In 1971, Günter Blobel and David Sabatini proposed a novel and quite speculative schematic model to describe how proteins might reach the proper cellular location. According to their proposal, proteins destined to be secreted from the cell contain a “signal” to direct their release. Despite the fact that Blobel and Sabatini presented their signal hypothesis as a “beautiful idea” not grounded in experimental evidence, they received criticism from other scientists who opposed such speculation. Following the publication of the 1971 model, (...) Blobel persisted in conducting experiments and revising the model to incorporate new data. In fact, over the period of 1975–1984, Blobel and colleagues published five subsequent schematic models of the signal hypothesis, each revised based on new laboratory evidence. I propose that the original 1971 model can be viewed as an epistemic creation. Additionally, analysis of the subsequent schematic diagrams over the period of 1975–1984 allows one to track Blobel’s changing conception of an epistemic object over time. Furthermore, the entire series of schematic diagrams presented by Blobel from 1971 to 1984 allow one to visualize the initial conception and subsequent reworking of a scientific theory. In 1999, Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the signal hypothesis, which was ultimately supported by experimental evidence gathered after the speculative model was published. (shrink)

The use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has expanded both in number and scope over the past 2 decades. Initially carried out to avoid the birth of children with severe genetic disease, PGD is now used for a variety of medical and non-medical purposes. While some human studies have concluded that PGD is safe, animal studies and a recent human study suggest that the embryo biopsy procedure may result in neurological problems for the offspring. Given that the long-term safety of (...) PGD has not been clearly established in humans, this study sought to determine how PGD safety is presented to prospective patients by means of a detailed website analysis. The websites of 262 US fertility centres performing PGD were analysed and comments about safety and risk were catalogued. Results of the analysis demonstrated that 78.2% of centre websites did not mention safety or risk of PGD at all. Of the 21.8% of centres that did contain safety or risk information about PGD, 28.1% included statements highlighting the potential risks, 38.6% presented information touting the procedure as safe and 33.3% included statements highlighting potential risks and the overall safety of the procedure. Thus, 86.6% of PGD-performing centres state that PGD is safe and/or fail to disclose any risks on their websites despite the fact that the impact of the procedure on the long-term health of offspring is unproven. This lack of disclosure suggests that informed consent is inadequate; this study examines numerous factors that are likely to inhibit comprehensive discussions of safety. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Although establishing gender equality in board and managerial positions has recently become more important for organizations, companies with low levels of gender diversity seem to perceive an ethical dilemma regarding the ways, in which they attempt to attain it. One way that organizations try to move toward gender equality is through the use of their corporate websites to manage potential applicants’ impressions of their current levels of, and actions to improve, gender diversity. The dilemma is whether to truthfully communicate their (...) low level of gender diversity, conceal it, or exaggerate it. On the one hand, organizations that are truthful may find it difficult to achieve equality because women are less attracted to companies that lack diversity. On the other hand, organizations that are untruthful risk their moral legitimacy. The present work investigates gender diversity-related communication on the corporate websites of 99 major German companies. Based on theoretical work on minority attraction, we apply an organizational impression management taxonomy to guide our in-depth content analysis. With this approach, we hope to advance the understanding of how the issue of gender diversity is presented on corporate websites, which is useful for both organizational decision makers as well as diversity researchers. We found that although gender diversity-related communications on corporate websites contain both assertive and defensive organizational impression management tactics, as well as a third type of tactic we refer to as “acknowledgement,” assertive tactics were used more frequently. We argue the existence of a paradox whereby organizations use assertive impression management tactics to maintain pragmatic legitimacy but compromise their moral legitimacy by doing so. Furthermore, we argue that moral legitimacy can be maintained or restored through the sincere use of defensive impression management tactics and acknowledgement. (shrink)

Women are underrepresented in the upper echelons of management in most countries. Despite the effectiveness of identity conscious initiatives for increasing the proportion of women, many organizations have been reluctant to implement such initiatives because potential employees may perceive them negatively. Given the increasing competition for labor, attracting talent is relevant for the long-term success of organizations. In this study, we used an experimental design to examine the effects of identity blind and identity conscious gender diversity initiatives on people’s pursuit (...) intentions toward organizations using them. We used counterfactual thinking, derived from fairness theory, as a guiding framework for our hypothesis development and investigated the moderating influence of a forthcoming government-mandated gender quota as well as individual characteristics. Participants reviewed statements regarding workplace diversity initiatives and rated either the initiatives’ effectiveness or indicated their intentions to pursue employment with organizations using them. Of those rating pursuit intentions, half were informed that the country in which they were conducting their job search was about to implement gender quotas. Results indicated a diversity management paradox such that initiatives perceived as more effective made organizations using them less attractive as employers. However, these negative perceptions were mitigated by a government-mandated quota, and also lower among women. Implications for the study and practice of diversity are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, we analyse the novel case of Phoenix, a non-binary adult requesting ongoing puberty suppression to permanently prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a way of affirming their gender identity. We argue that the aim of OPS is consistent with the proper goals of medicine to promote well-being, and therefore could ethically be offered to non-binary adults in principle; there are additional equity-based reasons to offer OPS to non-binary adults as a group; and the ethical defensibility (...) of facilitating individual requests for OPS from non-binary adults also depends on other relevant considerations, including the balance of potential benefits over harms for that specific patient, and whether the patient’s request is substantially autonomous. Although the broadly principlist ethical approach we take can be used to analyse other cases of non-binary adults requesting OPS apart from the case we evaluate, we highlight that the outcome will necessarily depend on the individual’s context and values. However, such clinical provision of OPS should ideally be within the context of a properly designed research study with long-term follow-up and open publication of results. (shrink)

A critical review of four recent works that reflect current conflicts and tensions among feminists regarding new reproductive technologies: In Search of Parenthood by Judith Lasker and Susan Borg; Ethics and Human Reproduction by Christine Overall; Made to Order, Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds. and Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michelle Stanworth, ed. Their positions are evaluated against the background of growing feminist dialogue about the future of reproduction and the bearing of reproductive innovations on such related issues (...) as racism, sexuality, motherhood and abortion. (shrink)

In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the women's movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of sexual difference than the economic contradictions of capitalism. Meanwhile the conditions of working-class and black women have (...) been deteriorating. In this situation, they argue, feminists can only serve the general interests of women through alliance with working-class movements and class struggle. Weir and Wilson represent a minority position within the British Communist Party (the CP), which argues that ‘feminism’ is now being used by sections of the left, in particular the dominant ‘Eurocommunist’ left in the CP, to justify their moves to the right, with an accompanying attack on traditional forms of trade union militancy. Beatrix Campbell, who is aligned to the dominant position within the CP, has been one target of Weir and Wilson's criticisms. In several articles from 1978 onwards, and in her book Wigan Pier Revisited, Beatrix Campbell has presented a very different analysis of women and the labour movement. She has criticized the trade union movement as a ‘men's movement’, in the sense that it has always represented the interests of men at the expense of women. And she has described the current split within the CP as one extending throughout the left between the politics of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’: traditional labour movement politics as against the politics of those who have rethought their socialism to take into account the analysis and importance of popular social movements – in particular feminism, the peace and anti-racist movements. In reply to this debate, Anne Phillips has argued that while women's position today must be analysed in the context of the capitalist crisis, it is not reducible to the dichotomy ‘class politics’ versus ‘popular alliance’. Michèle Barrett, in another reply to Weir and Wilson, has argued that they have presented a reductionist and economistic approach to women's oppression, which caricatures rather than clarifies much of the work in which socialist-feminists have been engaged. To air these differences between socialist-feminists over the question of feminism and class politics, and to see their implications for the women's movement and the left, Feminist Review has decided to bring together the main protagonists of this debate for a fuller, more open discussion. For this discussion Feminist Review drew up a number of questions which were put to the participants by Clara Connolly and Lynne Segal. (Michèle Barrett was present in a personal capacity.) They cover the recent background to socialist-feminist politics, the relationship of feminism to Marxism, the role of feminists in le ft political parties and the labour movement, the issue of racism and the prospects for the immediate future. The discussion was lengthy and what follows is an edited version of the transcript. (shrink)

We thank the commentators for their thoughtful responses to our article.1 Due to space constraints, we will confine our discussion to just three key issues. The first issue relates to the central ethical conundrum for clinicians working with young people like Phoenix: namely, how to respect, value and defer to a person’s own account of their identity and what is needed for their well-being, while staying open to the possibility that such an account may reflect a work in progress. This (...) conundrum thus relates both to what will be beneficial for that person and what constitutes respecting their autonomy, and clinicians must dwell on these questions when deciding what forms of medical intervention to offer. D’Angelo,2 Lemma3 and Wren4 highlight the importance of considering Phoenix as a ‘whole person in context’ 2 prior to initiating treatment or care. In this way, they advocate for a process of ‘therapeutic exploration’,4 which includes taking sufficient time to explore Phoenix’s personhood with them so as to support them in achieving an ‘authentic self-discovery’.2 We agree with these authors that identity development is a complex, life-long process that is influenced by biological, psychosocial and relational aspects, all of which may contribute to an individual’s desire to pursue gender-affirming interventions. To explore the various factors—both conscious and unconscious—that might be motivating Phoenix’s decision to pursue ongoing puberty suppression, D’Angelo,2 Lemma3 and Wren4 describe a comprehensive psychological approach to working with transgender and gender diverse individuals and propose questions to guide such discussions. Consistent with this approach, we stipulated that Phoenix had undergone regular psychological counselling and that the psychologist had judged that ‘Phoenix’s distress is significant and enduring…not a symptom …. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was the first to embed the roots of human sexuality in discipline and biopolitics, therefore revolutionizing our conception of sex and its relationship to society, economics, and culture. Yet over the past two decades, scholars have limited themselves to the study of Foucault's _History of Sexuality_, volume 1 paying lesser attention to his equally explosive _History of Madness_. In this earlier volume, Foucault recasts Western rationalism as a project that both produces and represses sexual deviants, calling out the (...) complicity of modern science and the exclusionary nature of family morality. By reclaiming these deft moves, Lynne Huffer teases out exciting new strands of Foucauldian thought. She then revisits the theorist's ethical work in light of these discoveries, divining an ethics of eros that sees sexuality as a lived experience we are repeatedly called on to remember. Throughout her study, Huffer weaves her own experiences together with Foucault's, sampling from unpublished interviews and other archived materials in order to intimately rework the problem of sexuality as a product of reason. (shrink)

Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics of (...) sexual difference. Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex, including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love, pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within, defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in common sexual experience. (shrink)

Jorge Luis Borges introduces the mythical ouroboros as follows: “A third-century Greek amulet, to be found today in the British Museum, gives us an image that can better illustrate that infinitude:...

This two-part article summarizes the major arguments of Lynne Huffer’s 2010 book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. The second part of the piece is a dialogue between Huffer and feminist theorist Elizabeth Wilson about the implications of the book’s arguments about rethinking queer theory, interiority, psychic life, lived experience and received understandings of Michel Foucault’s work.

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Recent historical work on changing perceptions of the human body has been influenced by Michel Foucault’s contention that the self of western individualism was created by new regimes of disciplining the body. A different approach is taken here, one that focuses on how individual bodies came to be viewed as separate and inviolable, that is, as autonomous. The separateness and inviolability of bodies can be traced in the histories of bodily practices as different as portraiture and legal torture. After 1750, (...) regular public exhibitions, themselves a new feature of the social landscape, showed increasing numbers of portraits in London and Paris. The proliferation of individual likenesses encouraged the view that each person was an individual, that is, single, separate, distinctive and original. At the same time, the tide turned against judicially sanctioned torture and cruel punishment. Long-held notions of sacrificial punishment and truth through pain withered under the pressure of new experiences of the body that in turn facilitated the emergence of new conceptions of rights of individuals. (shrink)

This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Confessions, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads (...) Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Confessions speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought. (shrink)

About the Author James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His many books include Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, and What Painting Is, all published by Routledge. Michael Newman teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College in the University of (...) London. His publications include the books Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) and Jeff Wall, and he is co-editor with Jon Bird of Rewriting Conceptual Art. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Reopening a Discussion The empiricist-derived epistemology that has directed most social and natural scientific inquiry for the last three ...

The recognition of taboo words – i.e. socially inappropriate words – has been repeatedly associated to semantic interference phenomena, with detrimental effects on the performance in the ongoing task. In the present study, we investigated taboo interference in the context of reading aloud, a task configuration which prompts the overt violation of conventional sociolinguistic norms by requiring the explicit utterance of taboo items. We assessed whether this form of semantic interference is handled by habituative or cognitive control processes. In addition (...) to the reading aloud task, participants performed a vocal Stroop task featuring different conditions to dissociate semantic, task, and response conflict. Taboo words were read slower than non-taboo words, but this effect was subject to a quick habituation, with a decreasing interference over the course of trials, which allowed participants to selectively attend to goal-relevant information. In the Stroop task, only semantic conflict was significantly reduced by habituation. These findings suggest that semantic properties can be quickly and flexibly weighed on the basis of contextual appropriateness, thus characterising semantic processing as a flexible and goal-directed component of reading aloud. (shrink)

The Body–Object Interaction (BOI) variable measures how easily a human body can physically interact with a word's referent (Siakaluk, Pexman, Aguilera, Owen, & Sears, ). A facilitory BOI effect has been observed with adults in language tasks, with faster and more accurate responses for high BOI words (e.g., mask) than for low BOI words (e.g., ship; Wellsby, Siakaluk, Owen, & Pexman, ). We examined the development of this effect in children. Fifty children (aged 6–9 years) and a group of 21 (...) adults completed a word naming task with high and low BOI words. Younger children (aged 6–7 years) did not show a BOI effect, but older children (aged 8–9 years) showed a significant facilitory BOI effect, as did adults. Magnitude of children's BOI effect was related to age as well as reading skills. These results suggest that bodily experience (as measured by the BOI variable) begins to influence visual word recognition behavior by about 8 years of age. (shrink)

We argue that in extensive decision problems (extensive games with a single player) with imperfect recall care must be taken in interpreting information sets and strategies. Alternative interpretations allow for different kinds of analysis. We address the following issues: 1. randomization at information sets; 2. consistent beliefs; 3. time consistency of optimal plans; 4. the multiselves approach to decision making. We illustrate our discussion through an example that we call the ‘‘paradox of the absentminded driver.’’ Journal of Economic Literature Classification (...) Numbers: C7, D0. 1997 Academic Press. (shrink)

In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews with 150 non-college-educated white and black workers in the United States and white and North African workers in France. The comparison of the four groups shows how differences in cultural repertoires across national context and structural location shape distinct anti-racist rhetorics. Market-based arguments are salient among American workers, while arguments based (...) on solidarity and egalitarianism are used by French, but not by American, workers. Minority workers in both countries employ a more extensive toolkit of anti-racist rhetoric as compared to whites. The interviewed men privilege evidence grounded in everyday experience, and their claims of human equality are articulated in terms of universal human nature and, in the case of blacks and North Africans, universal morality. Workers' conceptual frameworks have little in common with multiculturalism that occupies a central place in the literature on cosmopolitanism. We argue that for the discussion and practice of cosmopolitanism to move forward we should shift our attention to the study of multiple ordinary cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)

This paper applies Plato’s cave allegory to Enron’s success and downfall. Plato’s famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato’s cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato’s levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created its image (...) and presented information to support that image, and how the public eventually emerged from the cave to realize the truth about Enron’s actual accounting practices and financial state, which led to the corporation’s downfall. We find Plato’s allegory both useful in analyzing the relationship between Enron and the public and instructive about the power and moral responsibility of Enron’s executives. (shrink)

Most guidelines and proposalsfor Internet research ethics are based onregulations for human subjects research. In therelated research, Internet material is viewedas animate and described as people. Humanitiesresearchers have rarely been a part of thedebate about Internet research ethics and thepractices of these scholars have not been takeninto consideration when drafting most of theguidelines. This threatens to limit the kindsof Internet research that can be performed – critical strategies are particularlydiscouraged – and the ways that researchers andother users understand the Internet.Researchers (...) who use human subjects models havenot fully acknowledged computer mediation, theconstructed aspects of Internetrepresentations, and the screen. If we viewInternet material as cultural production thenthe models for Internet research would be ArtHistory and Visual Culture, English andLiterary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Musicand Sound Studies, and Theatre and PerformanceStudies. A more complete integration of theseapproaches into Internet Studies – either as asole investigatory strategy or in tandem withother forms of inquiry – would changeresearchers' ethical questions. It would alsoshow instances in which human subjectsguidelines do not apply to complex Internetmaterial. It is imperative to demonstrate thatInternet material is not people because thisconception makes highly constructed words andimages seem natural and stereotypedrepresentations appear to be real. (shrink)

For nearly five years, bioethicists and neurologists debated whether Jahi McMath, an African American teenager, was alive or dead. While Jahi's condition provides a compelling study for analyzing brain death, circumscribing her life status to a question of brain death fails to acknowledge and respond to a chronic, if uncomfortable, bioethics problem in American health care—namely, racial bias and unequal treatment, both real and perceived. Bioethicists should examine the underlying, arguably broader social implications of what Jahi's medical treatment and experience (...) represented. On any given day, disparities in the quality of health care and health outcomes for people of color in comparison to whites are evidenced in American hospitals and clinics. These disparities are not entirely explained by differences in patient education, insurance status, employment, income, expressed preference for treatments, and severity of disease. Instead, research indicates that, even for African Americans able to gain access to health care services and navigate institutional nuances, disparities persist across a broad range of services, including diagnostic screening and general medical care, mental health diagnosis and treatment, pain management, HIV‐related care, and treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and kidney disease. (shrink)

Over the last decades the problem of the existence of Byzantine philosophy has been posed in terms of the determination of its status, its function, and its subject matter. To a certain extent, this approach to Byzantine philosophy has been motivated by the increasing disciplinary autonomy reached by the other branches of what is nowadays called «medieval philosophy». A series of significant scholarly achievements over the last twenty years have contributed to the development of more-or-less well defined scholarly fields of (...) research concerning the medieval Latin, Arabic, and Jewish philosophical traditions. In regard to Byzantine philosophy the situation is much more complicated. In the first chapter of his La philosophie médiévale, Alain de Libera devotes his first words to the retarded scholarly development of the study of Byzantine philosophy. He claims that Byzantine philosophy has been mainly ignored and misunderstood, and has not been deeply studied. However, from the second half of the twentieth century one can find relevant and extremely important attempts to establish not only the basic features and developments, but the very existence of Byzantine philosophy. In this Forschungsbericht I shall attempt to reconstruct the scholarly debate on this topic, testing the main interpretive attitudes against some concrete cases of thinkers who lived in the area of the Eastern Roman Empire and who are labelled by most modern historians as «Byzantine». (shrink)

The film, as the term itself implies, entails a recording and a particular kind of writing. Nonetheless, this is not enough to consider it as a social object. It needs a formal and narrative structure and, above all, it needs an inscription in order to give it a sociality based upon its diffusion. The amateur movies represent a perfect example of this condition: they are often recordings without any inscription and remain within a very narrow communicative circle. They certainly document (...) something, but they do not have the form of a social object. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) is a movie by a director who did not shoot the most impressive scenes of it. Is Herzog an impostor? Certainly not. He is simply the man who gave an inscription to the amateur movies he found, transforming them into social objects. (shrink)

How deep is the current diversity in the panoply of theories to define consciousness, and to what extent do these theories share common denominators? Here we first examine to what extent different theories are commensurable (or comparable) along particular dimensions. We posit logical (and, when applicable, empirical) commensurability as a necessary condition for identifying common denominators among different theories. By consequence, dimensions for inclusion in a set of logically and empirically commensurable theories of consciousness can be proposed. Next, we compare (...) a limited subset of neuroscience-based theories in terms of commensurability. This analysis does not yield a denominator that might serve to define a minimally unifying model of consciousness. Theories that seem to be akin by one denominator can be remote by another. We suggest a methodology of comparing different theories via multiple probing questions, allowing to discern overall (dis)similarities between theories. Despite very different background definitions of consciousness, we conclude that, if attention is paid to the search for a common methological approach to brain-consciousness relationships, it should be possible in principle to overcome the current Babylonian confusion of tongues and eventually integrate and merge different theories. (shrink)

In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews with 150 non-college-educated white and black workers in the United States and white and North African workers in France. The comparison of the four groups shows how differences in cultural repertoires across national context and structural location shape distinct anti-racist rhetorics. Market-based arguments are salient among American workers, while arguments based (...) on solidarity and egalitarianism are used by French, but not by American, workers. Minority workers in both countries employ a more extensive toolkit of anti-racist rhetoric as compared to whites. The interviewed men privilege evidence grounded in everyday experience, and their claims of human equality are articulated in terms of universal human nature and, in the case of blacks and North Africans, universal morality. Workers' conceptual frameworks have little in common with multiculturalism that occupies a central place in the literature on cosmopolitanism. We argue that for the discussion and practice of cosmopolitanism to move forward we should shift our attention to the study of multiple ordinary cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)

In 2003, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Regina McKnight, an African American woman who was convicted at the age of twenty‐two for committing “homicide by child abuse.” She became the first woman in the United States to be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for experiencing a stillbirth. Rather than an outlier case in the annals of American jurisprudence that stretched law beyond reason while restraining compassion and justice, McKnight's conviction inspired similar prosecutions of other poor black women (...) and then of other women. More than one‐third of states consider pregnant women's illicit drug use a form of child abuse, resulting in unprecedented forms of criminal and civil punishment. Laws previously understood to protect pregnant women from domestic violence during pregnancy, such as fetal protection laws, now serve as the vehicles for prosecuting pregnant women. What these prosecutions and laws expose are the multitudinous ways in which the criminalization of poor pregnant women—and normalization of that criminalization, such that even doctors and nurses are expected to participate in it—serve to humiliate women, interfere with their reproductive health, and ultimately rob women of reproductive autonomy. (shrink)