The ongoing legal and bioethics debates on consent requirements for collecting, storing, and utilizing human biological material for purposes of basic and applied research—that is, genomic research biobanking—have already managed to pass through three ostensibly dissimilar stages.

Brazil has recently been experiencing a phenomenon of political polarization: a conflict involving political views and social identities. Considering the extent to which this socially constructed conflict has been partially fueled by the media, we propose to use the Social Representations Theory. The present study explores how discourses in the mainstream media construct the political polarization taking place in Brazil. The topics covered in 82 texts published between January 2015 and August 2019 in Brazilian mainstream press, Folha da S. Paulo (...) and Estado de S. Paulo, were examined using content analysis and Reinert’s method with IRaMuTeQ software. A descending hierarchical analysis divided the corpus into four classes, and content analysis showed that both daily newspapers strongly criticized the political polarization underway, which was anchored to and objectified through episodes of violence, and they supported the valorization of democracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 1799 Dirk van Hogendorp published a Report on the Current Conditions of Dutch Possessions in the East Indies, a document that has garned comparisons to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for its condemnation of the Dutch East India Company and for its insistence on the importance of property rights to economic growth. The text is also an anti-Chinese diatribe, castigating the supposedly inveterate avarice of Java’s Chinese minority. Hogendorp’s advocacy of colonial reform and sinophobia intertwine in his use of (...) the term ijver, then the standard Dutch translation of ‘emulation’, a keyword of eighteenth-century political economy. Read against the status of emulation in European thinking, Hogendorp’s employment of the ijver offers an opportunity to re-examine emulation’s fraught, ambivalent quality, which has been noted by scholars like Istvan Hont and Sophus Reinert concerned primarily with a division between benevolent domestic emulation and dangerous international emulation. The colonial sphere, neither wholly domestic nor wholly foreign, was a discursive site wherein the tensions of emulation were worked out in new ways. (shrink)