With the help of renowned logician Taylor Swift, Theresa Helke introduces four fundamental paradoxes: the Liar, Epimenides’, the Truth-Teller, and the No-No.

In this article, I present a philosophy-of-language assignment which emerges as the hero in a fable with the following trio of villains:ness, Parroting, and Boredom. Building on Penny Weiss’s “Making History of Ideas Classes Relevant”, and serving students taking an introductory course which covers Western theories of meaning, the “You are there” essay conquers Abstractness by requiring students to make a connection between the material and their lives, rendering theories relevant. It conquers Parroting by requiring them to apply theories to (...) new examples. And it conquers Boredom by producing papers whose originality can not only surprise but also remind the instructor reading them how meaningful the original theories are. In addition, I present a way to adapt the Weiss framework such that it’s inclusive, and discuss my experience piloting and negotiating the assignment. As appendices, I include materials which an instructor can use to scaffold the assignment. Note that beyond dispatching Abstractness, Parroting, and Boredom, the assignment invites collaborative/cooperative learning, fosters learner autonomy, and lends itself to online course delivery. (shrink)

This thesis is about indicative conditionals and apparent counterexamples to classically valid argument forms. Specifically, it applies the following four theories: - material (inspired by Grice (1961, 1975 and 1989)); - possible-worlds (inspired by Stalnaker (1981); Lewis (1976); and Kratzer (2012)), - suppositional (inspired by Adams (1975) and Edgington (1995 and 2014)); and - hybrid (inspired by Jackson (1987)) to try and solve the following two counterexamples: - Vann McGee’s to modus ponens (1985); and - Lewis Carroll’s to modus tollens (...) (1894). I argue that none of the theories I consider can explain – without facing any problems – the three individually plausible but jointly inconsistent theses that give rise to the apparent counterexamples. The three theses of the trilemma are the following: (1) the argument is invalid; (2) the argument is an instance of modus ponens or modus tollens; and (3) modus ponens or modus tollens is valid. (shrink)

Suppose that some contradictions are true – for example, that as I walk through the door, I’m inside and I’m not inside. Then we argue 'if I'm walking through the door, I'm inside; I'm not inside; therefore, I'm not walking through the door' is an invalid instance of modus tollens.

In this article we address the question of how many impossible images Escher produced. To answer requires us first to clarify a range of concepts, including content, ambiguity, illusion, and impossibility. We then consider, and reject, several candidates for impossibility before settling on an answer.

In our everyday moral deliberations, we attend to two central types of considerations – outcomes and moral rules. How these considerations interrelate is central to the long-standing debate between deontologists and utilitarians. Is the weight we attach to moral rules reducible to their conduciveness to good outcomes (as many utilitarians claim)? Or do we take moral rules to be absolute constraints on action that normatively trump outcomes (as many deontologists claim)? Arguments over these issues characteristically appeal to commonsense intuitions about (...) various cases. As a result, an important portion of the debate involves empirically tractable questions — questions that can be investigated by probing for people’s judgments in cases in which the two types of considerations come into conflict with one another. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno's innovative understanding of nature and the historical constitutes the core of the two contributions that follow. This chapter illuminates the understanding of nature in Adorno by excavating the manifold relations between him and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concepts of nature. The chapter's argument in this essay concerns Adorno's surprising critique of Negative Dialectics, surprising because for a brief interval Adorno appears to side with nature against Hegel. This is not precisely the move one might have expected of (...) Adorno, for whom nature ought to have been aligned with the material and experimental culture of knowledge that he, like Hegel, opposed to the work of what Hegel called Spirit and the work of dialectic. However, Adorno charges Hegel with a “rage against nature,” and, in the course of a long section of Negative Dialectics, he makes that charge stick. (shrink)

Mathematical notation includes a vast array of signs. Most mathematical signs appear to be symbolic, in the sense that their meaning is arbitrarily related to their visual appearance. We explored the hypothesis that mathematical signs with iconic aspects—those which visually resemble in some way the concepts they represent—offer a cognitive advantage over those which are purely symbolic. An early formulation of this hypothesis was made by Christine Ladd in 1883 who suggested that symmetrical signs should be used to convey commutative (...) relations, because they visually resemble the mathematical concept they represent. Two controlled experiments provide the first empirical test of, and evidence for, Ladd's hypothesis. In Experiment 1 we find that participants are more likely to attribute commutativity to operations denoted by symmetric signs. In Experiment 2 we further show that using symmetric signs as notation for commutative operations can increase mathematical performance. (shrink)

Research on mirror self-recognition where animals are observed for mirror-guided self-directed behaviour has predominated the empirical approach to self-awareness in nonhuman primates. The ability to direct behaviour to previously unseen parts of the body such as the inside of the mouth, or grooming the eye by aid of mirrors has been interpreted as recognition of self and evidence of a self-concept. Three decades of research has revealed that contrary to monkeys, most great apes have convincingly displayed the capacity to recognize (...) self by mirrors. The putative discontinuity in phylogeny of the ability suggests the existence of a so-called cognitive gap between great apes and the rest of the animal kingdom. However, methodological and theoretical inconsistencies regarding the empirical approach prevail. For instance, the observation of self-directed behaviour might not be as straightforward as it seems. In addition, the interpretation of mirror self-recognition as an index of self-awareness is challenged by alternative explanations, raising doubt about some assumptions behind mirror self-recognition. To evaluate the significance of the test in discussions of the concept of self this paper presents and analyses some major arguments raised on the mirror task. (shrink)

This paper explores the pragmatic foundations of unreliable narration (UN), a narrative technique highly popular in western literary texts. It sets out by giving a critique of the competing theoretic frameworks of UN, namely the seminal Boothian concept and more recent constructivist approaches. It is argued that both frameworks neglect a pragmatic perspective as the most viable way for identifying and analysing UN. Such a pragmatic model is then developed on the basis of theories of cooperation, such as the Gricean (...) maxims, relevance theory, and politeness. The emerging definition of UN treats a narrator as unreliable if he or she violates the cooperative principle without intending an implicature. This model is tested against three prototypical UNs: Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. These sample analyses yield a typology of UN: while pragmatic deviation is shown to be the intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, unreliable narrators vary according to their degree of intentionality. Finally, two recurring issues in the UN debate are briefly discussed: the existence of textual clues of UN, and the role of the reader in constructing unreliability. (shrink)

The AAR-SBL Women’s Caucus session on ‘Beyond Down and Dirty: From Good to Great Sex’ revisited the Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions project and book with the participation of two of its co-editors, Mary E. Hunt and Patricia Beattie Jung, and co-author and collaborator, Wanda Defeilt. Scholar colleagues, Brandy Daniels, Fitri Junoes, and Alicia Besa Panganiban, presented intriguing papers on feminist religious and ethical reflections on what constitutes great sex as they examined the issues discussed by feminist (...) scholars and activist authors of Good Sex. Moreover, the session was an exhilarating dialogue of international, interreligious, and intergenerational perspectives on what women think is great sex. It was an exciting starting ground for intergenerational discussion with senior scholars, associated with the Good Sex book, providing generous, constructive, and well-considered responses to the presentations of their colleagues. The diverse international audience of masters, doctoral and senior scholars – male and female – was included in the complex, fun, and challenging discussion of sex. Amidst various issues raised, there was a consensus that discussions on great sex must address issues of safety, justice, and pleasure. Overall the session was a success as the platform for the presentations modelled a feminist method that was intentionally designed to give more time for discussion, not only among panelists but also with the audience. (shrink)

AI for social good is a thriving research topic and a frequently declared goal of AI strategies and regulation. This article investigates the requirements necessary in order for AI to actually serve a public interest, and hence be socially good. The authors propose shifting the focus of the discourse towards democratic governance processes when developing and deploying AI systems. The article draws from the rich history of public interest theory in political philosophy and law, and develops a framework for ‘public (...) interest AI’. The framework consists of (1) public justification for the AI system, (2) an emphasis on equality, (3) deliberation/ co-design process, (4) technical safeguards, and (5) openness to validation. This framework is then applied to two case studies, namely SyRI, the Dutch welfare fraud detection project, and UNICEF’s Project Connect, that maps schools worldwide. Through the analysis of these cases, the authors conclude that public interest is a helpful and practical guide for the development and governance of AI for the people. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant (...) role of human vision in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ and ‘seeing’ with/in the world, as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth. (shrink)

School principals world-wide report high levels of strain and attrition resulting in a shortage of qualified principals. It is thus, crucial to identify psychosocial risk factors that reflect principals’ occupational wellbeing. For this purpose, we used the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ-II), a widely used self-report measure covering multiple psychosocial factors identified by leading occupational stress theories. We evaluated the COPSOQ-II regarding factor structure and longitudinal, discriminant, and convergent validity using latent structural equation modeling in a large sample of Australian school (...) principals (N = 2,049). Results reveal that confirmatory factor analysis produced marginally acceptable model fit. A novel approach we call set exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM-set), where cross-loadings were only allowed within a priori defined sets of factors, fit well, and was more parsimonious than a full ESEM. Further multitrait-multimethod models based on the set-ESEM confirm the importance of a principal’s psychosocial risk factors; Stressors and depression were related to demands and ill-being, while confidence and autonomy were related to wellbeing. We also show that working in the private sector was beneficial for showing a low psychosocial risk, while other demographics have little effects. Finally, we identify five latent risk profiles (high risk to no risk) of school principals based on all psychosocial factors. Overall the research presented here closes the theory application gap of a strong multi-dimensional measure of psychosocial risk-factors. (shrink)

A population at the intersection between criminality and victimhood, sex workers1 have contact with myriad service providers in the fields of mental health, housing, child welfare, and criminal jus...

As políticas de privatização da educação e as formas pelas quais se materializam têm assumido contornos sem precedentes no tempo presente e são emblemas das mutações da face social do Estado no provimento e garantia do direito humano à educação, como consequência da ascensão e capilaridade dos princípios neoliberais no tecido social que se apoiam, por sua vez, na primazia do capital financeiro e na concentração da riqueza. No Brasil, o direito à educação é matéria do texto constitucional nos títulos (...) “II – Dos direitos e garantias fundamentais” e “VIII – Da ordem social” (BRASIL, 1988), além de outras disposições e tangencia, em maior ou menor medida, todas as legislações infraconstitucionais. Pelo fato de ser fundante e crucial para a garantia do direito humano à educação, a defesa da oferta, currículo e gestão da educação pela esfera pública constitui-se em uma pauta candente para as pesquisas acadêmicas e para o ativismo social, uma vez que se trata da defesa de direitos em risco e de contraposições às mecânicas de poder que contribuem para a corrosão da esfera pública. Balanços analíticos e interpretativos de evidências empíricas, realizadas por pesquisadores sobre o fenômeno da privatização da educação em diferentes países e territórios têm desvelado reconfigurações normativas, práticas gestoriais e desenhos curriculares elucidando a magnitude do alcance das políticas e práticas mercantis e privatistas no âmbito educacional, em escala mundial. As reformas educacionais de cariz privatista induzidas por atores privados têm sido orquestradas por regimes ou modelos de governança da educação denominados como “governo empresarial” por Dardot e Laval (2016), como gestão corporativa da educação (Croso e Magalhaes, 2016) ou ainda por parcerias público-privadas (Robertson e Verger, 2012). Em substância, os processos privatistas se concretizam mediante uma apropriação teórico-prática das políticas educacionais de forma orgânica e multiforme, incidindo sobre a gestão escolar; a formação de docentes e de gestores; assessorias pedagógicas; a oferta de tecnologias educacionais; os sistemas privados de ensino que padronizam projetos curriculares, dentre outros insumos pedagógicos, além do incentivo à programas de escolha parental que disputam os fundos públicos (Adrião, 2018). Essa miríade de formas de privatização da educação ocasiona efeitos nefastos à consolidação da educação como direito público e subjetivo, conquista consagrada em cartas constitucionais da grande maioria dos países do globo, dentre outros códigos legais. No Brasil, pesquisa financiada pela FAPESP e desenvolvida no âmbito da Rede Latino-Americana e Africana de Pesquisadores em Privatização da Educação (ReLAAPPe) sob coordenação geral de Theresa Adrião intitulada Mapeamento das Estratégias de Privatização da Educação Básica no Brasil e coordenada em nível estadual por pesquisadores/as de treze instituições públicas de pesquisa de diferentes regiões do país, mapeia e analisa tendências de privatização materializadas nas redes educacionais dos estados e do Distrito Federal, nas dimensões da oferta educativa, gestão educacional e do currículo (Adrião, 2018)[1]. A pesquisa elucidou a inserção de organizações privadas, fundamentalmente de natureza empresarial, na definição e ou operacionalização de programas educacionais sob a tutela dos entes subnacionais entre 2005 e 2018. Face ao avanço dos multifacetados formatos da privatização da educação, o presente dossiê revela elementos para a problematização do modus operandi do setor privado na escola pública em distintos contextos, de maneira a focalizar criticamente dimensões contíguas entre esta efeméride e a agenda globalmente estruturada para a educação (DALE, 2004). Trata-se de um esforço coletivo derivado de ações investigativas conectadas ao supracitado coletivo de pesquisa para dar visibilidade à teleologia empresarial que tem se reverberado na esfera pública, cuja aquiescência de governos ultraconservadores e determinações históricas da conjuntura atual têm encarregado de conformar. As análises aqui disponibilizadas constituem-se em importantes alternativas analíticas para dissipar narrativas hegemônicas que produzem colapsos na cidadania e nos Direitos Humanos dos estratos historicamente empobrecidos. (shrink)

In the highly contentious abortion arena, the new oral abortifacient technology RU486 is one among many actors. This article offers an arena analysis of the heterogeneous constructions of RU486 by various actors, including scientists, pharmaceutical compa nies, medical groups, antiabortion groups, women's health movement groups, and others who have produced situated knowledges. Conceptually, we find not only that the identity of the nonhuman actor-RU486 -is unstable and multiple but also that, in practice, there are other implicated actors—the downstream users and (...) consumers of the technology. If we try to follow all the actors, we find a fuller and more historicized arena, and, ironically, we too can be construed as implicated actors in it. (shrink)

This title considers whether any generalisations can be made about word order in language. The chapters, written by international scholars, draw on data from several 'disharmonic' and typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Basque, French, English, Hixkaryana (a Cariban language), Khalkha Mongolian, Uyghur Turkic, and Afrikaans.

In this paper, we develop a typology of auditors’ virtues through in-depth interviews with nine exemplars of the audit community.We compare this typology with prescribed auditors’ virtues as represented in the applicable Code of Professional Conduct. Ourcomparison shows that the Code places a primary emphasis on mandatory virtues including the virtues of “independent,” “objective,”and “principled.” While the non-mandatory virtues, which involve “going beyond the minimum” and “putting the public interest foremost,” were identified by our exemplars as essential to the auditor’s (...) role, they received little or no emphasis in the Rules of Professional Conduct. We find this particularly alarming, given that the exemplars interviewed for this study viewed these virtues are essential to the auditors’ role. If the audit profession wishes to uphold public confidence by encouraging the possession of non-mandatory auditors’ virtues, our research suggests that non-mandatory auditors’ virtues should be explicitly described and included in rules of professional conduct. (shrink)

Little understood in early U.S. history, the Florida manatee suffered at the hands of people. After the manatees were listed as endangered, scientists began to study manatees and gained much knowledge about them. With education efforts, the species then went from inspiring acts of cruelty to inspiring dedication and admiration among scientists, policymakers, and the interested public. The image of the manatee underwent a transformation. The social and cultural reinvention of the Florida manatees improved their chances for protection.

In an increasingly globalized food economy, local agri-food initiatives are promoted as more sustainable alternatives, both for small-scale producers and ecologically conscious consumers. However, revitalizing local agri-food communities in rural agro-industrial regions is particularly challenging. This case study examines Grant and Chelan Counties, two industrial farming regions in rural Central Washington State, distant from the urban fringe. Farmers in these counties have tried diversifying large-scale processing into organics and marketing niche and organic produce at popular farmers markets in Seattle about (...) 200 miles away. Such strategies invoke the question, “How are ‘local’ agri-food networks socially and geographically defined?” The meaning of what constitutes “local” and/or “sustainable” systems merits consideration in the linking of these rural counties with distant urban farmers markets. Employing historical, in-depth interview and survey research, we analyze production and consumption networks and the non-market systems that residents in these counties access for self-provisioning and food security. (shrink)

Introduction. Medical trainees fear disclosing psychological distress and rarely seek help. Social sharing of difficult experiences can reduce stress and burnout. Drawing comics is one way that has been used to help trainees express themselves. The authors explore reasons why some medical trainees chose to draw comics depicting stressful situations that they had never shared with anyone before. Methods. Trainees participated in a comic drawing session on stressors in medicine. Participants were asked if they had ever shared the drawn situation (...) with anyone. Participants who had not previously shared were asked what prevented them and why they shared it now. The authors performed content analysis of the responses. Results. Of two hundred forty participants, forty-six indicated sharing an experience for the first time. Analysis of the responses revealed dedicated time and space was essential to sharing, trainee insecurity was a barrier, and comics were perceived as a safe way to communicate. Discussion. Depicting a stressful situation may be beneficial for trainees who drew an experience they had never shared before. Providing trainees with the opportunity to externalize their experience and create a community for sharing tough experiences may be one way to reduce trainee stress and burnout. (shrink)

Quick reference guide includes illustrated explanations of the most common terms used in general math classes. Discusses how students can use manipulatives and basic math tools to improve their understanding. With measurement conversion tables, guides to geometric shapes, and more.

The shift from print to screen has bodily effects on how we read. We distinguish two dimensions of embodied reading: the spatio-temporal and the imaginary. The former relates to what the body does during the act of reading and the latter relates to the role of the body in the imagined scenarios we create from what we read. At the level of neurons, these two dimensions are related to how we make sense of the world. From this perspective, we explain (...) how the bodily activity of reading changes from print to screen. Our focus is on the decreased material anchoring of memories. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a typology of auditors’ virtues through in-depth interviews with nine exemplars of the audit community.We compare this typology with prescribed auditors’ virtues as represented in the applicable Code of Professional Conduct. Ourcomparison shows that the Code places a primary emphasis on mandatory virtues including the virtues of “independent,” “objective,”and “principled.” While the non-mandatory virtues, which involve “going beyond the minimum” and “putting the public interest foremost,” were identified by our exemplars as essential to the auditor’s (...) role, they received little or no emphasis in the Rules of Professional Conduct. We find this particularly alarming, given that the exemplars interviewed for this study viewed these virtues are essential to the auditors’ role. If the audit profession wishes to uphold public confidence by encouraging the possession of non-mandatory auditors’ virtues, our research suggests that non-mandatory auditors’ virtues should be explicitly described and included in rules of professional conduct. (shrink)

: The slogan "the personal is political" captures the distinctive challenge to the public-private divide posed by contemporary feminists. As such, feminist activism is not necessarily congruent with civic engagement, which is predicated on the paradoxical need to both bridge and sustain the public-private divide. Lee argues that rather than subverting the divide, the politics of the personal offers an alternative understanding of civic engagement that aims to reinstate individuals' dignity and agency.

A prerequisite for spoken language learning is segmenting continuous speech into words. Amongst many possible cues to identify word boundaries, listeners can use both transitional probabilities between syllables and various prosodic cues. However, the relative importance of these cues remains unclear, and previous experiments have not directly compared the effects of contrasting multiple prosodic cues. We used artificial language learning experiments, where native German speaking participants extracted meaningless trisyllabic “words” from a continuous speech stream, to evaluate these factors. We compared (...) a baseline condition to five test conditions, in which word-final syllables were either followed by a pause, lengthened, shortened, changed to a lower pitch, or changed to a higher pitch. To evaluate robustness and generality we used three tasks varying in difficulty. Overall, pauses and final lengthening were perceived as converging with the statistical cues and facilitated speech segmentation, with pauses helping most. Final-syllable shortening hindered baseline speech segmentation, indicating that when cues conflict, prosodic cues can override statistical cues. Surprisingly, pitch cues had little effect, suggesting that duration may be more relevant for speech segmentation than pitch in our study context. We discuss our findings with regard to the contribution to speech segmentation of language-universal boundary cues vs. language-specific stress patterns. (shrink)

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: (...) the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice. (shrink)

: Drawing from work in feminist moral philosophy, Tobin argues that the most common methodology used in practical ethics is a questionable methodology for addressing practical problems across diverse cultural contexts because the kind of impartiality it requires is neither feasible nor desirable. She then defends an alternative methodology for practical ethics in a global context and uses her proposed methodology to evaluate a problem that confronts many Sunni Muslim women around the world.

Interactional expertise is said to be a form of knowledge achieved in a linguistic community and, therefore, obtained entirely outside practice. Supposedly, it is not or only minimally sustained by the so-called embodied knowledge. Here, drawing upon studies in contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology, I propose that ‘derived’ embodiment is deeply involved in competent language use and, therefore, also in interactional expertise. My argument consists of two parts. First, I argue for a strong relationship among language acquisition, language use and (...) the real world (i.e. the world accessible to the senses). Biological constraints in very early childhood anchor language to the body. These constraints are by-products of our evolutionary peculiarity that we gain because of our physical and psychological immaturity at birth. Thus, infancy is predominantly concerned with the bodily needs and experiences of the concrete while language acquisition takes place. Particular interest in the concrete furnishes our linguistic world and installs ‘concrete’ language as the principal constituent of competent language use. Second, I argue that well-established concrete language implicitly and explicitly elicits mental representations, namely partial reactivations of sensorimotor states that occur during experience. These are stepping stones by which we subsequently make sense of expressions in new linguistic areas. Like any competent language user, the interactional expert, therefore, prompts multimodal imagination and re-enacts concrete experiences when acquiring linguistic knowledge pertaining to a specialist field. Finally, I outline the characteristics of those imaginative powers to identify mechanisms that improve interactional expertise and discuss the obvious relation between interactional expertise and ordinary knowledge acquisition after the concrete language stage. (shrink)

The authors examine the experiences and ideals of African American working-class mothers through 20 intensive interviews. They focus on the women's negotiations with racialized norms of motherhood, represented in the assumptions that legal marriage and an exclusively bonded dyadic relationship with one's children are requisite to good mothering. The authors find, as did earlier phenomenological studies, that the mothers draw from distinct ideals of community-based independence to resist each of these assumptions and carve out alternative scripts based on nonmarital relationships (...) with male partners and shared care of children. (shrink)

As concerns heighten over links between biomass production and land grabs in the global south, attention is turning to understanding the role of governance of biofuels systems, whereby decision-making and conduct are not solely determined through government regulations but increasingly shaped by non-state actors, including multi-stakeholder initiatives. Launched in 2005, Bonsucro is the principal MSI that focuses on sustainability standards for sugar and sugarcane ethanol production. Bonsucro claims that because it is free from government interference and draws on scientific metrics, (...) their standards transcend localized, political–economic contexts. In this paper, we illustrate how the local context shapes the prospects for Bonsucro sustainably certified biofuel production in relation to land and water grabs. To accomplish this, our case focuses on Colombia, which has used a range of national policy mandates to establish itself as one of the larger producers of agrofuels in Latin America. We draw on interviews with stakeholders in the sugar and ethanol industries, paired with an examination of Bonsucro principles on land rights and water use, to illustrate how the sugar industry is framing their participation in Bonsucro, and the effects of the increasing intensification of sugarcane for ethanol production on land and water access for communities. We find that within the context of Colombia, efforts such as Bonsucro provide a veil of legitimacy and authority to a system that is premised on deeply entrenched historical patterns of inequitable land ownership patterns and access to natural resources. (shrink)