This book explains how gossip contributes to knowledge. Karen Adkins marshals scholarship and case studies spanning centuries and disciplines to show that although gossip is a constant activity in human history, it has rarely been studied as a source of knowledge. People gossip for many reasons, but most often out of desire to make sense of the world while lacking access to better options for obtaining knowledge. This volume explores how, when our access to knowledge is blocked, gossip becomes (...) a viable path to knowledge attainment, one that involves the asking of questions, the exchange of ideas, and the challenging of preconceived notions. (shrink)

Most psychological literature on gaslighting focuses on it as a dyadic phenomenon occurring primarily in marriage and family relationships. In my analysis, I will extend recent fruitful philosophical engagement with gaslighting by arguing that gaslighting, particularly gaslighting that occurs in more public spaces like the workplace, relies upon external reinforcement for its success. I will ground this study in an analysis of the film Gaslight, for which the phenomenon is named, and in the course of the analysis will focus on (...) a paradox of this kind of gaslighting: it wreaks significant epistemic and moral damages largely through small, often invisible actions that have power through their accumulation and reinforcement. (shrink)

This article considers the Roman imperial court under the rule of Vespasian. His senatorial career began in the courts of Claudius and Nero; as successor to the Julio-Claudians, he established himself at the center of the imperial court by manipulating its physical space, its degree of formality, and his own accessibility to senators and to the public. In particular, his interactions with the imperial freedman Phoebus before and after his accession provide insight into both this court and imperial courts in (...) general, with particular reference to how status was determined extra-institutionally, and to how highly the imperial elite valued presence at, and absence from, court. (shrink)

In Kate Manne’s theory of misogyny, women’s behavior is surveilled (by men and other women) so that they conform to gendered norms of behavior and care, and they are threatened or punished when they refuse to abide by norms. I seek here to extend her argument about surveillance to norms around masculinity, and to demonstrate the ways in which surveillance actually runs throughout the gendered economy of care. I assess the impacts of this surveillance (particularly on men of color, who (...) identify as gay or trans, or who are immigrants or religious minorities), and argue that misogyny and masculinity are inextricably interlinked and mutually reinforcing phenomena, that must be simultaneously demystified for progress towards gender equity. (shrink)

In this study we explore how a selection of Norwegian women account for their decision to undergo weight loss surgery. We argue that women’s descriptions of their experiences leading up to this choice of action illuminate issues regarding social norms of bodily appearance and personal responsibility. The starting point is women’s own experiences within a cultural context in which opting for WLS often attracts moral scrutiny. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s notion of consciousness as embodied and de Beauvoir’s ideas concerning women’s situation, (...) we argue that bodily as well as socio-cultural aspects intertwine with women’s choice of surgery as a means of losing weight. Although society’s stigmatization of women with obesity has been well challenged by scholars in the field of critical fat studies, women with obesity still experience the bodily hindrances associated with being overweight in an intense and subjective way. The findings suggest that women confronting the option of WLS do so in a context of pain, dysfunction and social stigma, a combination which illuminates the intricate ambiguity of the obese body as both subject and object. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As doctoral students from New Zealand and Australia, advised by supervision teams with a diversity of critical realist experience from limited to none, we came independently to the 2018 Critical Realism conference – primed to seek increased understanding, confidence, motivation, and reassurance. We certainly found these things from the pre-conference, presentations, and individuals within the critical realist community. We also found each other, and a virtual writing group was born. This article is a description of what we did, why, (...) and the outcomes we experienced over the final two years completing our theses. It identifies the structures, contexts, motivations, and mechanisms from which our emotional, critical realist and writing-related outcomes emerged. We outline the roles of serendipitous timing, culture, different disciplinary approaches, administrative structures, and types of interactions on the social learning we developed. We anchor our discussion in recent theoretical literature about the role of writing groups in doctoral education. (shrink)

Programs for the reform of K-12 science teaching today usually insist that science teachers must introduce their students to the nature of science, as well as to scientific content. The academic field of science studies, however, evinces no consensus about what the nature of science really is. This article examines how science educators and educational researchers have drawn on the fragmented teachings of science studies about the nature of science, and how they have used those teachings as a resource in (...) their own projects. It identifies three competing movements for the reform of science teaching that owe a particular debt to science studies: history and philosophy of science, science, technology, and society, and constructivist pedagogy. The article analyzes some of the deep assumptions about the relationships between research science, school science, and children’s learning that pervade the educational literature. (shrink)

Poetry holds an important place as part of our cultural heritage.1 However, despite poetry’s apparent cultural value, there have been surprisingly few attempts to articulate clearly how this should be reflected in the teaching curriculum in our schools and universities. As a consequence of this lack of clarity, the cultural value of poetry gives way to the increasing emphasis on providing instrumental justification for the teaching curriculum; including poetry in the curriculum is often justified in terms of promoting transferable skills (...) and knowledge such as problem solving, understanding and interpreting language, general creativity, widening vocabulary, identifying or “spotting” techniques, and learning... (shrink)

The recent claiming of Simone de Beauvoir's legacy by French feminists for a policy of assimilation of Muslim women to Western models of self and society reduces the complexity and richness of Beauvoir's views in inacceptable ways. This article explores to what extent a politics of difference that challenges the ideals and political strategies of abstract liberalism can be extracted from and legitimized by the philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Without assuming their thought is identical, we can (...) read them as elucidating each other and as implicitly exposing weak and strong points in their respective philosophies on ethnocultural relations and social identities. (shrink)

Using the theoretical constructs “biographical disruption” and “limit experience” and also methodological frameworks from autoethnography and discourse analysis, we discuss the divergent ways in which language and healing are conceptualized and performed, first in an American medical clinic and then by traditional healers in Kwara‘ae (Solomon Islands). Discourses at the Dallas clinic draw on allopathic and complementary medicine and in emphasizing a scientific approach to talk about illness and treatment, were found to create ambiguity in patients’ sense of their physical (...) and metaphysical identities. In contrast, Kwara‘ae healing involves disappearing into silence, in which the physical and metaphysical are never separated, and where healing occurs. (shrink)

An enduring question in the cultural study of psychological experience concerns how emotion may play a role in shaping moral aspects of children’s lives as they are mentored into socially preferred ways of understanding and responding to the world at hand. This article brings together approaches from psychological and linguistic anthropology to explore how cultural schemas of normativity are communicated, embodied, and enacted as children participate in day-to-day family activities and routines. Illustrative examples emanate from a videotaped corpus of naturalistic (...) interactional data that document the daily lives of 32 ethnically diverse U.S. middle-class families who reside in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan region. The article employs discourse and narrative analysis to examine how children are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as culturally shaped indicators for proper comportment. Data analysis emphasizes how implicit components of caregivers’ interactions with children (i.e., gesture, gaze, facial expression) intertwine with explicit, verbal communication to constitute intricately layered affective messages that shape the evaluative frames through which children interpret, display, and respond to emotions. The article identifies two culturally salient childrearing practices, “pep talks” and “time outs,” that apprentice children into moral accountable relationships with others by encouraging them to manage their emotions in culturally preferred ways. Study findings suggest that parental communications conveying praise and approval—or conversely indexing disapproval—towards children are emotionally resonant motivational practices in this cultural milieu as children are mentored into culturally meaningful emotional management techniques. The article highlights how children actively employ semiotic socio-communicative resources and it closely traces their sense-making processes in tandem with their discursive contributions to the moment-by-moment interaction. It argues that emotion, morality, and interpersonal relations are critical in shaping children’s acquisition of consensually validated ways of perceiving, feeling, and responding to the phenomena they encounter in their day-to-day lives. This perspective aims towards contextualized understandings that render plausible connections between local contexts of everyday action and broader macro-level discourses and master narratives, such as those associated with a neo-liberal emphasis on cultivating citizens who learn to regulate their emotions on behalf of self and others. (shrink)

The United Nations deemed internet access to be of critical importance for human rights in 2016. In 2020, schools around the world closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools were closed, inequities in internet access gained widespread public attention as many educational opportunities shifted online. Amidst this shift, this paper analyzes an Ontario provincial announcement to provide 21,000 iPads and free data for young people, during the pandemic. The closure of schools in Ontario, Canada, meant that young people and families (...) who faced technological challenges, such as a lack of devices, stable and affordable internet connections, or sufficient data allowances, could experience barriers to their right to an education. This paper revisits a community informatics model of internet access, the Access Rainbow, to analyze attempts to operationalize the right to an education through technology in Ontario. In parallel to rights, however, the field of CI faces the ongoing presence of profit-oriented corporations within universal access efforts. This paper argues that socio-technical infrastructural elements of access to the internet became visible through the breakdown of the pandemic. Furthermore, it considers the multi-stakeholder efforts required to implement useful and effective access, where school boards responded in varied ways locally. The paper contributes the concept of refraction to offer continued theorization of a distributive paradigm and a rights-informed approach in community informatics against the backdrop of the pandemic, which could also act as an opening for privatization and disaster capitalism. (shrink)

The Anthroposophical Society in Sweden is, in the view of many of its members, going through tough times. Times of crisis and the search for a collective identity often inspire the formation of ideological rifts within a larger religious community. One way of responding to challenges is by turning to doctrines and texts stemming from a purportedly pristine past for guidance – in other words, by developing a fundamentalist discourse. A striking fact about the Anthroposophical Society, in Sweden as well (...) as internationally, is that such returns to a set of canonical texts by the founder of the movement appear to be self-defeating. There are deeply rooted structural features within the Anthroposophical Society as an institution that impede any one voice from gaining significant traction and imposing a collective identity upon the movement. This article uses the example of the Anthroposophical Society in Sweden and the conundrum it repeatedly faces when addressing a perceived crisis in order to formulate a model of charismatic leadership that more generally accounts for the lack of success of fundamentalist discourses in religious movements with certain types of organisational culture. (shrink)

A formidable and influential work, Language and Death sheds a highly original light on issues central to Continental philosophy, literary theory, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and speech-act theory. Focusing especially on the incompatible philosophical systems of Hegel and Heidegger within the space of negativity, Giorgio Agamben offers a rigorous reading of numerous philosophical and poetic works to examine how these issues have been traditionally explored. Agamben argues that the human being is not just “speaking” and “mortal” but irreducibly “social” and “ethical.” Giorgio (...) Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End, Stanzas, and The Coming Community, all published by the University of Minnesota Press. Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California. Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University. (shrink)

-/- CONCLUSION “The experience in California is clear. Affirmative action has helped to dismantle barriers such as "old boys' networks" that have excluded not only women and individuals of racial or ethnic minorities, but also white American men who did not belong to networks of privilege. Affirmative action has also worked to ensure that our schools, workplaces, and other social institutions fully use our diverse talents, thereby helping our government and social institutions to better serve their communities. -/- In short, (...) affirmative action has helped to bring out the best in us as a society. It challenges us to have the courage of our convictions that: (1) we do want a truly equal opportunity society; and (2) we believe that all Americans, including women and minorities, are competent individuals who have talents to contribute. Passing the CCRI would completely eliminate affirmative action, and thus have the same effect as "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." The "baby" —active and affirmative commitment to equal opportunity— is barely out of its infancy. We must not now abandon our commitment, just when we have taken our first steps towards creating a truly equal opportunity society.” -/- (This essay was written against the backdrop of legislative efforts in the mid 1990s, to overturn “affirmative action” policies at educational institutions, which had given more equal access to higher education for students from previously under-represented communities, particularly white women but also racialized communities. By mischaracterizing affirmative action programs as “gender or racial preferences”, opponents were able to pass the 1996 ballot measure, Proposition 209, the so-called “California Civil Rights Initiative” (CCRI). The ban on “preferences” gained the support of 54.6% of all California voters, including 58% of white women and 66% of white men voters. Use of language was key, as a slight majority of Americans approved of some affirmative actions but opposed racial preferences. The CCRI has had a huge toll on Latino and African American enrollment at UC Berkeley and UCLA, which has never recovered. State contracts for firms owned by women and minorities also dropped sharply. Similar initiatives failed in some states but succeeded elsewhere. See online Encyclopedia). (shrink)

Volume 11 Apollonius, or the Future of Psychical Research E N Bennett Originally published in 1927 "Admirably conceived, skilfully executed." Liverpool Post "His exposition of the case for psychic research is lucid and interesting." The Scotsman This volume summarizes the results secured by the scientific treatment of psychical phenomena, and to forecast the future developments of such research. 88pp ************** Socrates Or the Emancipation of Mankind H F Carlill Originally published in 1927 "One of the most brilliant and important of (...) a remarkable series." Westminster Gazette This volume examines the differences between humans and animals and discusses the freedom that a proper understanding of psychology will bring to the human race. The author argues that the whole psycho-physical organism will be regarded as what it is – a mechanism full of inherited tendencies and untapped energies which needs to be consciously adjusted and controlled. 90pp Morpheus or the Future of Sleep D F Fraser-Harris Originally published in 1928. "His arguments, clearly and ably presented, hold our interest." Clarion "Shows that the doctors do not as yet know much about the subject." Queen This volume discusses sleep and the part it plays in maintaining health. It contains suggestions for sufferers from insomnia, discusses dreams and their causes and suggests the probable line of investigation of sleep problems. 94pp Sisyphus or the Limits of Psychology M Jaeger Originally published in 1929. "Much acumen and knowledge. All students of psychology should read it." Manchester Guardian This volume argues that Psychology has just as an important role to play as Physics and Chemistry, because it affects the ordinary person and is not merely limited to the scientific community. The opportunities is provides, as well as its limits, are discussed. 88pp The Passing of The Phantoms A Study of Evolutionary Psychology and Morals C J Patten Originally published in 1924 "This bright and bracing little book." Literary Guide "Interesting and original." Medical Times This volume examines the evolution of the mental and moral faculties of animals. This knowledge, in the author’s opinion is critical for understanding the evolution of human mortality. 90pp. (shrink)

Recent defenses of shaming as an effective tool for identifying bad practice and provoking social change appear compatible with feminism. I complicate this picture by examining two instances of online feminist shaming that resulted in shame backlashes. Shaming requires the assertion of social and epistemic authority on behalf of a larger community, and is dependent upon an audience that will be receptive to the shaming testimony. In cases where marginally situated knowers attempt to “shame up,” it presents challenges for feminist (...) uses. (shrink)

Since Flexner's (1910) report over a century ago, we have observed the growth of medical education as a specialty (Donini-Lenhoff and Hedrick 2000). Of late, we have seen a strong move towards outcome-based education driven by educationalists and national bodies alike (GMC 1993; Harden, Crosby, and Davis 1999; Spady 1988). As medical educators, our understanding has grown considerably. However, there is an area that remains relatively unexplored. All surgeons within teaching hospitals share in the collective responsibility for training more junior (...) doctors (GMC 1995; Leung 2002). As with many facets of postgraduate teaching, this is multi-factorial. Trainee surgeons find themselves fighting a war on many fronts. .. (shrink)

We hypothesised that belief in conspiracy theories would be predicted by the general tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist. We further hypothesised that this tendency would explain the relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories, where lower levels of education have been found to be associated with higher conspiracy belief. In Study 1 participants were more likely to agree with a range of conspiracy theories if they also tended to attribute intentionality and (...) agency to inanimate objects. As predicted, this relationship accounted for the link between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. We replicated this finding in Study 2, whilst taking into account beliefs in paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief. (shrink)