This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway's (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts (...) are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin. (shrink)

One way to improve ethical standards and competency of psychologists is by understanding how they respond to ethical dilemmas. This study asked psychologists to choose what they would do and what would be the worst thing to do in response to each of 20 vignettes describing an ethically difficult scenario. Participants were 95 registered psychologists practicing in an Australian state. Normative responses for “would” and “worst” responses were defined by a reference group of five psychologists experienced in professional ethics. The (...) results showed that, unlike some previous studies, years of experience, gender and qualification were not significant predictors of normative choices. Overall, psychologists were better at identifying normative would than worst responses to ethical dilemmas. This finding highlights the need to raise awareness of what constitutes “bad” practice in order to help psychologists avoid engaging in behaviors that lead to misconduct. In addition, those who engaged in peer supervision were more likely to perform better on choosing the normative responses, suggesting the importance of receiving feedback and reflecting on clinical work to maintain ethical and professional standards. (shrink)

Our understanding of the decisions made under scenarios where both descriptive and experience-based information are available is very limited. Underweighting of small probabilities was observed in the gain domain when both description and experience were provided. The divergence observed from the prospect theory suggests a need for a separate or modified theory of decision making under risk. Recent studies suggest a possible role of probability weighting in the choice behaviour under risk. We investigated both gain and loss domains with and (...) without feedback for small and large probability conditions. We characterized the shape of the probability weighting function by a two-parameter functional form representing discriminability (concave-convex shape) and attractiveness (level of absolute weights relative to objective probability). We replicated four-fold pattern of risk attitude on non-WEIRD population. We find that feedback leads to underweighting of small probabilities and overweighting of large probabilities in the gain domain and overall underweighting of probabilities in the loss domain. We find that underweighting of small probabilities is driven by changes in discriminability and attractiveness components in the gain domain and changes in the attractiveness component in the loss domain. We have interpreted the results by proposing an updated belief-based account of decisions under uncertainty in which feedback, when available, influences the probability weighting mediating the choice behaviour. (shrink)

The use of a placebo arm in clinical trials is unethical if there is an active comparator that is acceptably safe and effective. We argue that reasonable evidence of effectiveness and safety of an inexpensive alternative to an expensive therapy is sufficient to require that the inexpensive therapy be included as a comparator when the expensive therapy is tested, and that use of an inactive placebo comparator only is not ethical. For example, studies of the expensive drug eplerenone for congestive (...) heart failure have not included a spironolactone arm, although there is reasonable evidence that spironolactone would be safe and effective, and spironolactone is inexpensive. The requirement to study inexpensive therapies is based on avoidance of unnecessary cost in medical care as an example of non-maleficence. Several ethical actors in the design, conduct, and publication of clinical trials and their results bear responsibility for the appropriate conduct of clinical trials. That responsibility includes protecting study subjects from being asked to participate in clinical trials that serve primarily to promote the use of new and expensive therapies. (shrink)

In giving a historically specific account of the self in early twentieth-century India, this article poses questions about the historiography of nationalist thought within which the concept of the self has generally been embedded. It focuses on the ethical questions that moored nationalist thought and practice, and were premised on particular understandings of the self. The reappraisal of religion and the self in relation to contemporary evolutionary sociology is examined through the writings of a diverse set of radical nationalist intellectuals, (...) notably Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Har Dayal, and this discussion contextualizes Mohandas Gandhi. Over three related sites of public propaganda, philosophical reinterpretation and individual self-reinvention, the essay charts a concern with the ethical as a form of critique of liberalism and liberal nationalism. While evolutionism and liberalism often had a mutually reinforcing relationship, the Indian critique of liberalism was concerned with the formation of a new moral language for a politics of the self. (shrink)

There is a paucity of treatment options for cognitively normal individuals with drug resistant genetic generalized epilepsy. Centromedian nucleus of the thalamus deep brain stimulation may be a viable treatment for GGE. Here, we present the case of a 27-year-old cognitively normal woman with drug resistant GGE, with childhood onset. Seizure semiology are absence seizures and generalized onset tonic clonic seizures. At baseline she had 4–8 GTC seizures per month and weekly absence seizures despite three antiseizure medications and vagus nerve (...) stimulation. A multidisciplinary committee recommended off-label use of CM DBS in this patient. Over 12-months of CM DBS she had two GTC seizure days, which were in the setting of medication withdrawal and illness, and no GTC seizures in the last 6 months. There was no significant change in the burden of absence seizures. Presently, just two studies clearly document CM DBS in cognitively normal individuals with GGE or idiopathic generalized epilepsy [in contrast to studies of cognitively impaired individuals with developmental and epileptic encephalopathies ]. Our results suggest that CM DBS can be an effective treatment for cognitively normal individuals with GGE and underscore the need for prospective studies of CM DBS. (shrink)

This paper investigates the gendered and racialized discourse on Polycystic Ovary Syndrome in India. A complex metabolic, endocrinal and reproductive disorder, PCOS is one of the most common endocrinopathies in women of reproductive age today. Due to an unclear etiology, there is no single clinical definition for PCOS, contributing to a sense of confusion around the syndrome. India has one of the highest rates of PCOS in the world. Medical and social discourses on PCOS suggest the high rates are due (...) to the failures of Westernized lifestyle and diet in women from developing countries. Taking the example of India, I argue that the lack of a clear etiology creates a discursive vacuum and that PCOS in itself is not a gendered and racialized syndrome, but the discourse on it is. Through the figure of the “new Indian woman,” I address the socio-political anxieties of nationalism projected onto the female body and suggest that the discourse on PCOS in India is in reaction to a rising nationalist rhetoric. As a syndrome that presents through “masculine” symptoms, PCOS acts a unique entryway into the intersectional issues of gender, race, sexuality, class and national identities. An analysis of the Indian setting might shed light on PCOS discourses that are increasingly relevant globally. (shrink)

The current study has mapped the impact of changes in different climatic parameters on the productivity of major crops cultivated in India like cereal, pulses, and oilseed crops. The vulnerability of crops to different climatic conditions like exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive indicators along with its different components and agribusiness has been studied. The study uses data collected over the past six decades from 1960 to 2020. Analytical tools such as the Tobit regression model and Principal Component Analysis were used for (...) the investigation which has shown that among climatic parameters, an increase in temperature along with huge variations in rainfall and consistent increase in CO2 emissions have had a negative impact by reducing crop productivity, particularly cereals and oilseed. Among various factors, adaptive factors such as cropping intensity, agricultural machinery, and livestock density in combination with sensitivity factors such as average operational land holding size and productivity of cereals, and exposure indicators like Kharif temperature, heavy rainfall, and rate of change in maximum and minimum Rabi temperature have contributed significantly in increasing crop vulnerability. The agribusiness model needs to be more inclusive. It should pay attention to small and remote farmers, and provide them with inclusive finance that can facilitate the adoption of climate-smart financial innovations, serve the underserved segments, and help them reach the target of a sustainable and inclusive agribusiness model. Though the social, technological, and economic initiatives can enhance the adaptive capacity of farmers, political measures still have a major role to play in providing a healthy climate for agriculture in India through tailored adaptive approaches like the adoption of craft climate adaptation program, dilating the irrigation coverage and location-centric management options. Hence, multidisciplinary and holistic approaches are worth emphasizing for evaluating the future impacts of change in climate on Indian agriculture. (shrink)

1. Manipur is a state in the Northeast region of India with a history of ongoing militarized social structure. ‘Northeast’ is a term used to label an entire region by the Indian state, which has a...

Developing countries often rely on consumption taxes, because these are broad, easy to administer, and harder to evade. However, the taxation system becomes inherently regressive. To counter this problem of the regressive nature of consumption taxes, there is a temptation among policymakers to address equity concerns through a multiplicity of rates, making the consumption tax system complex. Here, complexity is considered the by-product, or companion, to pursuing goals of equity. Complex tax systems, however, pose a different problem relating to equity. (...) Assuming a minimum fixed cost of compliance imposed by a complex tax system, smaller firms and individuals face a much higher cost of compliance relative to larger firms and richer individuals. Oligarchic sectors dominated by a few large firms also find it easier to organize and lobby to get favorable rates compared to competitive sectors with small firms. Though complexity is considered a by-product of several equity-enhancing measures, the Indian experience with its Goods and Services Tax reform serves demonstrates the opposite, that there is a trade-off between equity and complexity. (shrink)

The Bhagavad Gita's philosophical and political significance remains forever contemporary. In this volume a group of leading historians reflect on the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for political and ethical thinking in modern India and beyond. These essays contribute new perspectives to historical, contemporary and global political ideas. Violence and nonviolence, war, sacrifice, justice, fraternity and political community were constitutive of India's political modernity, and it was to these questions that Indian public figures turned their attention in the nineteenth and (...) twentieth centuries. Oriented towards the future, these commentaries and interpretations of a text that locates war as the central problem of human life have detached the Gita from antiquity and made it foundational for India's modernity. The book would be of interest to academic researchers as well as general readers interested in South Asian history, Indian philosophy and religion. (shrink)

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs are increasingly popular corporate marketing strategies. This paper argues that CSR programs can fall along a continuum between two endpoints: Institutionalized programs and Promotional programs. This classification is based on an exploratory study examining the variance of four responses from the consumer stakeholder group toward these two categories of CSR. Institutionalized CSR programs are argued to be most effective at increasing customer loyalty, enhancing attitude toward the company, and decreasing consumer skepticism. Promotional CSR programs are (...) argued to be more effective at generating purchase intent. Ethical and managerial implications of these preliminary findings are discussed. (shrink)

Organizations have increasingly relied on team-based reward systems to boost productivity and foster collaboration. Drawing on the literature on ethics and justice as well as appraisal theories of emotion, we examine how team-based reward systems can have an insidious side effect: They increase the likelihood that employees remain silent when observing a team member engage in unethical behavior. Across four studies adopting different methods, measures, and samples, we found consistent evidence that people are less likely to report (i.e., speak up (...) or provide anonymous feedback about) a team member’s unethical behavior in team-based than in individual-based reward systems. Furthermore, our research reveals that this effect is primarily driven by a decrease in the experience of moral anger, which subsequently leads to a decreased likelihood of reporting unethical behavior when it benefits the team rather than the individual. We do not find support for perceived indirect benefit or envy as alternative explanations, suggesting that the decision to report a team member’s unethical behavior is not driven by calculative and selfish motives, but by moral motives. Finally, we establish that the effect is contingent on the observer and the perpetrator being members of the same team; it dissipates when the observer and the perpetrator are part of different teams. Our work contributes to research on reward systems and business ethics and provides practical implications for human resource practices. (shrink)

Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, (...) offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how “political articulation” has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to broaden U.S. scholars' awareness of the similarities and differences of gender literature in another part of the world. In providing this partial review of gender scholarship in India, the authors hope to foster critical reflection on the inequities of global knowledge production and consumption and the role of U.S. academic institutions and scholars in this project. The article is written not by scholars who are based in India but by those who are (...) based in U.S. academies. Given their location, linguistic and cultural competencies, and scholarly expertise, the review, at best, can be described as a glimpse of gender scholarship in India. The four sections of this article feature theoretical and methodological issues, the women's movement, and violence against women in India. (shrink)

There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical-semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first- versus third-person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First-person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body modulated response latencies when responses were made along a front-back axis, consistent (...) with the action-sentence compatibility effect. This effect was not observed for third-person sentences. The ACE was observed when making responses along a left-right axis for third-person, but not first-person sentences.sentences did not show an ACE along either axis. These results show that perspective is a detail that is simulated during action sentence comprehension, and that motoric activations are flexible and affected by the pronominal perspective used in the sentence. (shrink)

The application of in vivo genetic lineage tracing has advanced our understanding of cellular mechanisms for tissue renewal in organs with slow turnover, like the lung. These studies have identified an adult stem cell with very different properties than classically understood ones that maintain continuously cycling tissues such as the intestine. A portrait has emerged of an ensemble of cellular programs that replenish the cells that line the gas exchange (alveolar) surface, enabling a response tailored to the extent of cell (...) loss. A capacity for differentiated cells to undergo direct lineage transitions allows for local restoration of proper cell balance at sites of injury. We present these recent findings as a paradigm for how a relatively quiescent tissue compartment can maintain homeostasis throughout a lifetime punctuated by injuries ranging from mild to life‐threatening, and discuss how dysfunction or insufficiency of alveolar repair programs produce serious health consequences like cancer and fibrosis. (shrink)

AbstractIn her article from 2019, Fleur Johns describes a change: from a style of development work marked by a propensity for ‘planning’, to one marked by a propensity for ‘prototyping’. Our project in this paper is to propose a modest shift in perspective. Where Johns traces a transition from old to new styles, we emphasise the enduring links between planning and prototyping, such that both styles are best understood through their ongoing relationships and entanglements. Returning to Pulse Lab Jakarta (PLJ), (...) the site of Johns’ initial inquiry, we offer a reinterpretation of what might be novel about PLJ for development practice. Our claim is that to understand the particular intervention that PLJ represents, and the new modes of practice it produces, it may be helpful to understand PLJ's work in the manner of a ‘modular’ attachment to existing development apparatuses, that combines big data analytics with design thinking. We then develop some reflections and speculations on the forms and novelty of PLJ in light of our redescription of its work in the language of modularity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has wide-ranging implications for the field of professional psychology. As clinical practice has rapidly adapted to ensure continuity of care, doctoral students have encountered unique opportunities for ethics-related competency development across practicum training settings. This article discusses the relevant American Psychological Association Ethics Code standards and additional ethical considerations facing trainees as they navigate their foundational clinical experiences and develop as professional psychologists in light of a pandemic.

There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical‐semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first‐ versus third‐person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First‐person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body (e.g., “You threw the microphone,” “You caught the microphone”) modulated response latencies (...) when responses were made along a front‐back axis, consistent with the action‐sentence compatibility effect (ACE). This effect was not observed for third‐person sentences (“He threw the microphone,” “He caught the microphone”). The ACE was observed when making responses along a left‐right axis for third‐person, but not first‐person sentences. Abstract sentences (e.g., “He heard the message”) did not show an ACE along either axis. These results show that perspective is a detail that is simulated during action sentence comprehension, and that motoric activations are flexible and affected by the pronominal perspective used in the sentence. (shrink)

We identified nearly 180 Black women who earned medical degrees prior to the start of the Second World War and found information regarding their family and social connections, premedical and medical educations, and internship experience or lack thereof for many of these women. Through their collective history, we observed large-scale trends, especially regarding the importance of “separatist” medical education and declining medical school attendance among African American women in the 1910s as medicine became an increasingly exclusionary profession. While our research (...) uncovered trends specific to Black women physicians, the implications of our research can be applied far more widely to other historically marginalized scientific practitioners. This research reminds us of the longstanding and shifting presence of Black women in science and medicine, despite the enduring popular belief that white men represent who participates in science, both historically and today. (shrink)

The modern abundance and prominence of data has led to the development of “data science” as a new field of enquiry, along with a body of epistemological reflections upon its foundations, methods, and consequences. This article provides a systematic analysis and critical review of significant open problems and debates in the epistemology of data science. We propose a partition of the epistemology of data science into the following five domains: (i) the constitution of data science; (ii) the kind of enquiry (...) that it identifies; (iii) the kinds of knowledge that data science generates; (iv) the nature and epistemological significance of “black box” problems; and (v) the relationship between data science and the philosophy of science more generally. (shrink)

Modern Indian nationalist thought has dealt with political ideas such as freedom, equality, liberty, democracy, so on and so forth. The idea of freedom received enough attention on the part of most of the modern Indian political thinkers. However, the idea of freedom as envisaged by the nationalist thinkers did not receive positive response from the other stream of modern Indian thought. Dalit-Bahujan political thinkers questioned the narration of freedom as propagated by the nationalist thinkers. Nationalist thinkers aspired for universal (...) values and at the same time reaffirmed ancient religious principles. Such effort was questioned and doubted by the other thinkers of modern India. Thus, one can find different narrations of freedom, such as social, economic and political. The social categories such as caste, class and gender became bases for their narration on the idea of freedom. The ideas and arguments of B. G. Tilak, M. K. Gandhi, Pandita Ramabai, Jyotiba Phule, B. R. Ambedkar E. M. S. Namboodripad and others would help in larger understanding of the idea of freedom. (shrink)