Recent neuroscientific research has caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of the meaning and scope of compassion. Derived from the Latin root compassiō, compassion used to be a religious emotion that implied suffering with the perceived sufferer, whereas now it is examined as a psychological, neuroscientific, neurobiological, and thus natural, phenomenon. The newly arisen research interest in compassion led to the development of secular compassion training programs that follow closely in the footsteps of the “mindfulness revolution.” Whereas the latter (...) has been criticized for its reductionist appropriation of Buddhist thought by the capitalist west, in this paper, I demonstrate that the secularization of compassion is the result of innovative activities by representatives of the Buddhist traditions. I argue that some of the causes for the recent secularization and sciencization can be traced back into the fourteenth century Tibet, namely to the innovative exegetical activities of the scholars of the Tibetan Lojong tradition. I argue that from the perspective of the tradition, the sciencization of compassion resembles a deliberate purposeful “translation” effort that fits into the “two-track approach” of Buddhist propagation. (shrink)

The research aims to investigate the characteristics and risks associated with the handling of sensitive data in the implementation of public policies within the digital government model. To achieve this, a hypothetical-deductive method and bibliographic and documentary procedures are employed, proposing an interdisciplinary discussion on technological advancement, data protection, transparency, and public policies. The justification revolves around the importance of a comprehensive, cohesive system that genuinely protects sensitive personal data, considering the need to keep pace with technological developments and maintain (...) a minimum level of security in the digital age at both national and international levels. There is no doubt that the judicious and strategic use of data has the potential to drive substantial improvements in policy evaluation, decision-making, and the relationship between government and citizens. However, dealing with personal data also means addressing risks with responsibility, transparency, and respect for individual rights. (shrink)

This study examines the conflation of terms such as “knowledge” and “understanding” in peer-reviewed literature, and tests the hypothesis that little current research clearly distinguishes between importantly distinct epistemic states. Two sets of data are presented from papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. In the first set, the digital text analysis tool, Voyant, is used to analyze all papers published in 2014 for the use of epistemic success terms. In the second set of data, all papers published (...) in Public Understanding of Science from 2010–2015 are systematically analyzed to identify instances in which epistemic states are empirically measured. The results indicate that epistemic success terms are inconsistently defined, and that measurement of understanding, in particular, is rarely achieved in public understanding of science studies. We suggest that more diligent attention to measuring understanding, as opposed to mere knowledge, will increase efficacy of scientific outreach and communication efforts. (shrink)

Objective: To explore the strategies that can help individuals mourning a family member’s death from Covid-19 to cope with the loss. Method: We carried out a narrative review on the PubCovid-19 platform using the descriptors “death,” “mourning,” “Covid-19,” and “coping strategies.” Ten articles were included. Results: The strategies found are phone calls, audio recording, letters, and photos, classified as immediate and long-term. These strategies are focused on mental health, which can be adversely affected by depression and psychological disorders. Conclusions: Creating (...) counseling programs for the relatives of those who died from Covid-19 is urgent. They must offer comprehensive, humanized, and continuous mental health care. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 713, August 2012.

Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering is a superlative collection of essays that does what too few scholarly works have dared: it takes seriously the philosophical significance of women’s lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the often restrictive beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Thus the concerns of this anthology are relevant to all women and central to any philosophical project that takes women’s lives seriously. In (...) this volume 16 authors- including both established feminists and some of today’s most innovative new scholars- engage in sustained reflection on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed. Many of the topics in this collection, though familiar, are here taken up in a new way: contributors think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform despite psycho-sexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of conventional philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women’s experience. The volume is diverse both in its content and in its scholarly approach; certain of the essays are informed by their authors’ own experiences, others draw from extant narratives; many engage such canonical thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while others draw from the works of contemporary feminists including Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Virginia Held, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All readers, regardless of their philosophical training and commitments, will find much to appreciate in this volume. (shrink)

Domestic abuse is a worldwide public health issue with long‐term health and social consequences. Nurses play a key role in recognizing and responding to domestic abuse. Yet there is considerable evidence that their responses are often inappropriate and unhelpful, such as trivializing or ignoring the abuse. Empirical studies have identified several reasons why nurses' responses are sometimes wanting. These include organizational constraints, e.g. lack of time and privacy; and interpersonal factors such as fear of offending women and lack of confidence. (...) We propose, however, that these factors present only a partial explanation. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, we suggest that alternative understandings may be derived through applying the concept of abjection. Abjection is a psychological defence against any threat (the abject) to the clean and proper self that results in rejection of the abject. Using examples from our own domestic abuse research, we contend that exposure of nurses to the horror of domestic abuse evokes a state of abjection. Domestic abuse (the abject) transgresses established social boundaries of clean and proper. Thus when exposed to patients' and clients' experiences of it, some nurses subconsciously reject domestic abuse as a possibility (abjection). They do this to protect themselves from the horror of the act, but in so doing, render themselves unable to formulate appropriate responses. Rather than understanding the practice of some nurses as wilfully neglectful or ignorant, we argue that through a state of abjection, they are powerless to act. This does not refute existing evidence about nurses' responses to domestic abuse. Rather, as a relatively unknown concept in nursing, abjection provides an additional explanatory layer that accounts for why some nurses respond the way they do. Crucially, it elucidates the need for nurses to be supported emotionally when faced with the transgressive practice of abuse. (shrink)

Study of Hans-Georg Gadamer's and Julius Stenzel's interpretations of Plato.

There is long standing agreement both among philosophers and linguists that the term ‘counterfactual conditional’ is misleading if not a misnomer. Speakers of both non-past subjunctive (or ‘would’) conditionals and past subjunctive (or ‘would have’) conditionals need not convey counterfactuality. The relationship between the conditionals in question and the counterfactuality of their antecedents is thus not one of presupposing. It is one of conversationally implicating. This paper provides a thorough examination of the arguments against the presupposition view as applied to (...) past subjunctive conditionals and finds none of them conclusive. All the relevant linguistic data, it is shown, are compatible with the assumption that past subjunctive conditionals presuppose the falsity of their antecedents. This finding is not only interesting on its own. It is of vital importance both to whether we should consider antecedent counterfactuality to be part of the conventional meaning of the conditionals in question and to whether there is a deep difference between indicative and subjective conditionals. (shrink)

Evolutionary accounts of the origin of human morality may be speculative to some extent, but they contain some very plausible claims, such as the claim that ethics evolved as a response to the demands of group living. Regarding the phenomenon of moral progress, it has been argued both that it is ruled out by an evolutionary approach, and that it can be explained by it. It has even been claimed that an evolutionary account has the potential to advance progress in (...) the moral domain. This paper explores the complex relationship between evolutionary explanations of morality and the possibility of moral progress. It seeks to answer the question as to what these explanations are able to tell us about the possibility of moral progress and the ways in which such progress can be achieved. It is argued that evolutionary explanations can inform moral education and other forms of moral enhancement, and that increased evolutionary knowledge figures among the changes in the circumstances of morality that can lead to moral progress. Evolutionary explanations can show us certain limits to the possibility for humans of progressing morally as well as certain enabling conditions. It is argued that both aspects – enhancement and changes in the circumstances – are equally important for the achievement of moral progress. This is illustrated by means of two examples of areas in which moral progress seems possible: our relationship towards the distant poor and our relationship towards non-human animals. (shrink)

According to a major trend in Hegel scholarship, Hegel advocates a McDowell-style transformativist conception of the human mind. Central to this conception is a methodological dualism, according to which phenomena belonging to the rational mind, in contrast to those belonging to non-rational nature, must be accounted for from within the ‘space of reasons.’ In this paper I argue, by contrast, that Hegel rejects methodological dualism. For Hegel, a constitutive aspect of the rational mind is the activity of expression. I show (...) how Hegel’s philosophy of mind adequately accounts for low-level forms of expressivity without appealing to capacities connected to conceptual thought and judgment, and that he does so by drawing on methods similar to those employed within the empirical sciences of his time. Thus, for Hegel, the sphere of the rational mind is broader than the McDowellian space of reasons. (shrink)

In this book I look at the tradition of eudaimonistic ethics which stems from Aristotle's treatment of ethics, and which takes distinct, though related forms in Epicurus, the Stoics and the Sceptics. I look at this tradition from different points of view: how is it related to human nature, how does it account for other-related virtue and action, and how much does it require in terms of revising previously held priorities. I discuss the methodology of discussing ancient texts in ways (...) that relate them to contemporary concerns, particularly the importance of respecting the texts and avoiding anachronism. (shrink)

Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail (...) to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data. (shrink)

This paper investigates the norm of presupposition, as one pervasive type of indirect speech act. It argues against the view that sees presuppositions as an indirect counterpart of the direct speech act of assertion and proposes instead that they are much more similar to the direct speech act of assumption. More concretely, it suggests that the norm that governs presuppositions is not an epistemic or doxastic attitude such as knowledge, justified belief, or mere belief; it's a practical attitude, most plausibly (...) the attitude of rational acceptance. This view has important ramifications well beyond debates in philosophy of language and linguistics. It affects not only our view of which speech act sequences are fine and which are off; it bears on whether presuppositions can function as testimony, whether they can be lies, and whether they are ontologically committal, thus addressing central topics in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Many people follow Grice in thinking that all conversational implicatures are cancellable. And often enough, they use this insight as a test for conversational implicatures. If you want to find out whether something is a conversational implicature, the test has it, you should ask yourself whether the thing in question is cancellable; if you find that it is not cancellable, you can infer that it is not a conversational implicature. If you find that it is cancellable, you can infer that (...) it might well be a conversational implicature and that you should now do further testing. Various philosophers and linguists have questioned the test however. Some have held that Grice's cancellability claim is subject to counterexamples and that the test is not reliable. Others have argued that even though Grice's claim can be defended against the examples in question, the test is not as informative as people have hoped. This article provides an overview of the recent discussion on the cancellability test and suggests a way forward. (shrink)

People disagree frequently, about both objective and subjective matters. But while at least one party must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? In recent years, a number of philosophers and linguists have argued that we must (...) become relativists about truth to understand faultless disagreements. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a more standard semantics with a novel pragmatic theory to develop a superior approach. The book discusses both classic and recent literature in philosophy and linguistics. It provides a general introduction to the debate about the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions, as well as an original contribution to the contemporary discussion. (shrink)

Some expressions, such as ‘generous’ and ‘stingy’, are used not only to describe the world around us. They are also used to evaluate the things to which they are applied. In this paper, I suggest a novel account of how this evaluation is conveyed—the conventional triggering view. It partly agrees and partly disagrees with both the standard semantic view and its popular pragmatic contender. Like the former and unlike the latter, my view has it that the evaluation is conveyed due (...) to the conventional meaning of the sentences in question. Unlike the former and much like the latter, my view suggests that the evaluation is a secondary rather than a primary content. (shrink)

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. It shows that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-a-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. It furthers investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really (...) prompts an inward turn, as some interpreters have suggested. (shrink)

Viewing animals as a disposable resource is by no means novel, but does milking the cow for all its worth now represent a previously unimaginable level of exploitation? New technology has intensified milk production fourfold over the last 50 years, rendering the cow vulnerable to various and frequent clinical interventions deemed necessary to meet the demands for dairy products. A major question is whether or not the veterinary code of practice fits, or is in ethical tension, with the administration of (...) ‘efficient’ techniques, such as artificial insemination, to enhance reproduction levels among cattle? Vets perform these interventions and their ‘success’ is measured by the maximisation of milk production, requiring perpetually pregnant cows. Our empirical research on 33 farm vets explores how their professional ethical code promising to protect the welfare of the animal ‘above all else’, is increasingly in conflict with, and subordinate to, the financial demands of clients. Since vets cannot stand outside of the productive power–knowledge relations that have intensified the consumption of animal bodily parts and secretions, we argue that a process of adiaphorization’ occurs, whereby humans become morally indifferent to cruel practices deemed necessary to our consumerist ways of life. However, this indifference reflects and reinforces a taken-for-granted anthropocentrism among vets, animal owners and the population generally. We suggest that posthumanist ideas may offer new insights for the study of human–animal relations in organisations that transcend the coercive and negative impact of discourses that deny any alternative to prevailing farm/veterinary practices. Our study has major implications in relation to climate warming and zoonotic diseases, both partly derived from our unethical relationship to animals, that are increasingly threatening our, and their, lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 : 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings (...) under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out. (shrink)

Among the available metaethical views, it would seem that moral realism—in particular moral naturalism—must explain the possibility of moral progress. We see this in the oft-used argument from disagreement against various moral realist views. My suggestion in this paper is that, surprisingly, metaethical constructivism has at least as pressing a need to explain moral progress. I take moral progress to be, minimally, the opportunity to access and to act in light of moral facts of the matter, whether they are mind-independent (...) or -dependent. For the metaethical constructivist, however, I add that moral progress ought also mean that agents come to be or could come to be motivated to act in light of the right kind of moral judgments. Together I take this to mean that, for all forms of constructivism, moral progress must be explained as a form of moral improvement, or agents aspiring to be better sorts of moral agents. In what moral improvement consists differs for various forms of constructivism. Here I distinguish between three different versions of metaethical constructivism: Humean constructivists as represented by Street, Kantian constitutivist constructivists as represented by Korsgaard, and constructivists about practical reason as represented by Carla Bagnoli. I conclude by showing that only constructivism as a view about practical reason can fully account for moral progress qua the opportunity for moral improvement. (shrink)

The book deepens our understanding of Arendt's conception of the role of violence in her political theory. But it also uses her work as a provocation to think about how we might engage with, build on, or criticize contemporary ideas of the political that have drawn on Arendtian themes-notably via the notion of "agonal" or "agonistic" politics as theorized in recent years by thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig-and how we can read Arendt in different ways to challenge (...) or further our understanding of the political. (shrink)

Many scholars of gender and migration assume that migration increases women’s household bargaining power, but this article argues that migration recreates and relies on patriarchal expectations that women return to household domestic labor. It draws on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with migrant factory women in China’s export processing zones as well as one migrant-sending community in China. Based on this fieldwork, I argue that despite young women’s desires to continue migrating for factory jobs, older generations perpetuate gendered views of (...) female migration as licentious and risky, in opposition to a dominant paradigm of proper femininity that relegates young women to household labor. They do this because migration creates an intergenerational dependence in migrant origin sites. Older women, unemployable in factories and deprived of state welfare support at home, rely on wage remittances from high-earning migrant sons and sons-in-law for subsistence. To ensure they receive remittances, they encourage daughters to marry higher-earning migrant men, then pressure these daughters to cease migrating in order to perform household domestic labor in support of migrant husbands. This finding reflects constraints on the opportunities that migration delivers to women: Not all women can migrate, and those who cannot must vie for control over migrant remittances. (shrink)

One of the best places to seek understanding of happiness is the study of ancient ethical theories and of those modern theories which share their eudaimonist concerns. For these recognize, and build on, some of our thoughts about happiness that have become overwhelmed by the kind of consideration that emerges in the claim that happiness is obviously subjective. Given the systematically disappointing results of the database approach, it is time to look seriously at our alternatives.

We provide an account of chimpanzee-specific agency within the context of philosophy of action. We do so by showing that chimpanzees are capable of what we call reason-directed action, even though they may be incapable of more full-blown action, which we call reason-considered action. Although chimpanzee agency does not possess all the features of typical adult human agency, chimpanzee agency is evolutionarily responsive to their environment and overlaps considerably with our own. As such, it is an evolved set of capacities (...) for goal-directed behavior, which solves problems that chimpanzees naturally encounter. Thus, it ought not be understood as a deficient instance of human agency. (shrink)

The concept of imagination is notoriously ambiguous. Thus one must be cautious not to use ‘imagination’ as a placeholder for diverse phenomena and processes that perhaps have not much more in common than that they are difficult to assign to some other, better defined domain, such as perception, conceptual thought, or artistic production. However, this challenge also comes with great opportunities: the fecundity and openness of ‘imagination’ appeal to researchers from different disciplines with different approaches and questions, and it draws (...) together fields of enquiry that are initially considered far apart. Hence, arguably, the field of imagination is particularly poised for interdisciplinary enquiry. In the section on Imagination in Interdisciplinary Research, I will talk about some of the issues that have already entered that field of interdisciplinary inquiry. (shrink)

The question ‘Why care about being an agent?’ asks for reasons to be something that appears to be non-optional. But perhaps it is closer to the question ‘Why be moral?’; or so I shall argue. Here the constitutivist answer—that we cannot help but have this aim—seems to be the best answer available. I suggest that, regardless of whether constitutivism is true, it is an incomplete answer. I argue that we should instead answer the question by looking at our evaluative commitments (...) to the exercise of our other capacities for which being a full-blown agent is a necessary condition. Thus, the only kind of reason available is hypothetical rather than categorical. The status of this reason may seem to undermine the importance of this answer. I show, however, that it both achieves much of what we want when we cite categorical reasons and highlights why agency is valuable. (shrink)

I consider an underappreciated problem for proponents of the Humean theory of motivation. Namely, it is unclear whether is it to be understood as a largely psychological or largely metaphysical theory. I show that the psychological interpretation of HTM will need to be modified in order to be a tenable view and, as it will turn out, the modifications required render it virtually philosophically empty. I then argue that the largely metaphysical interpretation is the only a plausible interpretation of HTM's (...) central claim that desires are necessary conditions for motivation. This interpretation also fits better with the important roles that HTM plays in both moral psychological and metaethical debates. (shrink)

Most views of agency take acting for reasons (whether explanatory or justifying) to be an important hallmark of the capacity for agency. The problem, however, is that the standard analysis of what it is to act in light of reasons is not sufficiently fine grained to accommodate what we will argue are the myriad types of ways that agents can do so. We suggest that a full account of acting for reasons must also recognize the relationship that agents have with (...) their reasons. We focus on two types of relationships. The first is the traditional case, where agents act in light of reasons that they take to be their own and that they endorse. We describe this as possessing an Endorsement Relationship with one's reasons. A second way of relating to reasons is what we will describe as possessing a Directed Relationship with one's reasons. This includes cases in which agents' actions are the product of reasons but toward which agents do not have an Endorsement Relationship. The Endorsement Relationship is uncontroversial. In this paper, we defend the existence and importance of the Directed Relationship. We show that it is a genuine but overlooked way of relating to, and thereby acting for, reasons. (shrink)

This paper argues that the vitalist monisms of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish. Even though Conway is often cited as a proponent of a thoroughgoing ‘spiritualist’ ontology and Cavendish as the advocate of a similarly thoroughgoing materialism, their views turn out to be much closer than they may initially seem. Apart from highlighting the more radical nature of Conway’s position, such a reframing also has the added advantage of bringing the similarities between her own ‘spiritual’ monism and the vitalist ‘materialisms’ (...) of her time into sharper relief. As F. Wunderlich emphasizes, the notion of subtle matter pervaded the natural sciences of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Cavendish’s ‘materialism’ and compares it to Conway’s view of created substance, drawing out a number of relevant similarities. It asks what may have motivated Conway and Cavendish to move beyond the materialism-immaterialism divide by ‘spiritualizing’ matter in this way. (shrink)

Special Issue, n. I, ch. 1, On the Transcendental.

It is generally agreed that there are two kinds of indicative conditionals that do not contain conditional 'then.' There are hypothetical conditionals such as 'If Mary has done the groceries, there is beer in the fridge' and there are biscuit conditionals such as 'If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge.' There is also broad consensus that we cannot find an analogous distinction between hypothetical and biscuit conditionals within indicative conditionals that do feature 'then.' Conditionals containing 'then,' it (...) is assumed, are uniformly read as hypothetical conditionals. In this article, I shall argue that there are biscuit conditionals featuring 'then.' This result, I take it, is not only interesting on its own. It also puts pressure on the popular view that conditional 'then' triggers the presupposition that in some situations in which the conditional's antecedent is not true, its consequent is not true either. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Quan Zhou Wu and Linaje’s GenealogyJulia Haeyoon Chang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuENJOY (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuUNA DE ELLAS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan ZhouWu Digital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 6] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuMEMORIAS RETORCIDAS(Linaje (...) 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,NEGATIVOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuELLAS Y YO (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 49] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,STATEMENT (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuLAS ARTISTAS QUE NO FUIMOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 75]Quan Zhou Wu’s followers will surely be struck—as I was—by the multisensory digital exhibit “Linaje” (“Lineage”), which was published in 2024 and departs, perhaps unexpectedly, from the artist’s previous well-established oeuvre. Before delving into the work in question, it may be fruitful first to have a glimpse at the artist’s iconic aesthetic. In 2015, and at the age of twenty-seven, Wu, a self-taught artist, debuted her first graphic memoir, Gazpacho Agridulce. The book commences with her parents’ newfound life in Spain after leaving Qingtian, a province of Zhejiang, China, to run a restaurant in Algeciras, a municipality of Cadiz. The opening pages of Gazpacho pack a punch, depicting Wu’s dramatic and untimely birth in a taxicab en route to the hospital.Gazpacho’s publication initiated a crucial sea change in the predominantly white Spanish publishing world, which would soon after be rocked by a boom of racialized1 authors penning anti-racist memoirs and other works of non-fiction.2 Gazpacho would also eventually become the first of the author’s trilogy of graphic memoirs, which was completed by the sequels Andaluchinas por el mundo (2017) and the most recent La agridolce vita (2023).Wu’s narratives capture the familial, identarian, and social conflicts that erupt from cultural disloyalties and racism—direct consequences of migration. She and her sisters, for example, loathe their family’s rigid Chinese and Christian mores and long for the cultural markers of an ordinary Spanish childhood, structured of course by U.S. global consumer culture, e.g. Barbie, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s.An illustrator, cartoonist, and podcaster, Wu’s talent as a storyteller lies in her complex use of humor. With great care for her subject and her reader, Wu deploys humor to tend to the uncouth, raw, and ugly parts of life. In so doing, the author invites us to laugh and ultimately reckon with our own discomfort as we with sit with the heaviness of racism, sexism, and post-migration melancholy—using humor as a salve.At her best, Wu serves irreverence, rawness, and wit. To be immersed in her books is to rub up against the rough-hewn emotions that bring her characters to life. The vibrancy of her palette and the whimsy of her pen strokes are inviting, animated, and deceptively light-hearted. In an instant, lines and pigment rearrange into abstractions dense with affect. Fiery hollowed eyes, a gaping mouth, and flushed skin burn through the frame—making the volcanic rage of a migrant mother immediately palpable. It’s so emotive, it practically singes your skin. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Cover of Wu’s first graphic memoir Gazpacho agridulce: Una autobiografía china-andaluza[End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Excerpt from Gazpacho agridulce (courtesy of the artist)[End Page 103]While... (shrink)

In multi‐stakeholder networks, actors from civil society, business and governmental institutions come together in order to find a common solution to a problem that affects all of them. Problems approached by such networks often affect people across national boundaries, tend to be very complex and are not sufficiently understood. In multi‐stakeholder networks, information concerning a problem is gathered from different sources, learning takes place, conflicts between participants are addressed and cooperation is sought. Corporations are key actors in many networks, because (...) the problems addressed are frequently related to business activities. The aim of this article is to conceptualise multi‐stakeholder networks by proposing a problem‐centred stakeholder definition. From an analysis of several case studies, a life cycle model is deduced that distinguishes seven phases: initiation, acquaintance, first and second agreement, implementation, consolidation and institutionalisation. (shrink)