects are not the only good candidates for aesthetic appreciation.1 We know from experience that one can aesthetically appreciate not only Georgia O'Keefe's White Trumpet Flower, but also a white trumpet flower. Similarly, we can aesthetically appreciate both a pictorial representation (...) of the human form and that form instantiated in certain prime specimens. We do so, moreover, without classifying either flowers or human beings as art objects. Yet, the paradigm of aesthetic appreciation today, in both everyday life and in educative contexts, is the appreciation of art, which explains why we tend to try to understand what makes aesthetic appreciation appropriate in terms of what makes art appreciation appropriate. This approach may not be entirely mistaken, for beginning with the familiar is always a good plan. However, it must be done with care, otherwise important differences between our relationships with the art we appreciate and with the nature we appreciate may be overlooked, thereby obscuring salient differences in the appreciation of each.In this essay, I focus on the issue of the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature and offer an overview of a contemporary debate on the topic. I begin with a general discussion of art and nature appreciation. I then summarize Kendall Walton's theory of appropriate art appreciation and explain his skepticism regarding the possibility of appropriate and inappropriate nature appreciation. Next, I discuss two models according to which Walton is mistaken, as the philosophers who present these models, Allen Carlson and Noël Carroll, do so to illustrate how nature appreciation can be properly considered appropriate or inappropriate. It may seem that given the recent proliferation of models of nature appreciation, the last thing we should seek is yet another model. However, in the end, I shall argue the need for a new and different kind of model, one that is a revisionist and extensionist model of nature appreciation. [End Page 52]Art and Nature AppreciationConcerning the perceptual activity of the audience, how we ought to appreciate artworks is largely uncontroversial. Perhaps this is why Carlson opens his attempt to understand the aesthetic appreciation of nature with a presentation of the aesthetic appreciation of art, explaining that "with art objects there is a straightforward sense in which we know both what and how to aesthetically appreciate."2 Although not all artworks offer "straightforward" examples of aesthetic appreciation, Carlson's general point is reasonably motivated. As Kendall Walton succinctly explains: "Paintings and sculptures are to be looked at; sonatas and songs are to be heard. What is important about these works of art, as works of art, is what can be seen or heard in them."3 That we ought to look at paintings and listen to sonatas seems obvious for at least two reasons. First, via formal education and informal interactions, we have grown familiar with the conventions of art appreciation; second, such conventions find experiential reinforcement when, for example, our auditory sense is tickled by a Mozart concerto.4Underlying our relative lack of confidence when it comes to nature appreciation is the obvious fact that nature, unlike art, is not an artifact. Nature was not made by beings like us; it was made neither for our use, nor for our entertainment, nor for our appreciation.5 As Carlson puts it, "art objects are our own creations; it is for this reason that we know what is and what is not part of a work, which of its aspects are of aesthetic significance, and how to appreciate them" (ANE, 41). We need, therefore, a model of nature appreciation that will serve as a source of education regarding how best to appreciate nature and will offer the confidence we lack and the guidance we seek.It might seem that we should simply apply our knowledge of art to nature appreciation — that is, appreciate nature as if it were art. However, as numerous philosophers have noticed, this approach is mistaken.6 The mistake is both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, it is a category error... (shrink)

This collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff explores how democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens.

Economics has developed into one of the most specialised social sciences. Yet at the same time, it shares its subject matter with other social sciences and humanities and its method of analysis has developed in close correspondence with the natural and life sciences. This book offers an up to date assessment of economics in relation to other disciplines. -/- This edited collection explores fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, sociology, architecture, and literature, drawing from selected contributions to the (...) 2005 Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET). There is currently much discussion at the leading edges of modern economics about openness to other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology. But what we see here is that economics has drawn on (as well as contributed to) other disciplines throughout its history. In this sense, in spite of the increasing specialisation within all disciplines, economics has always been an open discipline and the chapters in this volume provide a vivid illustration for this. -/- Open Economics is a testament to the intellectual vibrancy of historical research in economics. It presents the reader with a historical introduction to the disciplinary context of economics that is the first of its kind, and will appeal to practising economists and students of the discipline alike, as well as to anybody interested in economics and its position in the scientific and social scientific landscape. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: Economics in relation to other disciplines Richard Arena, Sheila Dow and Matthias Klaes Part I. Economics in relation to the humanities and social sciences 1. The social science of economics Brian J. Loasby 2. Economics and literature Bruna Ingrao 3. Happiness: what Kahneman could have learnt from Pietro Verri Pier Luigi Porta Part II. Economics in relation to the life and natural sciences 4. Newtonian physics, experimental moral philosophy and the shaping of political economy Sergio Cremaschi 5. Evolutionary biology and economic behaviour: re-visiting Veblen's instinct of workmanship Mark Harrison 6. Medicine and economics in pre-classical economics Alain Clément and Ludovic Desmedt Part III. Economics and mathematics 7. Mathematics as the role model for neoclassical economics Nicola Giocoli 8. The role of econometric method in economic analysis: A reassessment of the Keynes-Tinbergen debate, 1938-43 Giovanna Garrone and Roberto Marchionatti IV. Economics and architecture 9. Economics and architecture Maurice Lagueux 10. Economic policies and urban development in Latin America Michele Alacevich and Andrea Costa V. Economics and geography 11. ‘Space’ in economic thought Giovanna Vertova 12. Economics, geography and colonialism in the writings of William Petty Hugh Goodacre Part VI. Economics and sociology 13. Economics and sociology: Gustav Schmoller and Werner Sombart on social differentiation Joachim Zweynert 14. Is Homo Oeconomicus a 'bad guy'? Isabelle This Saint-Jean -/- . (shrink)

El presente artículo se encamina a indagar en las implicaciones que la palabra individualismo contuvo en los existencialismos de Jean-Paul Sartre y Albert Camus. Con este objetivo, se pretende desenmascarar la filosofía de Sartre como un deontologismo igual de desubjetivizado que cualquier doctrina colectivista, así como postular el individualismo de Camus como esa doctrina que se atrevió a hacerse cargo de las repercusiones de aquel axioma desde el que partieron ambos existencialismos y solo él se atrevió a explotar: la existencia (...) precede a la esencia. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiry into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering is a growing area of interest to academic philosophers. This volume brings together a diverse group of philosophers to speak about topics in this reemerging area of philosophical inquiry, taking up new themes, such as maternal aesthetics, and pursuing old ones in new ways, such as investigating stepmothering as it might inform and ground an ethics of care. The theoretical foci of the book include feminist, existential, ethical, aesthetic, phenomenological, social and political theories. (...) These perspectives are then employed to consider many dimensions of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, which are of central importance to human existence, but are only rarely discussed in philosophical cannons. Topics include pregnancy and embodiment, breast-feeding, representations – or the lack thereof – of pregnant and birthing women, adoption, and post-partum motherhood. (shrink)

This article presents Gadamer’s interest in temporality as his strategy for advancing hermeneutics as philosophy of experience, a strategy becoming significantly more salient with the appearance of his 1992 essay, ‘Wort und Bild’. I demonstrate how temporal categories readily demarcate the problem of ontological imbalance so central in Gadamer’s philosophical project, a demarcation that removes any illusion of compatibility between Gadamer and the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. The article also considers some common misunderstandings of Gadamer resulting from a failure to (...) take full account of his interest in temporality, misunderstandings that prohibit recognizing the radical potential of Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy for our understanding of human finitude. A full account of this orientation must begin with a grasp of the exemplariness of art in his philosophy, and in this connection, the article raises the question of Gadamer’s late interest in the distinct exemplariness, not of lyric poetry, but of narrative art. (shrink)

Topics discussed in this work are abortion, euthanasia, medical negligence and human experimentation.

The power of technology? -- Risk and responsibility? -- The ethical anatomy of disasters? -- Remaking nature? -- Tinkering with humans? -- Information's wild frontiers? -- Whose knowledge, whose property? -- Reclaiming the future? -- The ethics of invention?

In this article, I consider the standard interpretation of the superiority theory of humor attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, according to which the theory allegedly places feelings of superiority at the center of humor and comic amusement. The view that feelings of superiority are at the heart of all comic amusement is wildly implausible. Therefore textual evidence for the interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, or Hobbes as offering the superiority theory as an essentialist theory of humor is worth careful consideration. (...) Through textual analysis I argue that not one of these three philosophers defends an essentialist theory of comic amusement. I also discuss the way various theories of humor relate to one another and the proper place of a superiority theory in humor theory in light of my analysis. (shrink)

STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. (...) Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective containment. In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of atoms for development which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement. (shrink)

Nearly 70 years after the dawn of the genetic age, biotechnology, scientists proclaim, is poised to rewrite the book of life. Yet, how far can science go in making sense of what "life" means to human beings and societies? This book looks at flash points in law, politics, ethics, and culture to argue that the claims of rewriting life are overblown.

This paper explores the politics of representing events in the world in the form of data points, data sets, or data associations. Data collection involves an act of seeing and recording something that was previously hidden and possibly unnamed. The incidences included in a data set are not random or unrelated but stand for coherent, classifiable phenomena in the world. Moreover, for data to have an impact on law and policy, such information must be seen as actionable, that is, the (...) aggregated data must show people both something they can perceive and something that demands interrogation, explanation, or resolution. Actionable data problematize the taken-for-granted order of society by pointing to questions or imbalances that can be corrected or rectified, or simply better understood, through systematic compilations of occurrences, frequencies, distributions, or correlations. The paper describes and analyzes three different modes of authorized seeing that render data on global environmental phenomena such as climate change both visible and actionable. It argues that the political force of environmental data compilations derives from the divergent epistemological standpoints and expert practices associated with producing views from nowhere, everywhere, and somewhere. (shrink)

This paper addresses, and seeks to correct, some frequent misunderstandings concerning the claim that science is socially constructed. It describes several features of scientific inquiry that have been usefully illuminated by constructivist studies of science, including the mundane or tacit skills involved in research, the social relationships in scientific laboratories, the causes of scientific controversy, and the interconnection of science and culture. Social construction, the paper argues, should be seen not as an alternative to but an enhancement of scientists’ own (...) professional understanding of how science is done. The richer, more finely textured accounts of scientific practice that the constructivist approach provides are potentially of great relevance to public policy. (shrink)

Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept (...) of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies. (shrink)

This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive social sciences. Scientific assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped establish climate change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from embedded experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense (...) and undermines existing social institutions and ethical commitments at four levels: communal, political, spatial and temporal. The article explores the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental debates in which a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with social responses to those representations is taking place. It suggests how the interpretive social sciences can foster a more complex understanding of humanity’s climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer a framework in which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in inadequately prioritized healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries such as Kenya. In this prolonged pandemic, nurses and midwives working at the frontline face multiple ethical problems, including their obligation to care for their patients and the risk for infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Despite the frequency of emergencies in Africa, there is a paucity of literature on ethical issues during epidemics. Furthermore, nursing regulatory bodies in African countries such as Kenya (...) have primarily adopted a Western code of ethics that may not reflect the realities of the healthcare systems and cultural context in which nurses and midwives care for patients. In this article, we discuss the tension between nurses’ and midwives’ duty of care and resource allocation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need to clarify nurses’ and midwives’ rights and responsibilities, especially in the current political setting, limited resources, and ambiguous professional codes of ethics that guide their practice. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the nature of combinatorial properties for speech and the locus equation. The presence of some overlap in locus equation space suggests that this higher order property may not be strictly invariant and may require other cues or properties for the perception of place of articulation. Moreover, combinatorial analysis in two-dimensional space and the resultant linearity appear to have a “special” status in the development of this theoretical framework. However, place of articulation is only one of many (...) phonetic dimensions in language. It is suggested that a multidimensional space including patterns derived in the frequency, amplitude, and time domains will be needed to characterize the phonetic categories of speech, and that although the derived properties ultimately may not meet the conditions of linearity, they will reflect a higher order acoustic invariance. (shrink)

Este estudo avalia diferentes estratégias de coping como preditoras dos níveis de bem-estar psicológico. O bem-estar psicológico é medido através da escala General Health Questionnaire - GHQ-12, de Goldberg e as estratégias de coping através da Escala de Afrontamento para Adolescentes -ACS. Ambas as..

From all corners of the globe, the on-line revolution is proclaimed. The imperative is to connect; to shop, work, learn, be governed, even fall in love on-line. Government initiatives proliferate globally, stressing the urgency for citizens to become part of the so called Information Society. In the midst of all this euphoria the question must be raised 'Is this opportunity for all, or just a few?' Information and Communication Technologies are being introduced to the teaching and learning process at an (...) increasing pace. E-government ministers are particularly concerned about the 'have-nets' and 'have-nots' in this 'digital revolution'. Our research in schools and the HE sector, looking at women learning on-line, has indicated barriers. We discuss how gendered relations in the home, work and education go far beyond having access to IT. We illustrate how these relations contribute to the shaping of the gendered experiences of using technology in education. So whilst women are urged to get connected, we ask whether or not they will want to use technology as a tool to learn with. We suggest that the current gendered discourse surrounding technology and its use in all areas of society should inform government on-line learning policies globally, cutting through the euphoric hype. (shrink)