The National Institutes of Health and other federal health agencies are considering establishing a national biobank to study the roles of genes and environment in human health. A preliminary public engagement study was conducted to assess public attitudes and concerns about the proposed biobank, including the expectations for return of individual research results. A total of 141 adults of different ages, incomes, genders, ethnicities, and races participated in 16 focus groups in six locations across the country. Focus group participants voiced (...) a strong desire to be able to access individual research results. Recognizing the wide range of possible research results from a large cohort study, they repeatedly and spontaneously suggested that cohort study participants be given ongoing choices as to which results they received. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have long argued that the pregnant body is erased – both literally and discursively – from mainstream foetal representations. Janemaree Maher argues that the placenta, as point of distinction and connection between pregnant women and foetuses, has the radical potential to refigure understandings of pregnant embodiment and subjectivity, and offer ‘a way to begin thinking through the impasse of pregnant representation’. Drawing on Maher's notion of the ‘placental body’, this article will examine the place of the placenta in (...) the practice of non-diagnostic 4D ultrasound scanning. The analysis seeks to connect Maher's theoretical perspective, and the rich feminist literature around foetal imaging, with observational data from my study of 4D scans. I will argue that the capacity of 3- and 4D sonography to image the placenta and umbilical cord in a way that is newly intelligible to lay viewers might present an opportunity for thinking differently about the interconnections – material and social – between pregnant women and foetuses and to relocate women as the subjects of their pregnancies. (shrink)

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ seminal 1969 work, On Death and Dying, opened the door to understanding individuals’ emotional experiences with serious illness and dying. Patient’s emotions, however, are on...

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

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain—a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in (...) two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege. (shrink)

In March of 2012, following a robust activist campaign, Arysta LifeScience withdrew the soil fumigant methyl iodide from the US market, just a little over a year after it had finally been registered for use in California. As a major part of the campaign against registration of the chemical, over 53,000 people, ostensibly acting as citizens rather than consumers, wrote public comments contesting the use of the chemical for its high toxicity. Although these comments had marginal impact on the outcome (...) of the case, these comments are of interest for what they say about public action at a time when efforts to address food and agricultural issues have been dominated by “voting with your fork.” Based on a qualitative textual analysis of approximately 3500 representative comments made available to us, we show that many of those taking action did not abandon consumer subjectivities associated with neoliberal governmentality. By threatening “personal boycotts,” some were acting in their capacity as individual consumers; in invoking their own and their children’s health many more were also acting on behalf of consumers, despite that the chemical in question is applied before strawberries are planted and thus leaves no residues. The emphasis that letter writers gave to their own bodies reinforces the idea that some bodies count more than others and thus reveals a biopolitical sorting. Having consumer lives matter is consequential in light of evidence that consumer concern about pesticides has historically led to formulations and regulations more protective of consumers than workers and neighbors. (shrink)

Must a society aim indefinitely for continued economic growth? Proponents of economic growth advance three central challenges to the idea that a society, having attained high levels of income and wealth, may justly cease to pursue further economic growth: if environmentally sustainable and the gains fairly distributed, first, continued economic growth could make everyone within a society and globally, and especially the worst off, progressively better off; second, the pursuit of economic growth spurs ongoing innovation, which enhances people’s opportunities and (...) protects a society against future risks; and third, continued economic growth fosters attitudes of openness, tolerance, and generosity, which are essential to the functioning of a liberal democratic society. This article grants these challenges’ normative foundations, to show that, even if one accepts their underlying premises as requirements of justice, a society may still justly cease to aim for economic growth, so long as it continues to aim for and realize gains on other dimensions. I argue that, while continued economic growth might instrumentally serve valuable ends, it is not necessary for their realization, as a society can achieve these ends through other means. (shrink)

Since the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, classrooms in the U.S. have experienced a steady decline in the amount of time teachers spend on social studies, with the elementary grades suffering the highest level of decline. There is currently a need to understand how teachers perceive the problem of insufficient social studies instruction time and gain their perceptions of curriculum integration as a solution. The purpose of the qualitative case study was to explore how 14 (...) elementary social studies teachers in Grades 3 to 5 integrate social studies throughout the curriculum. In addition, another aim was to evaluate the outcomes of employing an integrated social studies curriculum on teaching civic competence to students. This qualitative case study included interviews and focus group discussions; data were then analyzed using a thematic analysis. It was discovered that teachers believed that by increasing instructional time for social studies, students’ understanding of the subject and its concepts should also increase; however, the key disadvantage was the need to have adequate time and planning to integrate the subject. The interviewed teachers shared that the best method of integration is by incorporating social studies concepts in classroom projects and activities. From the results, it is then recommended for the integrated curriculum theory to be strongly considered by the key educational decisions makers in the country. The results can help the schools determine how to best increase social studies instructional time, improve quality of social studies education, and the positive effects of instilling civic competence among their students. (shrink)

Approaches to self‐management traditionally focus upon individual capacity to make behavioural change. In this paper, we use Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital to demonstrate the impact of structural inequalities upon chronic illness self‐management through exploring findings from 28 semi‐structured interviews conducted with people from a lower socioeconomic region of Adelaide, South Australia who have type 2 diabetes. The data suggests that access to capital is a significant barrier to type 2 diabetes self‐management. While many participants described having sufficient cultural (...) capital to access and assess health information, they often lacked economic capital and social capital in the form of support networks who promote health. Participants were often involved in social networks in which activities which are contrary to self‐management have symbolic value. As a consequence, they entered relationships with health professionals at a disadvantage. We conclude that structural barriers to self‐management arising from habitus resulting in the performance of health behaviours rooted in cultural and class background and limited access to capital in the form of economic resources, social networks, health knowledge and prestige may have a negative impact on capacity for type 2 diabetes self‐management. (shrink)

Individuals often face administrative hurdles in attempting to access health care, public programmes, and other legal statuses and entitlements. These ordeals are the products, directly or indirectly, of institutional and policy design choices. I argue that evaluating whether such ordeals are justifiable or desirable instruments of social policy depends on assessing, beyond their targeting effects, the process-related burdens they impose on those attempting to navigate them and these burdens’ distributive effects. I here examine specifically how ordeals that levy time costs (...) reduce and constrain individuals’ free time, and how such time-cost ordeals may thereby create, deepen and compound disadvantages. (shrink)

This volume consists of twelve essays, mostly newly published, on a variety of topics in Aristotelian scholarship ranging from the theoretical to the practical and productive parts of the corpus. The volume divides the papers into one group addressing topics in Aristotle's metaphysics, physics, epistemology, biology, and logic on one hand, and his ethics, politics, poetics, and rhetoric on the other. The contributors include established scholars in ancient philosophy, such as Cynthia Freeland, Deborah Modrak, Martha Nussbaum, and Charlotte Witt, and (...) younger scholars such as Angela Curran, as well as those in disciplines outside ancient philosophy, including literature, law, and political science. The latter group of essays includes a chapter by Luce Irigaray on Book IV of Aristotle's Physics from her work, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), Freeland's interpretation of Irigaray's essay, as well as papers on Aristotelian political emotion, the historiography of Aristotle's rhetoric, and his political anthropology from Texas Law Review (1992). The very range of methodological perspective that lends breadth to the volume presents difficulties for an overview, in light of which four papers were selected for detailed comment, those on Aristotle's logic, Freeland's essay on Irigaray's reading of Physics IV, Aristotelian virtue ethics, and Aristotelian political emotion. (shrink)

A partir d’une enquête empirique auprès de « soixante-huitards », cet article revisite la question des générations politiques sous l’angle du genre. Le genre s’avère en effet essentiel pour appréhender les effets différenciés qu’ont pu avoir les événements de Mai-Juin 68 sur les trajectoires des enquêtés. En partant du constat que les femmes sont significativement plus nombreuses que leurs homologues masculins à revendiquer le sentiment d’appartenir à une « génération de 68 », l’article rend compte de l’influence du genre sur (...) les formes de politisation postérieures à Mai 68 et sur les incidences personnelles et quotidiennes (remise en cause des normes de genre dans la vie quotidienne) du militantisme en Mai 68. (shrink)

Lieve Spaas _The Francophone Film: A Struggle for Identity_ Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press/St Martins Press, 2000 ISBN 0-7190-5861-9 xiii + 290 pp.

The Quietist affair at the end of the seventeenth century has much to teach us about theories of the will in the period. Although Bossuet and Fénelon are the names most famously associated with the debate over the Quietist conception of pure love, Malebranche and his erstwhile disciple Lamy were the ones who debated the deep philosophical issues involved. This paper sets the historical context of the debate, discusses the positions as well as the arguments for and against them, and (...) opens up investigation of important material that is all but ignored in the English literature and only incompletely addressed in the French. (shrink)

Phosphotyrosine phosphatases (PTPases) are the enzymes which remove phosphate groups from protein tyrosine residues. An enormous number of phosphatases have been cloned and sequenced during the past decade, many of which are expressed in haematopoietic cells. This review focuses on the biochemistry and cell biology of three phosphatases, the transmembrane CD45 and the cytosolic SH2‐domain‐containing PTPases SHP‐1 and SHP‐2, to illustrate the diverse ways in which PTPases regulate receptor signal transduction. The involvement of these and other PTPases has been demonstrated (...) in haematopoietic cell development, apoptosis, activation and non‐responsiveness. A common theme in the actions of many haematopoietic cell PTPases is the way in which they modulate the thresholds for receptor signalling, thereby regulating critical events in the positive and negative selection of lymphocytes. There is growing interest in haematopoietic PTPases and their associated regulatory proteins as targets for pharmaceutical intervention and in the involvement of these enzymes in human disease. (shrink)

S’inscrivant dans une histoire du genre florissante de l’Italie pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, comme en témoignent notamment les travaux d’Anna Bravo, Anna Maria Bruzzone, Dianale Gaglinai ou encore de Gabriella Gribaudi, l’ouvrage de Michela Ponzani, issu d’une thèse de doctorat, étudie les mémoires féminines de la guerre et leurs écarts par rapport à la « mémoire nationale ». En rendant compte des expériences variées vécues par les femmes entre 1940 et 1945, l’auteure s’attache à démon...

Richesse et complexité d’une pensée intégrative mais non réductionniste Dans l’introduction de cet ouvrage, Marie Gaille met en lumière la dimension plurielle du parcours de Cabanis, « formé à la médecine et engagé dans l’histoire politique de son temps, […] auteur d’une réflexion sur les institutions de soin, les prisons et les hôpitaux autant que d’écrits épistémologiques et relatifs à l’enseignement de la médecine ». Cette pluralité d’approches, de thématiques de réflexion et de domaines d...

Nous proposons dans cette contribution une lecture spinoziste de la recommandation de bonne pratique « Voir la personne derrière la pathologie ». Il nous a semblé intéressant, en effet, de nous poser la question suivante : lorsqu’on recommande de prendre soin de la personne qu’est le patient derrière l’organe malade, qu’est-ce que cela implique, d’un point de vue anthropologique et psychologique, pour la personne qu’est le soignant? Est-ce que cela ne risque pas d’être vécu comme une mise en danger personnelle, (...) pour celui qui est au contact de situations dramatiques au quotidien de sa pratique professionnelle? Ces questionnements nous invitent à suivre deux pistes réflexives. Premièrement, penser une nouvelle anthropologie éthique de la relation de soins, par-delà les grands principes désincarnés de la bioéthique. Deuxièmement, redonner une place au corps organique et affectif du soignant dans la relation de soins, ainsi qu’à ce que ce dernier sent de la situation au-delà ou aux côtés de l’imagerie et des analyses médicales. Ces pistes réflexives ont elles-mêmes donné lieu à des expérimentations pratiques : proposer aux soignants de faire l’expérience d’autres manières d’être affectés, et leur proposer de contribuer activement à une réflexion éthique participative sur leur pratique. Cela implique en retour de sortir de l’immédiateté des effets attendus, et d’inscrire l’éthique en santé dans une temporalité longue, dans un devenir sans cesse réalimenté. (shrink)

Research consistently shows the typical farmers market shopper is a white, affluent, well-educated woman. While some research to date examining farmers markets discusses the exclusionary aspects of farmers markets, little has expounded on this portrait of the typical shopper. As a result of this neglect, the potential of farmers markets to be an inclusive, sustainable development tool remains hindered. This study seeks to better understand this typical shopper by drawing upon anti-consumerism literature to examine the motivations of these shoppers. Findings (...) from a survey of 390 shoppers in a predominately Hispanic community are discussed. Results from the survey indicate that even in a community in which white, non-Hispanics are the minority, the farmers market shopper is likely to be a white, non-Hispanic female who is more affluent and well educated than the average community member. Theoretical implications and suggestions for those working in community development are discussed. Suggestions for future research are also provided. (shrink)

Professional directives are unwavering: educational intimate exams should only ever occur with patients’ explicit consent. This article describes the current clinical, educational, and ethical landscape of educational pelvic examinations under anesthesia, underscores the imperative that these exams only ever occur with patients’ explicit consent, and offers accessible modifications to students’ involvement in these exams.

In the UK, higher education and health care providers share responsibility for educating the workforce. The challenges facing health practice also face health education and as educators we are implicated, by the way we design curricula and through students’ experiences and their stories.

The mechanisms by which bacteria adapt to changes in their environment involve transcriptional regulation in which a transcriptional regulator responds to signal(s) from the environment and regulates (positively or negatively) the expression of several genes or operons. Some of these regulators exert a positive feedback on their own expression. This is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for the occurrence of multistationarity. One biological consequence of multistationarity may be epigenetic modifications, a hypothesis unusual to microbiologists, in spite of some well-known (...) epigenetic modifications in bacteria. We propose here that the occurrence of mucoidy in the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is currently attributed to mutations only, may also be an epigenetic modification. A theoretical approach using a generalised logical analysis lends credit to this hypothesis and suggests experiments to ascertain it. (shrink)

There is a long history of women being underrepresented in biomedical and health research. Specific women’s health needs have been, and in some cases still are, comparatively neglected areas of study. Concerns about the health and social impacts of such bias and exclusion have resulted in inclusion policies from governments, research funders, and the scientific establishment since the 1990s. Contemporary understandings of foregrounding sex and gender issues within biomedical research range from women’s rights to inclusion, to links between human rights, (...) women’s health and sustainable development, and the increasing scientific and funding expectation for studies to consider the sex and gender implications of research design, results and impact. However, there are also exploitation issues to consider when foregrounding the inclusion of women as research participants, especially for research ethics committees and institutional review boards. A hidden risk is that exploitative research designs and practices may be missed, particularly by reviewers who may not have a nuanced understanding of gender-based harm. Utilizing contemporary case studies of ethics dumping, this paper highlights some of the concerns, and makes recommendations for IRBs/research ethics reviewers to help ensure that essential research is undertaken to the highest ethical standards. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga, in some essays recently published and presented, defends the rationality of a belief in the existence of God on the grounds that it is foundationally justified. Though this belief does not appear to be justified were we to adopt what Plantinga calls classical foundationalism, there are other, less restrictive versions of foundationalism. Plantinga urges that we recognize that a belief in the existence of God can be warranted within one of these frameworks.

This paper is the second of two in a series. In our first paper, we presented a social justice framework emerging from an extensive literature review and incorporating core social determinants specific to mental health in the age of COVID-19 and illustrated specific social determinants impacting mental health (SDIMH) of our resettled Bhutanese refugee population during the pandemic. This second paper details specific barriers to the SDIMH detrimental to the basic human rights and social justice of this population during this (...) pandemic. The SDIMH, as described, further informs the need for social justice measures and cultural humility in mental healthcare, public health, law, and community engagement. This work concludes with a proposed call to action toward mental health improvement and fair treatment for refugee populations in three core areas: communication and education, social stigma and discrimination, and accessibility and availability of resources. (shrink)

This article critically examines the relationship between shared residence and contact after the breakdown of the parents’ relationship. It examines the background to the government’s main emphasis on methods of monitoring, facilitating and enforcing contact as the most efficacious method of proceeding in respect of the law reform agenda, focussing particularly on the potential impact of punitive enforcement measures on primary carers, usually mothers. The article sets the discussion within its wider cultural context in respect of fathers’ rights claims that (...) family law currently favours mothers, and shows how recent legal developments constitute part of a package to manage post-separation relationships between parent and children. It also examines some of the emerging case law to show how the judiciary is using shared residence orders and transfer of residence to deal with protracted and very difficult contact disputes, and in ways which were not anticipated when shared residence orders were first introduced. Drawing on feminist legal commentaries the argument will be made that the use of transfer of residence and shared residence orders in these disputes is extremely worrying, especially in light of the growing body of empirical research which heralds caution. The article will conclude by suggesting that far from favouring mothers, both the law reforms and the case law effectively construct mothers as integral to the problem of contact. They are treated as the site of and solution to the ‚problem’ of contact, and the means of dealing with the problem is by increasingly punitive measures which are inappropriate in a family law context. At the same time non-residential fathers who do not uphold contact escape legal sanctions. (shrink)

Hope is something that most kids can relate to. Whether it'' the hope to win a game or for their friend to feel better. This title presents relatable and realistic ways that kids show hope. Colorful images support the simple text. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.

Responsibility is important for children to learn and understand at an early age. This title will introduce readers to what being responsible is through everyday and relatable examples that they are sure to experience." -- Publisher's website.

This essay discusses the origins, biases, and effects on contemporary discussions of economics and ethics of the unexamined use of the metaphor an economy is a machine. Both neoliberal economics and many critiques of capitalist systems take this metaphor as their starting point. The belief that economies run according to universal laws of motion, however, is shown to be based on a variety of rationalist thinking that – while widely held – is inadequate for explaining lived human experience. Feminist scholarship (...) in the philosophy of science and economics has brought to light some of the biases that have supported the mechanistic worldview. Possible alternatives to the an economy is a machine include an economy is a creative process and an economy is an organism. Such metaphors are intellectually defensible as guides to scientific inquiry and provide a richer ground for moral imagination. (shrink)