This review critically engages with Radhika Desai’s concept of geopolitical economy as a framework for understanding the evolution of the capitalist state system. While presenting a useful challenge to many of the most deeply-held beliefs in International Relations theory, Desai’s over-reliance on a geopolitical lens produces a relatively one-sided account of the ways in which capitalism forges distinct international regimes and ideological formations under a given set of historical conditions of possibility. Thus, Desai’s somewhat opaque reading (...) of the international relations of capitalism clouds our understanding of what the current conjuncture might entail for any possible future beyond the social discipline of capital. (shrink)

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes (Berg & Timmermans, 2000, p. 31). This kind of scientific evidence is seen by policy makers as being free of prejudice and ideology. Science is expected to represent the truth, state universal facts and make predictions. (...) Thus PISA seeks to rank countries' performances, work out future scenarios and offer policy direction. By what means does PISA gain knowledge and speak with confidence about diverse cultures and distant nations? How does it acquire a ‘voice from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1988; Suchman, 2000), and become a modern-day Oracle that countries might consult for policy advice? Modelled on early actor-network accounts of laboratory life, this ethnography traces how PISA knowledge comes to be made, guided by interview data with two ‘insiders’ in the ‘PISA laboratory’. It traces the translations and the circulating reference that turn PISA into a ‘centre of calculation’. It highlights how human and non-human entities are imbricated in the assembling of scientific facts and argues for a suspension of the divide between ‘science’ and ‘politics’. In the process, the paper offers an empirical instantiation of how some concepts from actor-network theory may be applied in the field of education policy, and ponders the implications of such an understanding for evidence based policy making. (shrink)

The legal status of the human body is hotly contested, yet the law of the body remains in a state of confusion and chaos. Sometimes the body is treated as an object of property, sometimes it is dealt with under the rubric of contract, and sometimes it is not conceived as property at all, but rather as the subject of privacy rights. Which body of law should become the law of the body? This question is even more pressing in the (...) context of current biomedical research, which permits commodification and commercialization of the body by everyone except the person who provides the “raw materials.” The lack of property protection for tangible parts of the human body is in stark contrast to the extensive protection granted to intellectual property in the body in the form of patents upon human genes and cell lines. Moreover, even courts that reject ownership claims on the part of those who supply body parts appear willing to grant property rights to scientists, universities, and others who use those body parts to conduct research and create products. (shrink)

Recent cases involving biosamples taken from indigenous tribes and newborn babies reveal the emptiness of informed consent. This venerable doctrine often functions as a charade, a collective fiction which thinly masks the uncomfortable fact that the subjects of human research are not actually afforded full information regarding the types of research that may be contemplated, nor do they provide meaningful consent. But if informed consent fails to provide adequate protection to the donors of biological materials, why not turn to principles (...) of property law? Property is power, yet current law permits everyone except for those who donate biological materials to possess property rights. The reluctance to invoke property probably stems from fears of resurrecting slavery and the commodification of human beings. But ironically, avoidance of property transforms the subjects of human research into objects that can be owned only by others, resulting in new forms of oppression and exploitation. Human research subjects are autonomous individuals who should not only possess the power to contribute their biological materials, but also the right to help control the course of research, and to share in the resulting benefits or profits. Conferring body property might enable research subjects to regain power and a measure of self-sovereignty. (shrink)

The classic questions of philosophical aesthetics—how and why human beings find certain works of art beautiful or sublime—suffered from something of a hiatus in the twentieth century, but the study of beauty has seen a return in recent years, often calling on rapidly evolving research in cognitive science and neuroscience for assistance. Patrick Colm Hogan's Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts is an important contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of cognitive aesthetics. The book makes (...) a brave attempt to bring together insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and literature to explain aesthetic response and justification.Hogan's focus is on the minutiae of... (shrink)

It is universally accepted that genetic control over basic aspects of cell and molecular biology is the primary organizing principle in development and homeostasis of living systems. However, instances do exist where important aspects of biological order arise without explicit genetic instruction, emerging instead from simple physical principles, stochastic processes, or the complex self‐organizing interaction between random and seemingly unrelated parts. Being mostly resistant to direct genetic dissection, the analysis of such emergent processes falls into a grey area between mathematics, (...) physics and molecular cell biology and therefore remains very poorly understood. We recently proposed a mathematical model predicting the emergence of a specific non‐Gaussian distribution of polygonal cell shapes from the stochastic cell division process in epithelial cell sheets; this cell shape distribution appears to be conserved across a diverse set of animals and plants.1 The use of such topological models to study the process of cellular morphogenesis has a long history, starting almost a century ago, and many insights from those original works influence current experimental studies. Here we review current and past literature on this topic while exploring some new ideas on the origins and implications of topological order in proliferating epithelia. BioEssays 30:260–266, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This article compares three frameworks for legal regulation of the human body. Property law systematically favors those who use the body to create commercial products. Yet contract and privacy rights cannot compete with the property paradigm, which alone affords a complete bundle of rights enforceable against the whole world. In the face of researchers' property rights, the theoretical freedom to contract and the meager interest in privacy leave those who supply body parts vulnerable to exploitation.

Selective reduction and abortion both involve the termination of fetal life, but they are classified by different designations to underscore the notion that they are regarded as fundamentally different medical procedures: the two are performed using distinct techniques by different types of physicians, upon women under very different circumstances, in order to further dramatically different objectives. Hence, the two procedures appear to call for a distinct moral calculus, and they have traditionally evoked contradictory reactions from society. This essay posits that (...) despite their different appellations, selective reduction and abortion are essentially equivalent. (shrink)

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes (Berg & Timmermans, 2000, p. 31). This kind of scientific evidence is seen by policy makers as being free of prejudice and ideology. Science is expected to represent the truth, state universal facts and make predictions. (...) Thus PISA seeks to rank countries' performances, work out future scenarios and offer policy direction. By what means does PISA gain knowledge and speak with confidence about diverse cultures and distant nations? How does it acquire a ‘voice from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1988; Suchman, 2000), and become a modern‐day Oracle that countries might consult for policy advice? Modelled on early actor‐network accounts of laboratory life, this ethnography traces how PISA knowledge comes to be made, guided by interview data with two ‘insiders’ in the ‘PISA laboratory’. It traces the translations and the circulating reference that turn PISA into a ‘centre of calculation’. It highlights how human and non‐human entities are imbricated in the assembling of scientific facts and argues for a suspension of the divide between ‘science’ and ‘politics’. In the process, the paper offers an empirical instantiation of how some concepts from actor‐network theory may be applied in the field of education policy, and ponders the implications of such an understanding for evidence based policy making. (shrink)

Résumé En Afrique du Sud, de nouveaux mouvements communautaires, où dominent les femmes, les jeunes, les pauvres, où tout le monde participe, sont apparus depuis la fin de l’apartheid. Ils luttent contre l’ANC, refusent de payer les services publics pour compenser les diminutions d’allocations, essaient d’inventer de nouveaux services. Les anciens militants de la libération nationale sont forcés de revoir leurs alliances et de se fondre dans ce mouvement horizontal. L’histoire est réécrite, hors des compromis que les luttes pour l’indépendance (...) avaient faits avec le colonisateur. Il s’agit de lutter contre les politiques imposées par la Banque mondiale et le Fonds monétaire international et, concrètement, contre les expulsions de logement et contre la privatisation des services et des espaces urbains. La communauté a cessé de croire en l’État, dans la figure du père. Alors les gens remplissent les logements vides comme ils l’entendent, avec qui ils veulent, brouillent la frontière entre légal et illégal. Ils s’inspirent de la lutte des piqueteros en Argentine et de ce qu’ils ont entendu de Seattle. (shrink)

There seems to be some initial evidence that team captains are selected based on non-leadership factors such as team tenure, technical abilities, being the daughter of the club president, or playing position. This is concerning since players expect their ideal team captain to have superior motivational and social skills. Adding to this literature on captain selection, the present study investigates relationships between the reasons for which team captains are selected and their perceived leadership quality; and perceived acceptance. To accomplish this, (...) we recruited 450 coaches and 198 players from Flemish football and volleyball teams. Participants evaluated 41 reasons on the extent to which they played a role in the selection of their team captain. Additionally, participants rated their team captain’s leadership quality and level of acceptance. The results consistently indicated that captains who were selected for having good motivational and social competencies were given higher ratings on perceived leadership quality and acceptance by participants. In conclusion, athletes who are motivated, good at motivating others and have superior social skills tend to be better suited for captaincy than those selected based on non-leadership factors. (shrink)

Unpublished writing on Jaina doctrines, philosophy, rituals, tirthankars, Gujarati Jain poets and their works.

_Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action_ offers researchers, practitioners, donors, and decisionmakers insights into entry points for education systems change needed to reorient human society’s relationship with our planetary systems.

Dobbs appears more extreme when juxtaposed against Roe’s hidden history. Justice Blackmun was the author of Roe, but the opinion was the product of a remarkable collaboration that incorporated the suggestions of many Justices. Thus, Roe’s medical framing embodied the vision of the Court as a whole, not one individual.

This chapter contains sections titled: ANT and the ‘PISA Laboratory’ PISA: An Overview Background to the Study Making PISA Knowledge From ‘World’ to ‘Word’ Engaging in a ‘Politics of Fact’ Notes References.

Partitions and their Afterlives engages with political partitions and how their aftermath affects the contemporary life of nations and their citizens.

In India, there has been a shift from using unclaimed bodies to voluntary body donation for anatomy dissections in medical colleges. This study used in-depth qualitative interviews to explore the deeper intent, values and attitudes towards body donation, the body and death, and expectations of the body donor, as well as their next of kin and representative religious scholars. All donors had enrolled in a body bequest programme in a medical school in South India. This study concludes that body donors (...) are philanthropists with deep-rooted values of altruism and service, who are often willing to forgo traditional religious and cultural death rituals. The next of kin are often uncomfortable with the donor’s decision, and this suggests that it is important that dialogue/counselling occurs at the time of the bequest, if the donor’s wishes are to be respected. Religious injunctions are often misinterpreted; this implies that religious leaders/scholars can play a significant role in addressing these misconceptions which are barriers to body donation. Body bequest programmes in India may be enhanced by positioning body donation as ‘daana’—giving without any expectation of return for a higher purpose, including ceremonies of respect in medical colleges. Furthermore, increased public engagement and awareness about body bequest programmes are also important to enhance participation. When medical students internalise what body donors expect of them, i.e. altruism, empathy with patients and becoming ‘good doctors’, it will help to ensure that the donation was not in vain and that the dead truly teach the living. (shrink)

This book opens the door to the effects of intellectual, educational, and economic colonization of young children throughout the world. Using a postcolonial lens on current educational practices, the authors hope to lift those practices out of reproducing traditional power structures and push our thinking beyond the adult/child dichotomy into new possibilities for the lives that are created with children.

This book concerns clinical psychology, but it is most concerned with the world outside the clinic. That world—where culture, history, and economy are found—radically impacts the public’s mental health. However these worldly considerations often do not feature centrally in the science and practice of clinical psychology, a subfield of psychology seemingly dedicated to mental health. Desai offers a corrective by travelling out of the clinic and into the world, exploring ideas, movements, and thinkers that help broaden our approach to (...) well-being, by situating it within its cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. The book aims to be an intercultural journey itself—encountering Buddhism, phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along the way. Featuring a Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs, the book positions pressing matters such as social justice, racial justice, and environmental justice as integral components of good mental health work. The book will be of interest to readers interested in cultural and community approaches to psychological science and practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has wide-ranging implications for the field of professional psychology. As clinical practice has rapidly adapted to ensure continuity of care, doctoral students have encountered unique opportunities for ethics-related competency development across practicum training settings. This article discusses the relevant American Psychological Association Ethics Code standards and additional ethical considerations facing trainees as they navigate their foundational clinical experiences and develop as professional psychologists in light of a pandemic.

This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway's (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts (...) are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin. (shrink)

AbstractIn her article from 2019, Fleur Johns describes a change: from a style of development work marked by a propensity for ‘planning’, to one marked by a propensity for ‘prototyping’. Our project in this paper is to propose a modest shift in perspective. Where Johns traces a transition from old to new styles, we emphasise the enduring links between planning and prototyping, such that both styles are best understood through their ongoing relationships and entanglements. Returning to Pulse Lab Jakarta (PLJ), (...) the site of Johns’ initial inquiry, we offer a reinterpretation of what might be novel about PLJ for development practice. Our claim is that to understand the particular intervention that PLJ represents, and the new modes of practice it produces, it may be helpful to understand PLJ's work in the manner of a ‘modular’ attachment to existing development apparatuses, that combines big data analytics with design thinking. We then develop some reflections and speculations on the forms and novelty of PLJ in light of our redescription of its work in the language of modularity. (shrink)

There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical-semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first- versus third-person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First-person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body modulated response latencies when responses were made along a front-back axis, consistent (...) with the action-sentence compatibility effect. This effect was not observed for third-person sentences. The ACE was observed when making responses along a left-right axis for third-person, but not first-person sentences.sentences did not show an ACE along either axis. These results show that perspective is a detail that is simulated during action sentence comprehension, and that motoric activations are flexible and affected by the pronominal perspective used in the sentence. (shrink)

The modern abundance and prominence of data has led to the development of “data science” as a new field of enquiry, along with a body of epistemological reflections upon its foundations, methods, and consequences. This article provides a systematic analysis and critical review of significant open problems and debates in the epistemology of data science. We propose a partition of the epistemology of data science into the following five domains: (i) the constitution of data science; (ii) the kind of enquiry (...) that it identifies; (iii) the kinds of knowledge that data science generates; (iv) the nature and epistemological significance of “black box” problems; and (v) the relationship between data science and the philosophy of science more generally. (shrink)

Modern Indian nationalist thought has dealt with political ideas such as freedom, equality, liberty, democracy, so on and so forth. The idea of freedom received enough attention on the part of most of the modern Indian political thinkers. However, the idea of freedom as envisaged by the nationalist thinkers did not receive positive response from the other stream of modern Indian thought. Dalit-Bahujan political thinkers questioned the narration of freedom as propagated by the nationalist thinkers. Nationalist thinkers aspired for universal (...) values and at the same time reaffirmed ancient religious principles. Such effort was questioned and doubted by the other thinkers of modern India. Thus, one can find different narrations of freedom, such as social, economic and political. The social categories such as caste, class and gender became bases for their narration on the idea of freedom. The ideas and arguments of B. G. Tilak, M. K. Gandhi, Pandita Ramabai, Jyotiba Phule, B. R. Ambedkar E. M. S. Namboodripad and others would help in larger understanding of the idea of freedom. (shrink)

Organizations have increasingly relied on team-based reward systems to boost productivity and foster collaboration. Drawing on the literature on ethics and justice as well as appraisal theories of emotion, we examine how team-based reward systems can have an insidious side effect: They increase the likelihood that employees remain silent when observing a team member engage in unethical behavior. Across four studies adopting different methods, measures, and samples, we found consistent evidence that people are less likely to report (i.e., speak up (...) or provide anonymous feedback about) a team member’s unethical behavior in team-based than in individual-based reward systems. Furthermore, our research reveals that this effect is primarily driven by a decrease in the experience of moral anger, which subsequently leads to a decreased likelihood of reporting unethical behavior when it benefits the team rather than the individual. We do not find support for perceived indirect benefit or envy as alternative explanations, suggesting that the decision to report a team member’s unethical behavior is not driven by calculative and selfish motives, but by moral motives. Finally, we establish that the effect is contingent on the observer and the perpetrator being members of the same team; it dissipates when the observer and the perpetrator are part of different teams. Our work contributes to research on reward systems and business ethics and provides practical implications for human resource practices. (shrink)