Introduction: find your way -- Orientations toward objects -- Sexual orientation -- The orient and other others -- Conclusion: disorientation and queer objects.

The paper suggests that we can usefully approach whiteness through the lens of phenomenology. Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they `take up' space, and what they `can do'. The paper considers how whiteness functions as a habit, even a bad habit, which becomes a background to social action. The paper draws on experiences of inhabiting a white world as a non-white body, and explores how whiteness becomes worldly (...) through the noticeability of the arrival of some bodies more than others. A phenomenology of whiteness helps us to notice institutional habits; it brings what is behind to the surface in a certain way. (shrink)

We have no interest whatever in minimizing the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise abusive biologisms, or the urgency of their exposure, that has made the gravamen of so many contemporary projects of critique. At the same time, we fear — with installation of an automatic antibiologism as the unshifting tenet of `theory' — the loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm. I was left wondering what danger had been averted by the exclusion of biology. What does (...) the nominative `biological or anatomical body' actually refer to? And what secures the separation of its inadmissible matter from the proper purview of Irigaray's textual interventions? When I asked a question to this effect it was met with a certain nervous comprehension. Deciding, perhaps, that I must still be immersed in a precritical understanding of the body, the speaker dismissed me with a revealing theatrical gesture. As if to emphasize the sheer absurdity of my question she pinched herself and commented `Well I don't mean this body'. And so it seemed with a gesture so matter of fact that it required no further comment, the fact of matter was both decided and dispatched. Feminism has been as deeply implicated in routinized antiessentialism as any of our critical procedures. Even though questions of `the body' have become increasingly fashionable in all manner of feminist projects, the schedule of feminism's antibiologism has been little altered. In most of these projects on `the body', the body in question is pursued in its socially, experientially, or psychically constituted forms, but rarely in its physiologically, biochemically, or microbiologically constituted form, the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive. Despite an avowed interest in the body, there is a persistent distaste for biological detail. These feminist theories have usually been reluctant to engage with biological data: they retain, and encourage, the fierce antibiologism that marked the emergence of second wave feminism. That feminist scholars are particularly prone to a `knee jerk constructivism' helps explain the reluctance of those in the humanities to engage seriously with the claims of science. This book functions primarily as a reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism and questions of the politics of globalisation, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research, if not necessary to, then certainly useful for more incisively formulating the concepts on which they so heavily, if implicitly rely. It is written as a remembrance of what we have forgotten — not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time. We have forgotten the nature, the ontology, of the body, the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency. We have forgotten where we come from. (shrink)

This comment addresses opportunities for understanding the social functions of emotion by taking a developmental perspective. I agree that understanding emotions and their development will meaningf...

Both adults’ habits-of-thought and their understanding of children’s stories shape how adults interpret children’s participation in conversations. In the light of the requests on children’s rights that follow from the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) this paper stresses the relevance of authorities having semiotically informed knowledge on children’s meaning-making within conversations with adults. In Article 12, the CRC stipulates the right of children to participate in and to be heard about decisions that affect their everyday lives. According (...) to the same Article, however, these rights can be restrained, based on the authority’s judgements of the child’s age and maturity. Sociological studies have highlighted the importance of adopting the child’s perspective in judging matters that concern her. The present paper further suggests that narrow conceptualization of the sign can help one to observe different levels of meaning in adults’ and children’s conversations better. Although Paul Ricoeur did not investigate children’s narratives per se, his theory of narratives and narrativity offers a phenomenological approach to development that allows for better theoretical discriminations of narrative as a semiotic resource, and can thus assist adults in truly listening to children. (shrink)

Despite the enormous progress made in the advancement of health technologies over the last century, infectious diseases continue to cause significant morbidity and mortality in developing countries. Neglected diseases are a subset of infectious diseases that lack treatments that are effective, simple to use, or affordable. Neglected diseases primarily affect populations in poor countries that do not constitute a lucrative market sector, thus failing to provide incentives for the pharmaceutical industry to conduct R&D for these diseases. Of the treatments that (...) do exist for neglected diseases, most are completely out-dated, with poor side-effect profiles, cumbersome logistics of administration, and inadequate efficacy. Historically, the impetus for a majority of neglected disease research was driven by early 20th-century colonialism, and in the post-colonial era, these diseases have been virtually ignored. Of the 1556 New Chemical Entities brought to market during the 30-year period from 1975 to 2004, only 20 — less than 0.02% — were for neglected diseases. (shrink)

This article examines ‘collective feelings’ by considering how ‘others’ create impressions on the surfaces of bodies. Rather than considering ‘collective feeling’ as ‘fellow feeling’ or in terms of feeling ‘for’ the collective, the article suggests that how we respond to others in intercorporeal encounters creates the impression of a collective body. In other words, how we feel about others is what aligns us with a collective, which paradoxically ‘takes shape’ only as an effect of such alignments. The article considers different (...) examples of racism in which a particular other is held in place by being aligned with other others. The ‘moment of contact’ is shaped by past histories of contact, which allows the proximity of a racial other to be perceived as threatening, at the same time as it re-shapes the bodies in the contact zone of the encounter. Feelings rehearse associations that are already in place, in the way in which they ‘read’ the proximity of others, at the same time as they establish the ‘truth’ of the reading. The article extends its analysis by showing that bodily proximity is not required to create the impressions of others, and offers an analysis of ‘collective feelings’ within virtual communities of global nomads. Proximity does not require physical co-presence: the collective can ‘surface’ through giving up on local attachments. The article concludes that collective feelings are not feelings that the collective ‘has’, as if the collective was a subject. Rather the collective is an effect of the impressions left by others on the surfaces of skins. (shrink)

This qualitative study examines the expectations and beliefs parents, students, and teachers have about the teaching of heritage histories in public high schools. Students from three heritage groups, as well as their parents and teachers, were interviewed to shed light on this complex, often silent, relationship. This study is grounded in literature about the purposes of history education, historical distance, and collective memory/heritage, which give shape to and help to explicate some of the more complex issues inherent in the teaching (...) of heritage histories. Participants included four Hmong students, three of their parents, and their teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota; eight Chinese students, nine of their parents, and their teacher in Elmdale, California; and five Jewish students, five of their parents, and their teacher in Maple Lake, Illinois. Findings indicate that the three stakeholder groups believe that the public school history classroom is an appropriate and desired place for heritage histories to be taught. This is complicated, however, by several factors: the placement of the heritage history narratives within larger curricular and mainstream narratives, how the teachers choose to incorporate the heritage narratives into the formal classroom curriculum, and the changing nature of historical and generational distance. (shrink)

Recent advances in immunology have provided a foundation of knowledge to understand many of the intricacies involved in manipulating the human response to fight parasitic infections, and a great deal has been learned from malaria vaccine efforts regarding strategies for developing parasite vaccines. There has been some encouraging progress in the development of a Chagas vaccine in animal models. A prize fund for Chagas could be instrumental in ensuring that these efforts are translated into products that benefit patients.

A way is found to add axioms to sequent calculi that maintains the eliminability of cut, through the representation of axioms as rules of inference of a suitable form. By this method, the structural analysis of proofs is extended from pure logic to free-variable theories, covering all classical theories, and a wide class of constructive theories. All results are proved for systems in which also the rules of weakening and contraction can be eliminated. Applications include a system of predicate logic (...) with equality in which also cuts on the equality axioms are eliminated. (shrink)

Background Families whose child has unexplained intellectual or developmental differences often hope that a genetic diagnosis will lower barriers to community-based therapeutic and support services. However, there is little known about efforts to mobilize genetic information outside the clinic or how socioeconomic disadvantage shapes and constrains outcomes.Methods We conducted an ethnographic study with predominantly socioeconomically disadvantaged families enrolled in a multi-year genomics research study, including clinic observations and in-depth interviews in English and Spanish at multiple time points. Coding and thematic (...) development were used to collaboratively interpret fieldnotes and transcripts.Results Thirty-two families participated. Themes included familial expectations that a genetic diagnosis could be translated into information, understanding, and assistance to improve the quality of a child’s day-to-day life. After sequencing, however, genetic information was not readily converted into improved access to services beyond the clinic, with families often struggling to use a genetic diagnosis to advocate for their child.Conclusion Families’ ability to use a genetic diagnosis as an effective advocacy tool beyond the clinic was limited by the knowledge and resources available to them, and by the eligibility criteria used by therapeutic service providers’ – which focused on clinical diagnosis and functional criteria more than etiologic information. All families undertaking genomic testing, particularly those who are disadvantaged, need additional support to understand the limits and potential benefits of genetic information beyond the clinic. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that corporate social responsibility is institutionalised amongst multinational corporations. Yet CSR scholarship faces considerable challenges. An agreed definition is lacking, even amongst researchers adopting aligned approaches. Studies remain heavily focused on making a business case for CSR, despite its widespread acceptance into business practice. Few studies examine CSR’s on-ground implications for the communities it purports to help, favouring instead a macro-level focus. And concerns about CSR’s sincerity, motivations and ethics perpetuate questions about its integrity. This article argues (...) that new institutionalism is well placed to respond to these core challenges for CSR, and that new institutionalist perspectives can complement and enrich other common theoretical approaches. It contributes a social mechanism-based framework for CSR, identifying and exploring the key social mechanisms that institutionalise it; namely, discourse, mimesis, normative learning and coercion. Understanding CSR as an institution facilitates new and different explorations of its causes and effects and opens new avenues for scholarly inquiry. Illustrative examples from a 3.5-year study of CSR in the global mining industry are presented to explore the implications of CSR as an institution and to suggest pathways for innovative research. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people’s perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an (...) urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020. The social restrictions imposed through national legislation divided the 69-day period into three phases. We collected observations, field audio recordings, photography, and diary notes on 50 days. Experts in soundscape and architecture were presented with the recordings, in randomized order, and made two separate perceptual analyses. One group rated the recordings for pleasantness and eventfulness using an adapted version of the Swedish Soundscape Quality Protocol, and a partly overlapping group annotated perceived sound events with free-form semantic labels. The labels were systematically classified into a four-level Taxonomy of Sound Sources, allowing an estimation of the relative amounts of Natural, Human, and Technological sounds. Loudness and three descriptors developed for bioacoustics were extracted computationally. Analysis showed that Eventfulness, Acoustic Complexity, and Acoustic Richness increased significantly over the time period, while the amount of Technological sounds decreased. These observations were interpreted as reflecting changes in people’s outdoor activities and behavior over the whole 69-day period, evidenced in an increased presence of Human sounds of voices and walking, and a significant shift from motorized vehicles toward personal mobility devices, again evidenced by perceived sounds. Quantitative results provided a backdrop against which qualitative analyses of diary notes and observations were interpreted in relation to the restrictions and the architectural specifics of the site. An integrated analysis of all sources pointed at the temporary suspension of human outdoor activity as the main reason for such a change. In the third phase, the progressive return of street life and the usage of personal mobility vehicles seemed to be responsible for a clear increase in Eventfulness and Loudness even in the context of an overall decrease of Technological sounds. Indoor human activity shared through open windows and an increased presence of birdsong emerge as a novel characteristic element of the local urban soundscape. We discuss how such changes in the acoustic environment of the site, in acoustic measurements and as perceived by humans, point toward the soundscape being a crucial component of a comprehensive urban design strategy that aims to improve health and quality of life for increasingly large and dense populations in the future. (shrink)

In this article, I examine racial narratives of passing and their relationship to discourses of hybridity. Rather than defining passing as inherently transgressive, or as one side of identity politics or the other, I suggest that passing must be understood in relationship to forms of social antagonism. I ask the following questions: how are differences that threaten the system recuperated? How do ambiguous or hybrid bodies get read in a way which further supports the enunciative power of those who are (...) telling the difference? In what ways is `passing' implicated in the very discourse around tellable differences? Although to some extent all identities involve passing - insofar as the subject never `is' what it `images' itself to be - we still need to theorize the differences between passing as white and passing as black. I argue that passing as black as a white subject can function as a technique of knowledge which assumes `blackness' to be imageable and hence beable. However, for black subjects to refuse to pass as white - that is, for black subjects to pass as black - can make visible the violent histories concealed by the invisibility of the mark of passing. Such a process of passing as black subjects is tied to a politics of the collective - a coming together through the recognition of the lack that engenders passing in the first place. (shrink)

As a philosopher interested in biomedical ethics, I find recent advances in genetic technologies both fascinating and frightening. Future technologies for genetic therapies and elimination of clearly deleterious genes offer us the ability to get rid of the cause of much human suffering, seemingly at its physiological root. But memories of past eugenics programs gone horribly awry must make cautious our initial optimism for these generally well-intentioned programs. Most often the scientist proceeds in research with the best of intentions, but (...) that does not make all scientific investigation worth pursuing. (shrink)

A case study in the kinds of problems to expect from this increasingly popular marketing tactic.

The contributors to two new anthologies A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity and Feminist Epistemologies are philosophers for whom feminism is an intellectual as well as political commitment and they produce original, valuable feminist and philosophical work. I focus on differences between the anthologies and on two themes: the social character of knowledge and the allegedly oppressive “masculinism” of epistemological ideals.

The development of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice has transformed the European Union and placed fundamental rights at the core of EU integration and its principles of mutual recognition and trust. The impact of the AFSJ in the development of an EU standard of fundamental rights, which has come to the fore since the Treaty of Lisbon, is a topic of great theoretical and practical importance. This is the first systematic academic study of the AFSJ and its implications (...) from the point of view of fundamental rights. The contributions to this collection examine the normative and jurisprudential development of the AFSJ in order to assess its effects on the overall construction of the scope and standards of protection of EU fundamental rights in this particularly complex and sensitive field of integration. The expert contributors systematically map and critically assess this area of EU law, together with the relevant case-law. (shrink)

In a 1983 interview with Christine Weiland, Gloria Anzaldúa posited that human and nonhuman connectivity exists outside hierarchical arrangements. Some twenty years after Anzaldúa’s interview, the “Speculative Turn” emerged in continental philosophy which critiques anthropocentrism in modern philosophy and reconceptualizes nonhuman subjectivity. While Anzaldúa’s scholarship addresses core issues that are highlighted by the speculative turn, little scholarship exists that places her into conversation with these new trajectories in continental philosophy. In this essay, I aim to contribute to this nascent scholarship (...) and explore the question, How can Anzaldúa’s creative work contribute to and expand scholarship of the speculative turn? I investigate how Anzaldúa’s work can help bridge connections between differing veins of speculative turn thought, specifically Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism. Conversations between Harman and Bennett demonstrate a split in understanding nonhuman autonomy and relationality and represent incompatibilities between OOP and VM. Interested in these departures, I posit that Anzaldúa’s creative works, such as poetry and drawing, offer ways to challenge problematic human/nonhuman relations and bridge philosophical divides within the speculative turn. (shrink)

The integrity of critical ethnography requires engagement in reflexive practice at all phases of the research process. In this discussion paper, I explore the insights and challenges of reflexive practice in an ethnographic study of the recovery experiences of black trauma patients in a Philadelphia hospital. Observation and interviews were conducted with twelve patients who were admitted to trauma‐designated units of the hospital over the course of a year. During fieldwork, I learned the ways that my background as a professional (...) nurse structured my way of being in clinical space and facilitated a particular interpretation of clinical culture. In analysis, reflection on subjectivities through which I designed this ethnographic research allowed me to see beyond my preconceived and theoretically informed perspective to permit unexpected features of the field to emerge. Reflexive practice also guided my reconciliation of key practical and epistemological differences between clinical ethnographic research and the anthropologic tradition in which it is rooted. I conclude that with careful reflection to the subjectivities that influence the research process, interdisciplinary clinically relevant applied interpretations of critical ethnographic work can be used to generate detailed knowledge across contexts in clinical care, nursing practice, and patient experiences. (shrink)

This article approaches certain dynamics, tensions and gaps that emerge in the concept of innovation and entrepreneurship when examining forms of creation, production, collaboration and competition in the real time visual/video intervention of videojockeys (VJs).

Desde una hermenéutica ontológica política se hacen visibles y audibles prácticas singulares a partir del punto de vista de los estudios latinoamericanos, los cuales apelan por una perspectiva de afirmación como propone Arturo Escobar respecto a una mirada sobre la diversidad y singularidad de accio..

To fully embrace situations of radical uncertainty, we argue that the theory should abandon the requirements that narratives, in general, must lead toaffective evaluation, and that they have toexplain(and potentiallysimulate) all or even the bulk of the current decisional context. Evidence from studies of incidental learning show that narrative schemata can bias decisions while remaining fragmentary, insufficient for prediction, and devoid of utility values.