Background In the wake of mandates for biomedical research to increase participation by members of historically underrepresented populations, community engagement (CE) has emerged as a key intervention to help achieve this goal.Methods Using interviews, observations, and document analysis, we examine how stakeholders in precision medicine research understand and seek to put into practice ideas about who to engage, how engagement should be conducted, and what engagement is for.Results We find that ad hoc, opportunistic, and instrumental approaches to CE exacted significant (...) consequences for the time and resources devoted to engagement and the ultimate impacts it has on research. Critical differences emerged when engagement and research decisionmaking were integrated with each other versus occurring in parallel, separate parts of the study organization, and whether community members had the ability to determine which issues would be brought to them for consideration or to revise or even veto proposals made upstream based on criteria that mattered to them. CE was understood to have a range of purposes, from instrumentally facilitating recruitment and data collection, to advancing community priorities and concerns, to furthering long-term investments in relationships with and changes in communities. These choices about who to engage, what engagement activities to support, how to solicit and integrate community input into the workflow of the study, and what CE was for were often conditioned upon preexisting perceptions and upstream decisions about study goals, competing priorities, and resource availability.Conclusions Upstream choices about CE and constraints of time and resources cascade into tradeoffs that often culminated in “pantomime community engagement.” This approach can create downstream costs when engagement is experienced as improvised and sporadic. Transformations are needed for CE to be seen as a necessary scientific investment and part of the scientific process. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss how phenomenology might cogently express the way painful experiences are layered with complex intersubjective meaning. In particular, we propose a critical conception of pain as an intricate multi-levelled phenomenon, deeply ingrained in the constitution of one’s sense of bodily self and emerging from a web of intercorporeal, social, cultural, and political relations. In the first section, we review and critique some conceptual accounts of pain. Then, we explore how pain is involved in complex ways with (...) modalities of pleasure and displeasure, enacted personal meaning, and contexts of empathy or shame. We aim to show why a phenomenology of pain must acknowledge the richness and diversity of peculiar painful experiences. The second section then weaves these critical insights into Husserlian phenomenology of embodiment, sensation, and localisation. We introduce the distinction between Body-Object and Lived-Body to show how pain presents intersubjectively. Furthermore, we stress that, while pain seems to take a marginal position in Husserl’s whole corpus, its role is central in the transcendental constitution of the Lived-Body, interacting with the personal, interpersonal, and intersubjective levels of experiential constitution. Taking a critical-phenomenological perspective, we then concretely explore how some people may experience structural conditions which may make their experiences more or less painful. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

First, to what level of quality can medical ethics a spire, if it ignores callous discrimination in medrcal practice against large populations of the innocent poor? Second, how effective can such theories be in addressing the critical issues of medical and clinical ethics if they are unable to contribute to the closing of the gap of sociomedical disparity?Marcio Fabri dos Anjos, Medical Ethics in the Developing World: A Liberation Theology Perspective.

Medicine and its allied health sciences have for too long been peripherally involved in work on human rights. Fifty years ago, the door to greater involvement was opened by Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which underlined social and economic rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in (...) the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”. (shrink)

Fast and effective detection of the causative agent of malaria in humans, protozoan Plasmodium parasites, is of crucial importance for increasing the effectiveness of treatment and to control a devastating disease that affects millions of people living in endemic areas. The microscopic examination of Giemsa‐stained blood films still remains the gold‐standard in Plasmodium detection today. However, there is a high demand for alternative diagnostic methods that are simple, fast, highly sensitive, ideally do not rely on blood‐drawing and can potentially be (...) conducted by the patients themselves. Here, the history of Plasmodium detection is discussed, and advantages and disadvantages of diagnostic methods that are currently being applied are assessed. (shrink)

The consequences of foreign direct investment (FDI) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the impact of FDI varies across industries. In particular, extractive firms in the oil and mining industries go where the resources are located and are bound to such investment, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting repressive rulers (“location-bound effect”). The same is not true for nonextractive multinational corporations (MNCs) in manufacturing or services, which can, in comparison, (...) exit problematic countries more easily. We also propose that strong democratic institutions can alleviate negative impacts of extractive FDI on human rights (“democratic safeguard effect”). Using U.S. FDI broken up into extractive and nonextractive industries in 157 host countries (1999–2015), we find support for these propositions.1 Extractive FDI is associated with more human rights abuse, but nonextractive FDI is associated with less abuse, after controlling for other factors, including concerns about endogeneity. We find also that the negative human rights impact of extractive FDI vanishes in countries where democratic institutions are stronger. Our results are robust to a range of alternative estimation techniques. (shrink)

While the Internet has emerged as a significant resource for women negotiating the questions and circumstances that arise during conception, pregnancy and childbirth, it remains unclear what role the Internet plays in challenging the current biomedical paradigm and empowering women to make meaningful choices. This article explores how women use the Internet to manage their pregnancies and mediate their doctor–patient relationships, particularly examining the role of social class and personal health history in shaping such Internet use. Drawing from in-depth interviews (...) with white middle-class mothers, the findings show that rather than using technology to resist the dominant biomedical paradigm, most women turned to online resources that affirmed mainstream medical authority and continued to rely on their doctors. By providing the means to confirm normalcy and take control in their reproductive experiences, the Internet enables socially privileged women to more fully perform the informed patient role in order to demonstrate their competence as mothers. (shrink)

Here, we compare birdsong and human musicality using insights from songbird neuroethology and evolution. For example, neural recordings during songbird duetting and other coordinated vocal behaviors could inform mechanistic hypotheses regarding human brain function during music-making. Furthermore, considering songbird evolution as a model system suggests that selection favoring certain culturally transmitted behaviors can indirectly select for associated underlying neural functions.

We examined whether positive and negative affect motivates verbal and spatial working memory processes, respectively, which have implications for the expenditure of mental effort. We argue that when emotion promotes cognitive tendencies that are goal incompatible with task demands, greater cognitive effort is required to perform well. We sought to investigate whether this increase in cognitive effort impairs behavioural control over a broad domain of self-control tasks. Moreover, we predicted that individuals with higher behavioural inhibition system (BIS) sensitivities would report (...) more negative affect within the goal incompatible conditions because such individuals report higher negative affect during cognitive challenge. Positive or negative affective states were induced followed by completing a verbal or spatial 2-back working memory task. All participants then completed one of three self-control tasks. Overall, we observed that conditions of emotion and working memory incompatibility (positive/spatial and negative/verbal) performed worse on the self-control tasks, and within the incompatible conditions individuals with higher BIS sensitivities reported more negative affect at the end of the study. The combination of findings suggests that emotion and working memory compatibility reduces cognitive effort and impairs behavioural control. (shrink)

While previous research considering the emergence of strategic alliances has typically viewed their formation through a single theoretical lens, we suggest that multiple theoretical perspectives are needed to understand their complexity. This research conceptually integrates the resource-based view and institutional theory to assess variations in firm-level motivations to form strategic alliances. Applying these ideas to the context of complex environmental problems, we propose that strategic alliances typically are either competency- or legitimacy-oriented, and that four structural dimensions characterize both types of (...) alliances—organization learning, partner diversity, governance structure, and partner relations. We present research propositions that describe how alliances differ along these dimensions, and offer an important broader perspective on alliance formation that is applicable towards understanding their strategic and social outcomes. (shrink)

Digital contact tracing, in combination with widespread testing, has been a focal point for many plans to “reopen” economies while containing the spread of Covid‐19. Most digital contact tracing projects in the United States and Europe have prioritized privacy protections in the form of local storage of data on smartphones and the deidentification of information. However, in the prioritization of privacy in this narrow form, there is not sufficient attention given to weighing ethical trade‐offs within the context of a public (...) health pandemic or to the need to evaluate safety and effectiveness of software‐based technology applied to public health. (shrink)

Human–robot interactions are often affected by error situations that are caused by either the robot or the human. Therefore, robots would profit from the ability to recognize when error situations occur. We investigated the verbal and non-verbal social signals that humans show when error situations occur in human–robot interaction experiments. For that, we analyzed 201 videos of five human–robot interaction user studies with varying tasks from four independent projects. The analysis shows that there are two types of error situations: social (...) norm violations and technical failures. Social norm violations are situations in which the robot does not adhere to the underlying social script of the interaction. Technical failures are caused by technical shortcomings of the robot. The results of the video analysis show that the study participants use many head movements and very few gestures, but they often smile, when in an error situation with the robot. The results suggest that participants do not see the robot as a social interaction partner with comparable communication skills. Our findings have implications for builders and evaluators of human–robot interaction systems. The builders need to consider including modules for recognition and classification of head movements to the robot input channels. The evaluators need to make sure that the presence of an experimenter does not skew the results of their user studies. (shrink)

Despite the propensity of species introductions to disrupt ecosystems through community disassembly, the use of species translocations is becoming more widely accepted. In this paper, we examine ethical investigations into human migration in an attempt to evaluate how translocation may be justified. Previous attempts to make the analogy between human and species migration have been prone to black and white thinking. We argue that the disagreement between nativist and cosmopolitan approaches to introduced species can be defused by extending the analogy (...) through the migration ethics literature. Additionally, by extending the discussion to the special status of refugees, we are able to develop a theoretical framework for species migrations that acknowledges the risk of species introduction while recognising that special obligations towards endangered species may necessitate the use of translocations. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on the simple sounding question: What is it to have sex? On the assumption that having sex is what you do with all and only your sexual part-ners, this offers a way of focusing the question: What would it take for a sex robot to be a sex partner? In order to understand the significance of the development of robots with whom (or which) we can have sex, we need to know what it is to (...) have sex with a robot. And in order to know this, we have to know what it is to have sex, period. In the bulk of the chapter, we develop an account of shared sexual agency we think is a plausible precondition of genuinely having sex. In the final section, we remark briefly on the issue of what it would take to form a sexual we (as we call it) with a robot. For if we can do this, we can probably have sex with robots; but if we can’t, we can’t. (shrink)

L’utopie est nominalement un nulle part qui est aussi, comme nous le dit Thomas More, un “bon” endroit. Bien qu’il existe des notions concurrentes, la description grecque occupe une place importante dans la plupart des récits d’utopie. Les détails de cet idéal sont si précis que la littérature utopique consiste en un catalogue (et une critique) de ces caractéristiques. Cet essai attire l’attention sur le parfum attribué aux « Îles des bienheureux » de Lucien, ainsi que sur la description qu’en (...) fait Nietzsche, sur sa sensibilité à l’odorat et sur l’attention portée par Illich à l’« atmosphère » et au nez. On aborde également le scepticisme envers l’utopie et des parallèles sont établis, d’une part, avec les critiques pragmatiques de l’utopie comme étant intrinsèquement totalitaires, d’autre part, avec la « bonne vie » dans la théorie politique et le défaut programmatique de la fantaisie techno-utopique. L’article se termine par une discussion d’Illich sur la pax – c’est-à-dire la respiration. (shrink)

McCradden et al. propose to close the “AI chasm” between algorithms and clinically meaningful application using the norms of evidence-based medicine and clinical research, with the rat...

E.O. Wright, using the labourtransfer and game theory approach of J. Roemer, provides a general framework for a comparative analysis of the different class systems, the historical variations of which are founded on the peculiar nature of the "asset" the dominant class appropriates.

This issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy contains three papers on a topic of increasing importance within the field of "neurolaw"-namely, the implications for criminal law of direct brain intervention based mind altering techniques. To locate these papers' topic within a broader context, I begin with an overview of some prominent topics in the field of neurolaw, where possible providing some references to relevant literature. The specific questions asked by the three authors, as well as their answers and central claims, (...) are then sketched out, and I end with a brief comment to explain why this particular topic can be expected to gain more prominence in coming years. (shrink)

Geoffrey Hill’s prose has prompted longstanding critical controversy, much of which turns on the perceived difficulty, intransigence and anachronism of his œuvre as a whole. This paper proposes that new ways to navigate this controversy can be found in Hill’s preoccupation with the exemplary dimensions of writing – that is, in his interest in the poet’s capacity to offer examples (positive and negative) to a community of readers. The discussion pays particular attention to the connections Hill’s reviews establish between style (...) and ethical choice and between literary difficulty and democracy ; connections which are intertwined with his ethics of exemplarity in fundamental ways. The paper also engages with those dimensions of literary exemple-use which emerge in new or unusual ways in his prose : his presentation of “models” or ideals for the organisation of civil society ; his treatment of certain literary works as exemplars or embodiments of philosophical ideas ; and his procedural tic of “sampling” regularly for the purpose of chastisement the “bad example” set by some of the works he criticises. (shrink)

In 1849, Kierkegaard published The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses, which were closely followed by two discourses on the woman who was a sinner, published in 1849 and 1850. I argue that these discourses are intended to set the stage to learn how to embody Christian love from the woman. Kierkegaard’s claims about what is required to teach Christian virtue imply that the woman becomes more than loving, she becomes love. I explore (...) his notion of acquired originality and how applied philosophical concepts such as automaticity and skillful coping elucidate this notion. (shrink)

The study of human-human communication and the development of computational models for human-agent communication have diverged significantly throughout the last decade. Yet, despite frequently made claims of “super-human performance” in, e.g., speech recognition or image processing, so far, no system is able to lead a half-decent coherent conversation with a human. In this paper, we argue that we must start to re-consider the hallmarks of cooperative communication and the core capabilities that we have developed for it, and which conversational agents (...) need to be equipped with: incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. We base our argument on a vast body of work on human-human communication and its psychological processes that we reason to be relevant and necessary to take into account when modeling human-agent communication. We contrast those with current conceptualizations of human-agent interaction and formulate suggestions for the development of future systems. (shrink)

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have in recent years occupied a central position in conservation and climate discussions among both scientists and policy makers. NbS generally refer to a set of strategies which use nature, or natural objects, to address societal (human) issues while simultaneously supporting the broader environment. This paper examines the concept of NbS to determine whether it is a useful and well-motivated category to guide future climate and conservation efforts. I argue that NbS may in fact be a valuable (...) contribution to environmental thought and policy, but not for the reasons that they are typically thought to be. Specifically: while we have reason to doubt that NbS should be prioritized over other environmental strategies on the grounds that they are uniquely environmentally-friendly or supportive of biodiversity, they may nevertheless have an advantage insofar as they play a vital aesthetic role in developing a healthier relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. (shrink)

Rule is commonly conceptualized with reference to the compliance it invokes. In this article, we propose a conception of rule via the practice of resistance instead. In contrast to liberal approaches, we stress the possibility of illegitimate rule, and, as opposed to critical approaches, the possibility of legitimate authority. In the international realm, forms of rule and the changes they undergo can thus be reconstructed in terms of the resistance they provoke. To this end, we distinguish between two types of (...) resistance—opposition and dissidence—in order to demonstrate how resistance and rule imply each other. We draw on two case studies of resistance in and to international institutions to illustrate the relationship between rule and resistance and close with a discussion of the normative implications of such a conceptualization. (shrink)

Graphic and gut-wrenching images of death, violence, and pain fill our news media, despite debate about their effect on audiences and their potential to harm their subjects. This research uses in-d...

An influential heuristic for thinking about climate adaptation asserts that “natural” adaptation strategies are the best ones. This heuristic has been roundly criticized but is difficult to dislodge in the absence of an alternative. We introduce a new heuristic that assesses adaptation strategies by looking at their maturity, power, and commitment. Maturity is the extent to which we understand an adaptation strategy’s effects. Power is the size of the effect an adaptation strategy will have. Commitment is the degree to which (...) an adaptation strategy is difficult to test or reverse. (shrink)

While the agricultural knowledges and practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and women have shaped agriculture in the US, these knowledges have been colonized, exploited, and appropriated, cleaving space for the presently dominant white male agricultural narrative. Simultaneously, these knowledges and practices have been transformed to fit within a society that values individualism, production, efficiency, and profit. The authors use a decolonial Feminist Political Ecology framework to highlight the ways in which the knowledges of Indigenous, Black, and women (...) farmers have been and are being colonized; a tradition that makes alternative agriculture a predominantly white space. The authors interviewed 10 BIPOC and women farmers in Colorado to understand what values and knowledges were shaping their often-appropriated agricultural practices. Three themes emerged: people, place, and patterns. By centering these values, farmers create relational agricultural practices that support the well-being of human and more-than-human beings. To support the widespread implementation of these practices, food systems practitioners must elevate the voices and knowledges of historically excluded farmers. Only then can truly just and equitable alternative agricultural practices be realized in the US. (shrink)

Editors' introduction to Puncta's February 2022 Special Issue, "Pandemic Politics and Phenomenology.".