Climate adaptation research often ignores the broader socio-cultural human sphere within which climate change takes place. Dominant viewpoints on climate adaptation derive from the biophysical world that often excludes social, economic, and political contexts that also connect to biophysical changes. Hybrid methodological mixed methods approaches to climate adaptation provide paradigmatically different questions. This perspective is useful for identifying socio-cultural aspects of climatic adaptation. To demonstrate the power of a hybrid approach for interconnecting human and non-human factors implicated in climate adaptation, (...) we deploy an in-depth case study of N. Benin, West African farmers who increasingly must configure their farming methods to tackle erratic changes in weather. The case study examines the role gender dynamics play in climate adaptation that found few gender differences in the ways male and female farmers perceive the biophysical aspects of climate adaptation on their subsistence farming lifestyle from their initial village climate survey. However, the qualitative components of their study uncovered significant gender differences in socio-cultural adaptation challenges, vulnerabilities, and future lifestyle opportunities. We discuss the transformative policy implications about ignoring gender difference and the importance of taking an intersectional approach to variation in climate adaptation policy making. (shrink)

This study provides insight into factors that determine whether women in the college population who exhibit eating-disordered behavior during their college years recover during their postcollege years. The study assessed changes in the eating patterns of 21 women across a six-year time period, from sophomore year in college to two years postcollege. Eleven of the women get better during their postcollege year, whereas 10 of the women continue to struggle with disordered eating. The major differences between the two groups revolve (...) around the relationship between autonomy and relation. Women who get better negotiate the tension between autonomy and relatedness and are more likely to have higher selfesteem based on a more positive self-concept; this, in turn, leads to healthier relationships with food and body image. Two factors that appear to influence this negotiation include one's history of chronic physical or sexual abuse and the quality of familial messages about food, body image, relationship, and autonomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:594 Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards In the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, the great wizard admonishes Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Dorothy and company turn to see a man standing before a large (...) control panel operating the smoke, holographic image, and voice of the great wizard. Realizing he has been discovered, the man gives up manipulating the switches and the nebulous wizard vanishes.1 Hegemonic masculinity is analogous to the “all-powerful” wizard.2 In order to maintain its grandeur, power, and mystique, the mechanics of masculine ideology—as well as the social actors who participate in its reproduction —must be kept hidden.3 A crucial aim of feminist research is to 1. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn -Mayer, 1939). 2. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–61; Michael Kaufman, “Me, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 142– 63; and Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 119–42. 3. Michael Flood and Bob Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions,” Policy and Society 24, no. 4 (2005): 119–38; Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch 595 pull back the curtain on men’s lives and masculine institutions in order to demystify socially constructed masculinities, particularly in their most powerful forms. As early feminist scholars note, male privilege renders women’s lives invisible.4 But male privilege renders aspects of men’s lives invisible, too. In this article we highlight how institutional review boards (IRBs) in universities and hospitals erect barriers to research that render particular aspects of men’s lives invisible. We draw on our experiences of submitting ten applications for a series of methodologically diverse studies of masculinity to eight IRBs. First, we argue that, despite their original function of protecting subordinated groups, IRBs are gendered institutions in which members base their decisions on culturally dominant, normative images of women and men. We show how this results in the stringent protection of male research participants, the safeguarding of participants’ personal masculinity, and the shielding of men’s lives from social inquiry. Second, we argue that IRBs are gendering institutions. Our experiences reveal how the privileging and protection of masculinity results in mandatory protocol modifications that idealize hegemonic masculinity. These modifications require researcher-participant interactions that socialize men to engage in gender “appropriate” behavior and reify gendered expectations. Third, our experiences reveal the ways in which IRBs protect the institution itself and privilege the universities, hospitals, and (predominantly male) medical doctors they represent. Consequently, the ways they reproduce social inequality remain impervious to academic inquiry. IRBS AS GENDERED AND GENDERING INSTITUTIONS Every university and hospital in the United States where human research is conducted houses a human research protections program, or IRB, to oversee academic research. Universities with hospitals typically our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1951); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber and Michelle L. Yaiser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–96. 596 Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch maintain two types of IRB committees: a social-behavioral committee that oversees studies in the social sciences, and a biomedical committee to supervise clinical drug trials, experimental medical treatments, and tissue and blood research. The duty of the... (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of a continuum along which interactive, participatory and emancipatory inquiries may be placed in critical qualitative research with a social justice focus. It draws on critical distinctions to make the argument that labelling research ‘participatory’ hides both interactive approaches and those that might be seen to be emancipatory in the vein of Paolo Freire and Stanley Biggs. To support the argument for a continuum of engaged research, four recent research studies from South Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria (...) and Sierra Leone that address youth marginality and views on an array of topics are discussed with a view to articulating divergences and convergences in approaches. Included are considerations around adapting research for specific audiences and participants, the location of power, research ethics, as well as the demystification and democratisation of knowledge ownership and generation, and the nature of collaboration. The article offers tentative criteria by which research may be located along the suggested continuum and argues that an emancipatory approach, whilst being key to bringing about change or freedom, is a difficult but not impossible aim to achieve in research. (shrink)

The 1924 Church reform, through which the Romanian Orthodox Church decided to adopt the Revised Julian Calendar, led to dissent movements, mostly comprised of peasants, especially in the villages of Moldavia and Bessarabia. Considering the calendar change a heresy, these groups soon developed into religious communities that came to be known as Old Calendarists, or “stylists,” followers of “the old-style calendar.” Led by defrocked priests and monks who rejected the reform, the groups very quickly became the target of the secret (...) police and the Gendarmerie. What also drew the attention of the authorities and the Orthodox Church was that women, especially the younger ones, seemed to play important roles within the communities, not only in terms of membership, but also in preserving and spreading the Old Calendarists’ beliefs and religious ideas. As many members of the communities were being arrested, and their churches were destroyed, these women also suffered imprisonment, monastic incarceration, or were forced to hide from the authorities in caves or huts that they built in the woods. Though subjected to various forms of persecution, which continued through the communist period, the majority of them held strong to their beliefs and contributed to the forging of a religious identity. Using archival documents, in the forms of letters, postcards, photos, and declarations as primary sources, and drawing on interviews conducted with contemporary nuns and members of the Old Calendarist communities, the present article explores the personal stories of young Old Calendarist women. Building upon the work of Anca Șincan, this article challenges the notion that transmission of religion was the exclusive prerogative of older women. (shrink)

An in-depth look at the science of ancient Greece, this volume examines the influence of antique philosophy on 17th-century thought. Additional topics embrace many elements of modern physics: the empirical basis of quantum mechanics, wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle, and the action-at-a-distance theory of Wheeler and Feynman. 1961 edition.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) raise important questions about whether people view moral evaluations by AI systems similarly to human-generated moral evaluations. We conducted a modified Moral Turing Test (m-MTT), inspired by Allen et al. (Exp Theor Artif Intell 352:24–28, 2004) proposal, by asking people to distinguish real human moral evaluations from those made by a popular advanced AI language model: GPT-4. A representative sample of 299 U.S. adults first rated the quality of moral evaluations when blinded to their source. (...) Remarkably, they rated the AI’s moral reasoning as superior in quality to humans’ along almost all dimensions, including virtuousness, intelligence, and trustworthiness, consistent with passing what Allen and colleagues call the comparative MTT. Next, when tasked with identifying the source of each evaluation (human or computer), people performed significantly above chance levels. Although the AI did not pass this test, this was not because of its inferior moral reasoning but, potentially, its perceived superiority, among other possible explanations. The emergence of language models capable of producing moral responses perceived as superior in quality to humans’ raises concerns that people may uncritically accept potentially harmful moral guidance from AI. This possibility highlights the need for safeguards around generative language models in matters of morality. (shrink)

In this book, Michael Arbib, a researcher in artificial intelligence and brain theory, joins forces with Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science, to present an integrated account of how humans 'construct' reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them. The book is a major expansion of the Gifford Lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1983. The authors reconcile a theory of the individual's construction of reality as a network (...) of schemas 'in the head' with an account of the social construction of language, science, ideology and religion to provide an integrated schema-theoretic view of human knowledge. The authors still find scope for lively debate, particularly in their discussion of free will and of the reality of God. The book integrates an accessible exposition of background information with a cumulative marshalling of evidence to address fundamental questions concerning human action in the world and the nature of ultimate reality. (shrink)

This article explores the importance of register variation for analyses of grammar and discourse. The general theme is illustrated through consideration of variability in the form and use of English complement clauses. First, the patterns of use for four related grammatical constructions are considered: that-clauses and to-clauses, headed by verbs and by nouns. The differing discourse functions of each construction type are explored by considering their lexico-grammatical associations. However, it is shown that the characteristic uses of each type are conditioned (...) by register. That is, each construction type has a different distribution across spoken and written registers, with a different set of associated lexical heads. A second study provides an even more striking illustration of this interaction between grammar, discourse, and register: the contextual factors conditioning the retention vs omission of the complementizer that. In this case, it is shown that each register has an overall norm, and that contextual factors are influential only when they work in opposition to that register norm. These case studies are presented to make the general point that analyses of grammar and discourse are often inadequate and misleading when they disregard register differences. Instead, a register perspective is required to capture the range of variability associated with grammatical patterns of use. (shrink)

It probably did not require COVID-19 to highlight that the world is experiencing a systemic crisis of global reach and historic scale: one in which economic, social, political, cultural, and ecolog...

Introduction -- Repression, ignorance, and undone science -- The epistemic dimension of the political opportunity structure -- The politics of meaning: from frames to design conflicts -- The organizational forms of counterpublic knowledge -- Institutional change, industrial transitions, and regime resistance politics -- Contemporary change: liberalization and epistemic modernization -- Conclusion.

Item context effects refer to the impact of features of a test on an examinee’s item responses. These effects cannot be explained by the abilities measured by the test. Investigations typically focus on only a single type of item context effects, such as item position effects, or mode effects, thereby ignoring the fact that different item context effects might operate simultaneously. In this study, two different types of context effects were modeled simultaneously drawing on data from an item calibration study (...) of a multidimensional computerized test (N = 1,632) assessing student competencies in mathematics, science, and reading. We present a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) parameterization of the multidimensional Rasch model including item position effects (distinguishing between within-block position effects and block position effects), domain order effects, and the interactions between them. Results show that both types of context effects played a role, and that the moderating effect of domain orders was very strong. The findings have direct consequences for planning and applying mixed domain assessment designs. (shrink)