In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that ‘anti-biologism’ have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency in the political implications of ontological claims: an assumed (...) political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming. Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at ‘second-wave’ feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig’s materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and ‘the myth of woman’ provides the historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig’s anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative ‘ideology of the status quo’ created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique ‘second-wave’ feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification. (shrink)

This article revisits Arendt’s and Foucault’s converging accounts of modern (bio)politics and the entry of biological life into politics. Agamben’s influential account of these ideas is rejected as a misrepresentation both because it de-historicizes biological/organic life and because it occludes the positivity of that life and thus the discursive appeal and performative force of biopolitics. Through attention to the genealogy of Arendt’s and Foucault’s own ideas we will see that the major point of convergence in their thinking is their insistence (...) upon understanding biological thinking from the inside, in terms of its positivity. Agamben’s assessment of modern politics is closer to Arendt’s than it is to Foucault’s and this marks a fascinating point of disagreement between Arendt and Foucault. Whereas Arendt sees the normalizing force of modern society as being in total opposition to individuality, Foucault posits totalization and individuation as processes of normation, which casts a light upon the relative import they place upon politics and ethics. (shrink)

Despite the frequency of stillbirths, the subsequent implications are overlooked and underappreciated. We present findings from comprehensive, systematic literature reviews, and new analyses of published and unpublished data, to establish the effect of stillbirth on parents, families, health-care providers, and societies worldwide. Data for direct costs of this event are sparse but suggest that a stillbirth needs more resources than a livebirth, both in the perinatal period and in additional surveillance during subsequent pregnancies. Indirect and intangible costs of stillbirth are (...) extensive and are usually met by families alone. This issue is particularly onerous for those with few resources. Negative effects, particularly on parental mental health, might be moderated by empathic attitudes of care providers and tailored interventions. The value of the baby, as well as the associated costs for parents, families, care providers, communities, and society, should be considered to prevent stillbirths and reduce associated morbidity. (shrink)

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

On Surface and Place is a rich and poetic exploration of surfaces which foregrounds their significance in our understanding and experience of place. Adopting weaving as its overarching metaphor, it departs from Gottfried Semper's discussion of correspondences between architecture and textiles, and emerges from the reading of photographs, a swatch of Harris Tweed and curtain wall façade juxtaposed. In juxtaposing the fabric of the city with the weave of Harris Tweed the book charts an original course across a range of (...) connected ideas and questions, combining many different themes, writers and disciplines. It presents integrated and innovative rethinkings on a number of fundamental relationships, including correlations between body and building, word and image, and between the rural and the metropolitan, and the hand-crafted and the mass-reproduced. In doing so, it seeks to foreground the very interrelationship of surface and place, as it makes a claim for the relational nature of the world in which we live. (shrink)

The Australian moratorium on human clinical trials of xenotransplantation was lifted in December 2009. This decision follows public consultations on whether xenotransplantation should or should not proceed in Australia, which occurred in 2002 and 2004. However, the public consultation, in its design and process, did not facilitate meaningful public engagement and involvement, thus marginalising the public and devaluing their social experiences and diverse knowledges. This brief article questions what constitutes adequate public consultation, and suggests that consensus conferences or citizen juries (...) should be explored as a mechanism for meaningful public engagement for future public consultation exercises in Australia. (shrink)

This study considers one of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of second language vocabulary in children: The differentiation and sharpening of lexical representations. We propose that sharpening is triggered by an implicit comparison of similar representations, a process we call contrasting. We investigate whether integrating contrasting in a learning method in which children contrast orthographically and semantically similar L2 words facilitates learning of those words by sharpening their new lexical representations. In our study, 48 Dutch-speaking children learned unfamiliar orthographically (...) and semantically similar English words in a multiple-choice learning task. One half of the group learned the similar words by contrasting them, while the other half did not contrast them. Their word knowledge was measured immediately after learning as well as 1 week later. Contrasting was found to facilitate learning by leading to more precise lexical representations. However, only highly skilled readers benefitted from contrasting. Our findings offer novel insights into the development of L2 lexical representations from fuzzy to more precise, and have potential implications for education. (shrink)

Recent discussions concerning the ethics of nursing care have gained added impetus from articulations of die so‐called ‘ethic of carersquo; in moral philosophy. This paper addresses the question of recognizing and elaborating the ethics of nursing care by exploring the problems and the possibilities of diese intersecting discourses. In the first part of the paper it is argued that appropriation of ‘the ethic of care’ by nursing theorists as the central value of nursing, in contradistinction to other moral values such (...) as beneficence or justice, runs the risk of reinforcing the conventional approaches to ethics that ‘the ethic of care’ seeks to overturn. Central to ‘the ethic of care’ is the recognition that caring entails a focus on the particularities and context of the relationships in which it is expressed. Accordingly die application of a unitary concept of care to the context of nursing relations may seriously distort dieir diverse and complex‐specific ediical possibilities. The dynamic complexity of nursing ethics may be more adequately understood by working through an array of specific examples of nursing practice highlighting the differences and similarities between them and other ethical practices of care. Experience of a set of examples in this way will draw attention to the multiplicity, ambiguity, and particularity of the ethics of nursing while facilitating the ability to recognize how other practices may or may not be understood as examples of ediical nursing care. In the second part of the paper a beginning is made on this project by addressing the work of several different theorists of care who have examined different practices of nursing from the overlapping perspectives of nurses, patients and the socio‐historical construction of their relationships. (shrink)

In _Caring_, Peta Bowden extends and challenges recent debates on feminist ethics. She takes issue with accounts of the ethics of care that focus on alleged principles of caring rather than analysing caring in practice. Caring, Bowden argues, must be understood by 'working through examples'. Following this approach, Bowden explores four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. Her analysis of the differences and similarities in these practices - their varying degrees of intimacy and reciprocity, formality and informality, (...) vulnerability and choice - reveals the practical complexity of the ethics of care. _Caring_ recognizes that ethical practices constantly outrun the theories that attempt to explain them, and Bowden's unique approach provides major new insights into the nature of care without resorting to indiscriminate unitary models. It will be essential reading for all those interested in ethics, gender studies, nursing and the caring professions. (shrink)

The body conceived of as a machinic assemblage becomes a body that is multiple. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies. In this paper I draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore what happens to the drug using body when it is rethought as a machinic assemblage. Following an exploration of how the body of the drug user is put together and (...) stratified as a subject, and a careful manoeuvre through the bleak conception of the ‘drugged body’ provided by Deleuze and Guattari, I begin to map out some ethical alternatives. I argue that a body should, ultimately, be valued for what it can do (rather than what is essentially ‘is’), and that assemblages should be assessed in relation to their enabling, or blocking, of a body’s potential to become other. (shrink)

This article argues that political performance reveals the significance of the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood in relation to the censorship of democratic expression. Belarus Free Theatre performers spoke about fear as they gave personal accounts of imprisonment and undertook extreme physical action on aerial ropes, creating performances that evoked both emotionally felt responses and bodily affect. The aesthetic mood effect in these performances shifted from amusing audiences with the absurdity of political censorship to alarming them with the terror (...) of political persecution. Antonio Damasio points out that although aspects of the emotions merge in everyday life, ideas or impressions need to be separated out from the physiology of emotional feeling in their study. While the turn to affect emphasizes convergence and, importantly, recognizes human sensitivity to nonhuman energies, an impersonal energetic field can be distinguished from the personal and the psychological. This analysis of theatrical performance reveals the ways in which it presents social ideas of the emotions and aesthetic moods, as well as elicits the affect of bodily sensation and invites the emotionally felt responses of audience members. Theatrical performance offers a space for expressing emotions in political protest. (shrink)

Research exploring the needs of families of childhood cancer survivors is critical to improving the experiences of future families faced by this disease. However, there are numerous challenges in conducting research with this unique population, including a relatively high mortality rate. In recognition that research with cancer survivors is a relational activity, this article presents a series of cases of parents bereaved by childhood cancer who unintentionally received invitations to participate in survivorship research. We explore six ethical considerations, and compare (...) our experiences with that described previously. Our considerations include the sharing of confidential information with external parties to confirm past patients’ vital status and appropriate researcher responses to bereaved parents. The management of researchers’ emotional safety when working with illness populations and the fact that study invitations can elicit grief responses in non-bereaved families are discussed. To conclude, we argue for the benefits of inviting bereaved parents whose children died after treatment completion in survivorship research. Such parents’ early survivorship experiences will otherwise be systemically neglected. We argue that discussing complex cases can assist researchers to protect participants’ and researchers’ emotional well-being. We hope to contribute to the dearth of discussion about research operating procedures to address these issues. (shrink)

Retrospective rule-making has few supporters and many opponents. Defenders of retrospective laws generally do so on the basis that they are a necessary evil in specific or limited circumstances, for example to close tax loopholes, to deal with terrorists or to prosecute fallen tyrants. Yet the reality of retrospective rule making is far more widespread than this, and ranges from ’corrective’ legislation to ’interpretive regulations’ to judicial decision making. The search for a rational justification for retrospective rule-making necessitates a reconsideration (...) of the very nature of the rule of law and the kind of law that can rule, and will provide new insights into the nature of law and the parameters of societal order. This book examines the various ways in which laws may be seen as retrospective and analyses the problems in defining retrospectivity. In his analysis Dr Charles Sampford asserts that the definitive argument against retrospective rule-making is the expectation of individuals that, if their actions today are considered by a future court, the applicable law was discoverable at the time the action was performed. The book goes on to suggest that although the strength of this ’rule of law’ argument should prevail in general, exceptions are sometimes necessary, and that there may even be occasions when analysis of the rule of law may provide the foundation for the application of retrospective laws. (shrink)

Étude sur deux pensées philosophiques de l'existence qui furent influencées par le romantisme au milieu du XIXe siècle. L'auteur s'interroge sur la conception de l'homme que chacun des deux philosophes propose. D'après lui, leurs postulats sont parents par bien des aspects. L'existence est envisagée dans ses dimensions littéraires, philosophiques et religieuses.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

The question of the transcendent, that which operates above and beyond the material stuff of the world, remains an enduring one for feminism, bound up as it is with the foundations of feminism's corporeal politics and the definition of its political subject. With the specificity of the situated and meaningful body grounding feminist politics, the universal and neutral status of the speaking subject has been diagnosed as masculine, and unable to properly account for sexed differences. On this basis, political community, (...) collectivity forged along the lines of a common identity, is considered important in the realization of feminist political goals, yet is also problematic in view of its reliance upon a universal category of identity through which to motivate for political change. Acknowledging these tensions, this paper revisits Luce Irigaray's essay “Divine Women” to suggest that in her rethinking of the divine as a shared horizon through which women can potentially achieve autonomy, the nature of the transcendent, the universal, and the identity of the feminine are also reconfigured in surprising ways. In a specific address to the dilemma of political community, Irigaray makes available a notion of the divine that is already differently inhabited. (shrink)

Prior research on sustainability suggests that ambitious sustainability strategies are often turned into “business-as-usual” practices. Although ecological embeddedness—that is, actors’ physical and cognitive anchoring in their ecological environment—can help maintain sustainability ambitions, its collective dynamics and pluralistic moral foundations remain understudied. We rely on the economies of worth framework and the revelatory case of a biodynamic farm business experiencing sustained commercial growth to explore these blind spots by analyzing how ecological embeddedness was maintained despite this growth. We found that moral (...) threats moved the organization away from its initial sustainability commitment and demonstrated how the farm maintained its ecological embeddedness through three mechanisms that involved multiple moral foundations: nurturing ecological inspiration, networking green projects, and unifying a green ethos. By inducing such mechanisms of moral recombination, our analysis advances sustainability studies by clarifying and bridging individual and collective dynamics of ecological embeddedness while revealing their multiple moral foundations; we also extend economies of worth research by demonstrating the role of ecological materiality in the alignment of organizations with the green world. (shrink)

This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized (...) database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are currently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’’ toward exposure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing the contingencies, the framing, the reflexivity, and the politics embedded within them. Within this move, the study examines ways in which theories of performance and emergence have begun to influence the way that archives of different kinds are conceived and reflects on the role of Science and Technology Studies scholars in their construction. (shrink)

Recent work in clinical nursing ethics has been influenced by two main areas of insight associated with the challenge levelled by the women's movement to traditional thinking about morality and ethics. Broadly speaking these two realms have been distinguished as articulating ‘feminist’ socio‐political and ‘feminine’ ethic of care concerns. Often these two impulses are seen as pulling against each other, or worse, the ‘feminine’ emphasis on the ethics of care is seen as reinforcing the dynamics that elicit the ‘feminist’ concern. (...) In this paper I suggest how an expanded understanding of an ethic of care in clinical settings can provide resources for dealing with both concerns. A discussion of the way institutional relations can ride rough‐shod over the ‘feminist’ insights of ethical care, in the second part of the paper, provides evidence for my conclusion that ethical nursing care depends on recognizing that both areas of insight are imperative for its success. (shrink)

I define 'skim semantics' to be a Davidson-style truth-conditional semantics combined with a variety of deflationism about truth. The expressive role of truth in truth-conditional semantics precludes at least some kinds of skim semantics; thus I reject the idea that the challenge to skim semantics derives solely from Davidson's explanatory ambitions, and in particular from the 'truth doctrine', the view that the concept of truth plays a central explanatory role in Davidsonian theories of meaning for a language. The fate of (...) skim semantics is not determined by the fate of the truth doctrine, so rejecting the truth doctrine does not in itself open the way to skim semantics. I establish my thesis by showing that some recently proposed versions of skim semantics fail because of truth's expressive role. I also discuss the conditions that might permit skim semantics. (shrink)

Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those (...) pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data. (shrink)

Contrasting the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz, and Moira Gatens with the poststrueturalist philosophy of Judith Butler, this paper identifies a distinctive “Australian” feminism. It argues that while Butler remains trapped by the matter/representation binary, the Spinozist turn in Lloyd and Gatens, and Grosz's work on Bergson and Deleuze, are attempts to think corporeality.

This article analyses research that has explored the potential of a focus on indeterminate bodies for decision making, policy and politics. Drawing on different ways of conceptualising indeterminacy in scientific and policy domains it describes the Loweswater Care Project, a participatory ‘knowledge collective’ that attempted to avoid converting the complexities of vital cyanobacterial bodies into a purely social or managerial set of questions around water quality. Through a commitment to opening out the nature of ‘things’, participants in this collective honed (...) new questions and avenues of inquiry around cyanobacteria and its relations. The Loweswater Care Project was a kind of ‘open’ in Haraway’s sense, where questions and demands are put to bodies, and to the apparatus that allows us to sense them, in ways that do not shy away from the probabilistic character of entities and their relations. The implications of generating indeterminacies in this setting are explored for environmental decision making, policy and politics. (shrink)

I define ‘skim semantics’ to be a Davidson‐style truth‐conditional semantics combined with a variety of deflationism about truth. The expressive role of truth in truth‐conditional semantics precludes at least some kinds of skim semantics; thus I reject the idea that the challenge to skim semantics derives solely from Davidson's explanatory ambitions, and in particular from the ‘truth doctrine’, the view that the concept of truth plays a central explanatory role in Davidsonian theories of meaning for a language. The fate of (...) skim semantics is not determined by the fate of the truth doctrine, so rejecting the truth doctrine does not in itself open the way to skim semantics. I establish my thesis by showing that some recently proposed versions of skim semantics fail because of truth's expressive role. I also discuss the conditions that might permit skim semantics. (shrink)

This paper describes a method for analyzing a corpus of descriptions collected through micro-phenomenological interviews. This analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences which have been described, and in particular their diachronic structure, while unfolding generic experiential structures through an iterative approach. After summarizing the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview, and then describing the process of preparation of the verbatim, the article presents on the one hand, the principles and conceptual devices of the analysis method and on (...) the other hand several dimensions of the analysis process: the modes of structural unfolding of generic structures, the mutual guidance of the processes of structural and experiential unfolding, the tracking of analysis processes, and finally the assessment of analysis results. (shrink)

Most areas of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s thought have been explored, but his views on logic, mathematics, and semantics have been largely ignored. These essays offer an alternative to discussions of the philosophy of contemporary mathematics. The book covers areas of disagreement between Husserl and Gottlob Frege, the father of analytical philosophy, and explores new perspectives seen in their work.

Within a context of rapid growth and diversification in higher degree research programs, there is increasing pressure for the results of doctoral research to be made public. Doctoral students are now being encouraged to publish not only after completion of the doctorate, but also during, and even as part of their research program. For many this is a new and challenging feature of their experience of doctoral education. _Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond_ is a timely and informative collection (...) of practical and theorised examples of innovative pedagogies that encourage doctoral student publishing. The authors give detailed accounts of their own pedagogical practices so that others may build on their experiences, including: a program of doctoral degree by publication; mentoring strategies to support student publishing; innovations within existing programs, including embedded publication pedagogies; co-editing a special issue of a scholarly journal with students; ‘publication brokering’, and writing groups and writing retreats. With contributions from global leading experts, this vital new book: explores broader issues pertaining to journal publication and the impacts on scholarly research and writing practices for students, supervisors and the academic publishing community takes up particular pedagogical problems and strategies, including curriculum and supervisory responses arising from the ‘push to publish’ documents explicit experiences and practical strategies that foster writing-for-publication during doctoral candidature. _Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond_ explores the challenges and rewards of supporting doctoral publishing and provides new ways to increase research publication outputs in a pedagogically sound way. It will be a valued resource for supervisors and their doctoral students, as well as for program coordinators and managers, academic developers, learning advisors, and others involved in doctoral education. (shrink)

In this round table response, we discuss some of the problems inherent in insisting on specific consent for an activity that needs to happen rapidly as part of a package of care. The Human Tissue Authority consider that specific consent is mandatory to assess which antibiotics are appropriate on the neonatal unit, but this insistence may actually limit the autonomy which consent aims to promote. While genetic testing to determine which child will react adversely to particular antibiotics has been available (...) clinically for several years, the research proposed here is to assess whether improving the speed of testing allows decisions to be made before treatment starts. Insisting on specific consent before this activity can take place is likely to delay appropriate care in some cases. On admission to the neonatal unit, the unwell infant is routinely subjected to a range of investigations and treatments. A person with parental responsibility will usually be asked to provide consent to undertake treatments for children who do not have capacity to give consent themselves.1 For the acutely unwell child, consent will usually be sought for a package of care: the urgent nature of neonatal medicine often requires clinicians to make many decisions without explicit consent. Doctors must always act in a child’s best interests: their decisions need to protect the health and well-being of a child and hold the child’s welfare paramount in accordance with the Children Act and General Medical Council guidelines.1 2 Thus, for example, ventilation might be initiated, sedation provided, antibiotics commenced or diagnostic investigations requested without separate consent conversations or …. (shrink)

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. In (...) Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

: Contrasting the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz, and Moira Gatens with the poststructuralist philosophy of Judith Butler, this paper identifies a distinctive "Australian" feminism. It argues that while Butler remains trapped by the matter/representation binary, the Spinozist turn in Lloyd and Gatens, and Grosz's work on Bergson and Deleuze, are attempts to think corporeality.

Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance (...) to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged. (shrink)

This edited collection had its origins in a two-day conference held at the Tate Britain, organised collaboratively by research staff and students at Middlesex University and the London Consortium in order to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's famous book on the sublime. The conference was funded by Middlesex University, the London Consortium and the Tate Britain's AHRC-funded "Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language" research project. The conference set out to critically examine the legacy of the (...) sublime in contemporary art, culture and society and to assess the value and the dangers of this concept as it is articulated in current thought and practice. The book selected from and expanded on the papers delivered at the conference in order to pursue this goal further. It was broken into themed sections (each of which had an introduction), each exploring an different issue around contemporary uses of the sublime. The sections were: 1. Nature, Ecology and the Sublime; 2. The Sublime After Kant; 3. Capitalism, Terror, Art and the Sublime; 4. Baroque and Beyond: Art, Sex and the Sublime; 5. The Cinematic Sublime. The volume reflects the interdisiplinarity of the concept of the sublime today, and includes essays whose appraoches come from aesthetics and ethics, ecological and political thought, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, literary studies, art history and popular culture. It includes papers by internationally renowned authors from the UK, America and Europe alongside the new voices of younger academics. The contributors were: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Mark Bould (University of the West of England), Eu Jin Chua (London Consortium), Gudrun Filipska (Middlesex University), Cornelia Klinger (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna / University of Tübingen, Germany), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), William McDonald (Middlesex Univeristy), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), Claire Pajaczkowska (Royal College of Art), Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Gene Ray (Geneva University of Art and Design), Bettina Reiber (Central St. Martins), Jan Rosiek (University of Copenhagen), Sherryl Vint (Brock University, Canada), and Luke White (Middlesex University). (shrink)