Affective self-transformation premised on empathy has been understood within feminist and anti-racist literatures as central to achieving social justice. Through juxtaposing debates about empathy within feminist and anti-racist theory with rhetorics of empathy in international development, and particularly writing about ‘immersions’, this article explores how the workings of empathy might be reconceptualised when relations of postcoloniality and neoliberalism are placed in the foreground. I argue that in the neoliberal economy in which the international aid apparatus operates, empathetic self-transformation can become (...) commodified in ways that fix unequal affective subjects. Empathy may function here less to produce more intersubjective relations and ways of knowing than it does to augment the moral and affective capacities of development professionals. Yet, I suggest, it is in the ambivalences, tensions and contradictions of both emotion and neoliberalism that spaces for thinking and feeling transnational encounters differently might be cultivated. (shrink)

Re-thinking the political workings of habit and habituation, this article suggests, is vital to understanding the logics and possibilities of social change today. Any endeavour to explore habit’s affirmative potential, however, must confront its legacies as a colonialist, imperialist and capitalist technology. As a means to explore what it is that differentiates contemporary neoliberal modes of governing through habit from more critical approaches, this article compares contemporary ‘nudge’ theory and policy, as espoused by the behavioural economist Richard Thaler and the (...) legal scholar Cass Sunstein, with the pragmatist philosophies of habit offered by John Dewey, William James and Shannon Sullivan. While nudge advocates focus on how policy-makers and corporate leaders can intervene in the ‘choice architectures’ that surround us to outsmart or bypass problematic human tendencies, I argue, pragmatist philosophers appreciate the necessity of collective efforts to develop new and flexible forms of habituation in order to engender more enduring and democratic forms of social transformation. (shrink)

Although we tend to associate social transformation with major events, historical turning points, or revolutionary upheaval, Revolutionary Routines argues that seemingly minor everyday habits are the key to meaningful change. Through its account of influential socio-political processes – such as the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy, the crafting of new technologies of governance, and the operation of digital media and algorithms – this book rethinks not only how change works, but also what counts as change. Drawing examples from the (...) affective politics of Trumpism and Brexit, nudge theory and behaviour change, social media and the international refugee crisis, and the networked activism of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, Carolyn Pedwell argues that minor gestures may be as significant as major happenings, revealing the powerful potential in our ability to remake shared habits and imaginatively reinhabit everyday life. Revolutionary Routines offers a new understanding of the logics of habit and the nature of social change, power, and progressive politics, illustrating diverse forms of consciousness and co-operation through which political solidarities might take shape. (shrink)

Assembling a distinctive genealogy of cybernetic thought situated in relation to Progressive Era technocracy, industrial capitalism, (de)colonial relations, and eugenic machinery, Code uncovers the vital interdependence of informatics, the humanities, and the human sciences in the 20th century. Rather than figuring cybernetics as emerging from Second World War military technologies and post-war digital computing, Code argues that liberal technocrats’ inter-war visions of social welfare delivered via ‘neutral’ communication techniques shaped the informatic interventions of both the Second World War and the (...) Cold War. Tracing how an organizing concept of code linked the work of diverse structurally-minded thinkers, such as Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs the cybernetic apparatus that spawned new fields, including structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology – and grapples with the unfolding implications of such socio-technical dynamics for 21st-century critical theory, digital media, and data analytics. (shrink)

Making links between different embodied cultural practices has become increasingly common within the feminist literature on multiculturalism and cultural difference as a means to counter racism and cultural essentialism. The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made in this context is that between ‘African’ practices of female genital cutting (FGC) and ‘western’ body modifications. In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which FGC and other body-altering procedures (such as cosmetic surgery, intersex operations and 19th century American clitoridectomies) are compared (...) within this feminist literature. I identify two main strategies of linking such practices, which I have termed the ‘continuum’ and ‘analogue’ approaches. The continuum approach is employed to imagine FGC alongside other body-altering procedures within a single ‘continuum’, ‘spectrum’ or ‘range’ of cross-cultural body modifications. The analogue approach is used to set up FGC and other body-altering practices as analogous through highlighting cross-cultural similarities, but does not explicitly conceive of them as forming a single continuum. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege gender and sexuality, they tend to efface the operation of other axes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender while failing to address the implicit and problematic role which race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in such models. This erasure of these axes, I contend, is linked to the construction of a ‘western’ empathetic gaze, which is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in the West to establish cross-cultural ‘empathy’ through models that stress similarity and solidarity conceals the continuing operation of geo-political relations of power and privilege. (shrink)

Through illustrating the similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists seek to reveal the instability of essentialist binaries which distinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally `different'. They also aim to query how the term `culture' is employed differentially on the basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. However, in emphasizing overarching commonalities between practices, feminist cross-cultural comparisons risk collapsing into economies of sameness (...) that elide the complex relations of power through which such practices have been constituted. They can also fix the imagined subjects of these practices in troubling ways. Using the ubiquitous `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery binary as an example, this article explores the difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. As a means to reorient feminist cross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity or sameness, it argues for the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs. (shrink)

researchers carolyn pedwell and shannon sullivan have begun to examine how habit can help us better understand the concept and lived experience of gender and how habit can act as a tool for enacting social change. John Dewey’s pragmatism also inquires into how individuals can and should act and respond to their conditions and peers in constantly changing times. Through bringing together Iris Marion Young’s analysis of feminine body comportment in her essay “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology (...) of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” and Dewey’s framework of habit that he develops in his book Human Nature and... (shrink)

The digital humanities represent, for many researchers, the potential for extending their research in terms of audience, scope, methods, and opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration. Ideally, this potential should also extend access to cultural engagement and preservation for marginalized groups. In practice, the reality may be quite different for projects that focus on diverse racial, gender, ethnic, and cultural heritage. In this short article we discuss preliminary findings from a study of patterns in U.S. federal funding for digital humanities projects, with (...) particular focus on cultural heritage and archival projects. Through the lens of funding and access, we raise some questions about whether the digital humanities can represent a shift from old hegemonies or run the risk of expressing them in a new technological paradigm. (shrink)

Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western culture from Columbus' voyages to today's tropical island retreats. Few narratives are so powerful - and, as Carolyn Merchant shows, so misguided and destructive - as the dream of recapturing a lost paradise. A sweeping account of these quixotic endeavors by one of America's leading environmentalists, Reinventing Eden traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations in shopping malls, theme parks (...) and gated communities. With eloquence and insight, Merchant shows how the drive to conquer nature and to explore and settle the globe, springs from this utopian pastoral impulse throughout Western history. Time and again, human manipulation of the environment is our downfall: Eden is achieved by fencing off pristine beauty in national parks and wildlife preserves, while leaving the majority of the earth in ruins. Challenging both narratives, Merchant argues that the green veneer of city-park conservation has become a cover for the corruption of the earth and the neglect of its environment. Reinventing Eden is a bold new way to think about the earth that includes green political parties, sustainable development and a partnership between humans and earth that is nothing short of an ecological revolution. (shrink)

A summary of the philosophical literature on trust.

Biomedical research funding bodies across Europe and North America increasingly encourage—and, in some cases, require—investigators to involve members of the public in funded research. Yet there remains a striking lack of clarity about what ‘good’ or ‘successful’ public involvement looks like. In an effort to provide guidance to investigators and research organisations, representatives of several key research funding bodies in the UK recently came together to develop the National Standards for Public Involvement in Research. The Standards have critical implications for (...) the future of biomedical research in the UK and in other countries as researchers and funders abroad look to the Standards as a model for their own policy development. We assess the Standards and find that despite offering useful suggestions for dealing with practical challenges associated with public involvement, the Standards fail to address fundamental questions about when, why and with whom public involvement should be undertaken in the first place. We show that presented without this justificatory context, many of the recommendations in the Standards are, at best, fragments that require substantial elaboration by those looking to apply the Standards in their own work and, at worst, subject to potentially harmful misapplication by well-meaning investigators. As funding bodies increasingly push for public involvement in research, the key lesson of our analysis is that future recommendations about how public involvement should be conducted cannot be coherently formulated without a clear sense of the underlying goals and rationales for public involvement. (shrink)

It is often assumed that engaging in a one‐on‐one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested the interaction hypothesis under the constraint that (a) all students covered the same content during instruction, (b) the task domain was qualitative physics, (c) (...) the instruction was in natural language as opposed to mathematical or other formal languages, and (d) the instruction conformed with a widely observed pattern in human tutoring: Graesser, Person, and Magliano's 5‐step frame. In the experiments, we compared 2 kinds of human tutoring (spoken and computer mediated) with 2 kinds of natural‐language‐based computer tutoring (Why2‐Atlas and Why2‐AutoTutor) and 3 control conditions that involved studying texts. The results depended on whether the students' preparation matched the content of the instruction. When novices (students who had not taken college physics) studied content that was written for intermediates (students who had taken college physics), then tutorial dialogue was reliably more beneficial than less interactive instruction, with large effect sizes. When novices studied material written for novices or intermediates studied material written for intermediates, then tutorial dialogue was not reliably more effective than the text‐based control conditions. (shrink)

IntroductionResearch indicates that body image disturbance is associated with poorer psychosocial outcomes for individuals with physical health conditions, with poorest body image reported for individuals with visible bodily changes. Using White’s theoretical model of body image the present paper aimed to examine the nature of these relationships in two distinct groups: individuals with an amputation and individuals with diabetes. It was hypothesized that body image disturbance would be associated with psychosocial outcomes and would mediate the relationships between self-ideal discrepancy and (...) personal investment in psychosocial outcomes.MethodsIndividuals with diabetes and individuals with an amputation provided details regarding their medical condition, and completed measures assessing body image, investment, self-ideal discrepancy, depression, anxiety, and quality of life. Structural equation and invariance modeling were used to test the model paths and the invariance of the model.ResultsAs hypothesized, body image disturbance was found to mediate the relationships between personal investment and psychosocial outcome, and between self-ideal discrepancy and psychosocial outcome. The predicted paths were invariant across groups, although the model accounted for more variance in people with an amputation than people with diabetes.ConclusionBody image disturbance, personal investment, and self-ideal discrepancy are important factors contributing to psychosocial outcome for individuals with diabetes and individuals with an amputation. These findings not only confirm the validity of the model in these two groups, but they emphasize the importance of targeting body image in future psychological interventions for individuals with a health condition. (shrink)

Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment ofmoral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences (...) were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged. (shrink)

Soft X‐ray tomography (SXT) is an imaging technique capable of characterizing and quantifying the structural phenotype of cells. In particular, SXT is used to visualize the internal architecture of fully hydrated, intact eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells at high spatial resolution (50 nm or better). Image contrast in SXT is derived from the biochemical composition of the cell, and obtained without the need to use potentially damaging contrast‐enhancing agents, such as heavy metals. The cells are simply cryopreserved prior to imaging, and (...) are therefore imaged in a near‐native state. As a complement to structural imaging by SXT, the same specimen can now be imaged by correlated cryo‐light microscopy. By combining data from these two modalities specific molecules can be localized directly within the framework of a high‐resolution, three‐dimensional reconstruction of the cell. This combination of data types allows sophisticated analyses to be carried out on the impact of environmental and/or genetic factors on cell phenotypes. (shrink)

The discrepancy between measures of preferred and actual participation in decision making was used as a measure of ecological dissonance for an organization and then used to assess its relationship to job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. Questionnaires were administered to 143 faculty and staff members of Mississippi State University. Correlational analyses indicated mild relationships between the measures of ecological dissonance and job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization, thus providing support for ecological dissonance theory (...) (see Miller, Topping, & Wells-Parker, 1989). It was concluded that ecological dissonance in participation in decision making was a predictor of workers’ job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. (shrink)

Indigenous knowledge and work in social science demonstrates the importance for well-being of people’s relationships with places, but western moral theorists have said little on this topic. This paper argues that there is a neo-Aristotelian virtue associated with forming a relationship with a place or places; that is, human beings can form relationships with places that affect their perceptions, emotions, desires and actions, and such dispositions, when properly developed, increase the chance that people will flourish. As well as discussing the (...) virtue, the paper considers related vices and briefly outlines implications of this virtue for dispossession, pro-environmental action, and education. (shrink)

An examination of the Scientific Revolution that shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science has sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion, and a new socioeconomic order that subordinates women.

Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists. In Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of (...) greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects—food and drink—she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating. (shrink)

In this adventurous contribution to the project of combining philosophy and biology to understand the mind, Carolyn Price investigates what it means to say that mental states--like thoughts, wishes, and perceptual experiences--are about things in the natural world. Her insight into this deep philosophical problem offers a novel teleological account of intentional content, grounded in and shaped by a carefully constructed theory of functions. Along the way she defends her view from recent objections to teleological theories and indicates how (...) it might be applied to notable problems in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

John Earman and John Norton have argued that substantivalism leads to a radical form of indeterminism within local spacetime theories. I compare their argument to more traditional arguments typical in the Relationist/Substantivalist dispute and show that they all fail for the same reason. All these arguments ascribe to the substantivalist a particular way of talking about possibility. I argue that the substantivalist is not committed to the modal claims required for the arguments to have any force, and show that this (...) naturally leads to an alteration in the way determinism is characterized for local spacetime theories. (shrink)

The power of new medical technologies, the cultural authority of physicians, and the gendered power dynamics of many patient-physician relationships can all inhibit women's reproductive freedom. Often these factors interfere with women's ability to trust themselves to choose and act in ways that are consistent with their own goals and values. In this book Carolyn McLeod introduces to the reproductive ethics literature the idea that in reproductive health care women's self-trust can be undermined in ways that threaten their autonomy. (...) Understanding the importance of self-trust for autonomy, McLeod argues, is crucial to understanding the limits on women's reproductive freedom. -/- McLeod brings feminist insights in philosophical moral psychology to reproductive ethics, and to health-care ethics more broadly. She identifies the social environments in which self-trust is formed and encouraged. She also shows how women's experiences of reproductive health care can enrich our understanding of self-trust and autonomy as philosophical concepts. The book's theoretical components are grounded in women's concrete experiences. The cases discussed, which involve miscarriage, infertility treatment, and prenatal diagnosis, show that what many women feel toward themselves in reproductive contexts is analogous to what we feel toward others when we trust or distrust them. -/- McLeod also discusses what health-care providers can do to minimize the barriers to women's self-trust in reproductive health care, and why they have a duty to do so as part of their larger duty to respect patient autonomy. (shrink)

The process of adopting a child is “not for the faint of heart.” This is what we were told the first time we, as a couple, began this process. Part of the challenge lies in fulfilling the licensing requirements for adoption, which, beyond the usual home study, can include mandatory participation in parenting classes. The question naturally arises for many people who are subjected to these requirements whether they are morally justified. We tackle this question in this paper. In our (...) view, while strong reasons exist in favour of licensing adoptive parents, these reasons support the licensing not only of adoptive parents, but of all or some subset of so-called “natural” parents as well. We therefore conclude that the status quo with respect to parental licensing, according to which only adoptive parents need to be licensed, is morally unjustified. (shrink)

The authors of these essays--including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Weed, and Rosi Braidotti--shed new light on the relationship of Irigaray to many of the philosophers she has "romanced," from Aristotle to Deleuze.

In the first edition of Radical Ecology --the now classic examination major philosophical, ethical, scientific, and economic roots of environmental problems--Carolyn Merchant responded to the profound awareness of environmental crisis which prevailed in the closing decade of the twentieth century. In this provocative and readable study, Merchant examined the ways that radical ecologists can transform science and society in order to sustain life on this planet. Now in this second edition, Merchant continues to emphasize how laws, regulations and scientific (...) research alone cannot reverse the spread of pollution or restore our dwindling resources. Merchant argues that in order to maintain a livable world, we must formulate new social, economic, scientific, and spiritual approaches that will fundamentally transform human relationships with nature. She analyzes the revolutionary ideas of visionary ecologists for a new economy, society, science, and religion, and examines their efforts to bring environmental problems to the attention of the public. This new edition features a new Introduction from the author, a thorough updating of chapters, and two entirely new chapters on recent global movements and globalization and the environment. It is a timely update that will give students everything they need to know on the most recent philosophical positions and social movements that characterize the radical ecology spectrum. (shrink)

With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England's industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions, Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major (...) transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860. In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future. (shrink)