Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese (2020) define radical care as ‘as a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds’ (16). Yet they sound a note of caution when they argue that ‘because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor’ (16). This article explores scaffolded peer-to-peer programmes as a form of radical care. In these programmes and (...) approaches people are connected in non-hierarchical structures of mutual support and care that locate lived experience, rather than solely professional accreditation, as powerful, inclusive and collaborative expertise. The often implicit and traditional hierarchies of care are challenged in this structuring; we argue that the dynamic and horizontal structure of peer care practices can subvert and ultimately enrich circulating discourses of self-care, commodified care and the neoliberal devolution of responsibility for health and well-being to individuals. (shrink)

The review system on research with human participants in the Netherlands is characterised as a decentralised controlled and integrated peer review system. It consists of an independent governmental body, the Central Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects (or Central Committee), which regulates the review of research proposals by accredited Medical Research Ethics Committees (MRECs). The legal basis was founded in 1999 with the Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act. The review system is a decentralised arrangement since most research proposal (...) are reviewed by the 30 accredited MRECs in the country. It is a controlled system in which the Central Committee is responsible for the accreditation and oversight of the MRECs and can make legally binding directives for these committees. The assessment of research proposals is an integrated peer review process in which all documents of the research file are reviewed by experts in one committee only. A small number of research proposals are assessed by the Central Committee and not by accredited MRECs. These proposals are on specific research categories such as gene therapy, cell therapy and embryo research. The review of research with surplus human embryos is regulated separately in the Embryos Act. The Central Committee provides support to the accredited MRECs and to researchers and sponsors. It is currently developing an internet portal to reduce the bureaucracy and make the review process more efficient and transparent. The Central Committee stimulates confidence on medical research in society by providing a public trial registry with core data on reviewed research proposals. (shrink)

As clinical ethics consultants move toward professionalization, the process of certifying individual consultants or accrediting programs will be discussed and debated. With certification, some entity must be established or ordained to oversee the standards and procedures. If the process evolves like other professions, it seems plausible that it will eventually include a written examination to evaluate the core knowledge competencies that individual practitioners should possess to meet peer practice standards. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has published core (...) knowledge competencies for many years that are accepted by experts as the prevailing standard. Probably any written examination will be based upon the ASBH core knowledge competencies. However, much remains to be done before any examination may be offered. In particular, it seems likely that a recognized examining board must create and validate examination questions and structure the examination so as to establish meaningful, defensible parameters after dealing with such challenging questions as: Should the certifying examination be multiple choice or short-answer essay? How should the test be graded? What should the pass rate be? How may the examination be best administered? To advance the field of health care ethics consultation, thought leaders should start to focus on the written examination possibilities, to date unaddressed carefully in the literature. Examination models—both objective and written—must be explored as a viable strategy about how the field of health care ethics consultations can grow toward professionalization. (shrink)

Predatory journals operate as vanity presses, typically charging large submission or publication fees and requiring little peer review. The consequences of such journals are wide reaching, affecting the integrity of the legitimate journals they attempt to imitate, the reputations of the departments, colleges, and universities of their contributors, the actions of accreditation bodies, the reputations of their authors, and perhaps even the generosity of academic benefactors. Using a stakeholder analysis, our study of predatory journals suggests that most stakeholders (...) gain little in the short run from such publishing and only the editors or owners of these journals benefit in the long run. We also discuss counter-measures that academic and administrative faculty can employ to thwart predatory publishing. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a focus on ethics education in STEM and business programs. Scholars, industry representatives, and accreditation bodies have identified ethics education as an element that requires renewed strategies to create better prepared professionals. In this paper, the author argues the importance of educating future technology and business professionals in constructive confrontation, conflict resolution, and creative problem solving. In addition, students need to be provided tools to become self-aware so they can be more assertive in their everyday (...) lives which will lead to more confident decision-making. Ethics curriculum in all fields should provide discussion regarding the normalcy and essential nature of confrontation. Without knowledge and practice of strategy when confrontation is needed, students will be less likely to act when faced with questionable situations in their professional lives. Finally, educational techniques for use in the classroom, such as assignments that promote practice in confrontation and peer mediation, are presented and explained. (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christopher Norris HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD: DERRIDA, AUSTIN, AND THE OXFORD CONNECTION THERE IS NO philosophical school or tradition that does not carry along with it a background narrative linking up present and past concerns. Most often this selective prehistory entails not only an approving account of ideas that fit in with the current picture but also an effort to repress or marginalize anytíiing that fails so to fit. (...) Bertrand Russell's History Of Western Philosophy is one fairly blatant example of mis strategy at work.1 The story it tells is a Whiggish account of how drinkers managed — against all the odds of metaphysical delusion — to come out at last (with Russell and his peers) on the high plateau oflogical consistency and truth. On the way to this dénouement Russell avails himself ofvarious techniques for pointing up die narrative drift. His coverage takes in all the accredited "major" thinkers, some of whose opinions Russell is hard put to summarize without remarking how nonsensical they appear from a modern (logical) point of view. Elsewhere — as with Leibniz or Kant — he takes the more accommodating line of winnowing out the structures of valid argument and consigning what remains to the history of dead metaphysical abstractions. It is this latter technique that has characterized the approach of analytical philosophers to the history of their discipline. The question is not so much, what did these drinkers mean or knowingly hope to achieve by posing the issues as they did? Rather it is to ask what techniques exist for translating their concerns into an up-to-date idiom based upon certain (mainly linguistic) terms of analytical enquiry. P. F. Strawson's revisionist reading of Kant is probably the best-known example of how such techniques can be used to achieve a distinctively modern understanding of otherwise recalcitrant texts.2 What remains of Kant after this cleaning-up 2 Philosophy and Literature operation is still "metaphysics" of a kind, but relieved of its excess conceptual baggage and couched (as Strawson would claim) in a "descriptive" rather than a "prescriptive" idiom. Thus philosophy comes to terms with its own errant precursors by explaining what they would presumably have said if equipped with die latest analytical tools. The result of such meuiods is to rewrite intellectual history from a standpoint of self-assured logical grasp where present concerns decide what shall count as the relevant or useful aspects ofpast tradition. And the same selective process goes to construct that typecast narrative which treats the "British" and die "Continental" styles of philosophizing as two completely separate, indeed antagonistic lines of descent. Thus it is taken for granted that the two sides are so far apart, with so little in the way of shared methods and assumptions, mat any kind of dialogue is certain to produce mere bafflement or cross-purpose talk. British philosophers with an interest in "Continental" theory feel themselves forced into a marginal role by the highly professionalized ethos that prevails within their discipline. This feeling is only strengthened by their more or less accepting the background mythology that explains how the two "traditions" grew up in a state of hostility often amounting to downright mutual contempt. There are several different versions of this story at present, but they all serve equally to reinforce the sense of incommensurable aims and languages. One (the "ordinary language" version) takes its lead from the later Wittgenstein in arguing that most of the problems that have long vexed philosophers — and continue to vex those "Continental" thinkers — result from dieir use ofa poindess metaphysicaljargon which puts them at odds with the commonsense wisdom of everyday usage. On this account, such thinkers have failed to learn the lesson bequeaüied by a long tradition of misguided speculative thought. They have persisted in errors and delusions of their own creating, hooked on a kind of malign verbal magic — "bewitchment by language," as Wittgenstein described it — which prevents them from seeing the plain sense ofthings. The other exemplary narrative is Uiat which takes not "ordinary language" but logic (or the modern refinements oflogic introduced by philosophers like Frege) as its reference point for deciding which episodes ofprevious or subsequent diought are to... (shrink)

L'assimilation des images à une attitude chrétienne correcte fut le résultat d'un long débat sur la nature du culte chrétien. Les icones n'excluaient pas d'autres approches comme la vertu chrétienne , mais elles faisaient désormais partie inextricablement d'une éthique chrétienne complète. Les hagiographies de Théodore Stoudite, de Photios, de Nicéphore ont contribué à la diffusion du culte des images comme une pratique chrétienne acceptable. L'exemple miraculeux de Michel au sanctuaire d'Eusèbe intervient également dans la mise en place d'un consensus.

Conservation and exhibition of historical works of art run many risks of misrepresentation of the life and meanings of objects. This paper explores the identities of some particularly compelling examples of Byzantine art restored under special circumstances at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. This examination of the restoration of frescos and icons, and their particular display histories, reveals the contingencies of our encounters with and explanations of historical art.

While there is a substantive literature on the link between welfare states and individuals’ trust, little is known about the micro-linkage of the conditionality of welfare as a driver of trust. This study presents a unique randomized social experiment investigating this link. Recipients of the regular Dutch social assistance policy are compared to recipients of two alternative schemes inspired by the basic income and based on a more trusting and unconditional approach, testing the main reciprocity argument in the literature: a (...) trusting government will harvest trust from welfare recipients in return. Particularly trust in local government – the level at which the experiment was implemented – increases among recipients of the alternative treatments. Subsequently, we innovatively theorize and test rigorously which mediating mechanisms might explain this increase. Policy evaluation, social integration, and psychological well-being are studied in this respect. Of these, the only underlying mechanism proven to mediate the treatment effect in local political trust, is citizens’ satisfaction with policy. (shrink)

The present investigation challenges the traditional distinction between cohesion and coherence; i.e., the distinction between the syntactical rules governing the composition of lexical units within the scope of the clause and the semantic-pragmatic rules guiding the composition of text units beyond the scope of the clause. To this end it exposes two major principles of semantic combination that are active through all levels of linguistic composition: viz. frame-schematic structure and narrative structure. These principles are considered as being components of a (...) semantic combinatorial system to be determined in terms of dependency relations. (shrink)

Prakash Nair has made comments about the kind of spatial planning that educationists should make for the purpose of improving, and refining the architectural model of the school that can be adopted in the twenty-first century. These remarks imply that an “old” and out-dated architectural model needs to be replaced by one that is better suited to the kinds of workers that children will become when they graduate, so that schools can more effectively prepare students for the workforce to come. (...) In this article, I argue that his proclamation that “the classroom is obsolete” should be interpreted in the context of neo-liberalism, alongside similarly hyperbolic claims by Francis Fukuyama in 1989 that the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the “end of history”. By addressing the rhetorical structure of such remarks, I deconstruct Prakash Nair’s promise to build a better future for education. Additionally, I argue that educational researchers may benefit from thinking of the classroom as a fictional place, a “scene” that does not always bear identical and universal attributes, owing to the diversity of cultural and geographical contexts in which classrooms are found. (shrink)

This article addresses a discourse on visual culture and its comparability to visual arts in school curriculum; it focuses initially on Kevin Tavin’s 2005 history of popular and visual culture in relation to visual-art education.1 In the second part, I also discuss contributions to this discourse by Kerry Freedman2 and Paul Duncum.3 There are two concerns that I raise here about arguments made against visual-arts curriculum in this discourse. First, they are generally lacking in rigor, making generalized criticisms of different (...) writers from different sources, in an effort to describe a coherent new discipline that circulates around different names, such as “visual culture,” “popular culture,” “visual literacy,” and... (shrink)