ABSTRACTWomen television journalists have long faced criticism and harassment regarding their appearance. The normalization of social media engagement in newsrooms, where journalists are expected t...

After years of trying to figure out how people can communicate and learn in ways that might make themselves, each other, and the world a better place, I have come to see that we humans do not know what sort of creature we are. It is not surprising, then, that our schools, institutions, and societies often do not work well. They are all based on fallacious ideas about what sort of creature a human is. We cannot make real progress-and will (...) continue to do much damage-until we face squarely what humans are. You cannot keep a donkey happy and healthy if you do not know what sort of creature a donkey is and behave accordingly. The same goes for humans. (shrink)

The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new treatment protocol has been adopted by healthcare practitioners and providers is considered unprecedented. However, a number of intersex people and advocacy groups have complained that the recommended revisions are inadequately informed by the testimony of intersex people. In this paper, I argue that such complaints are valid and that, despite the conference conveners stated (...) intention, the revisions perpetuate the epistemic injustice long endured by intersex people. By analyzing the Consensus Conference and its results as a failed attempt to redress the epistemic marginalization of intersex patients and advocacy groups, I am able to identify lingering institutional hurdles to cultivating the virtue of epistemic justice in biomedical practice. (shrink)

The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new treatment protocol has been adopted by healthcare practitioners and providers is considered unprecedented. However, a number of intersex people and advocacy groups have complained that the recommended revisions are inadequately informed by the testimony of intersex people. In this paper, I argue that such complaints are valid and that, despite the conference conveners stated (...) intention, the revisions perpetuate the epistemic injustice long endured by intersex people. By analyzing the Consensus Conference and its results as a failed attempt to redress the epistemic marginalization of intersex patients and advocacy groups, I am able to identify lingering institutional hurdles to cultivating the virtue of epistemic justice in biomedical practice. (shrink)

Critical thought on immersive theatres is gathering in pace with many arguments centred on explorations of audience/performer interaction and the unique relationship these theatres create. Within this paper I look beyond these debates in order to consider the implications of immersive theatres within contemporary culture, with the aim of furthering the ways in which immersive theatres are presently being framed and discussed. Theatre and science fiction have shared a somewhat limited relationship compared to their burgeoning usage within other forms of (...) entertainment. This paper focuses on how the conceits of science fiction are being staged within this theatrical setting. Primary focus is given to Punchdrunk’s… and darkness descended and The Crash of the Elysium. This is considered alongside The Republic of the Imagination’s Cerebellium, an original narrative created for the performance which has been subsequently developed over a three-year period to date. This discussion is presented and framed through my personal experience as both a performer in Cerebellium and as audience member. The particular use of dystopian narratives and alternate worlds is given consideration, with reflection on the way these works destabilize and call into question the audience’s sense of self either through their ability to survive or understand their sense of self. By making evident the spectrum of practice, I endeavour to delve further into identifying and de-mystifying immersive theatres and their differences to conventional theatre. (shrink)

Discourse-based processes seek to arrive at socially acceptable decisions by adhering to a specific set of procedures. In this case study, we empirically test how successful the,Cooperative Discourse' was in identifying a socially acceptable site for a solid-waste landfill in Switzerland. Our results indicate that even individuals living in the community designated as the prospective site think highly of the,Cooperative Discourse', but they know close to nothing about this procedure. This ignorance is rational, because, under Swiss laws, the recommendations of (...) the discourse are not legally binding and siting projects can easily be thwarted by town hall meetings. In this case, the,Cooperative Discourse' may have reached a consensus proposal because this proposal is socially not very relevant. (shrink)

Discourse-based processes seek to arrive at socially acceptable decisions by adhering to a specific set of procedures. In this case study, we empirically test how successful the,Cooperative Discourse' was in identifying a socially acceptable site for a solid-waste landfill in Switzerland. Our results indicate that even individuals living in the community designated as the prospective site think highly of the,Cooperative Discourse', but they know close to nothing about this procedure. This ignorance is rational, because, under Swiss laws, the recommendations of (...) the discourse are not legally binding and siting projects can easily be thwarted by town hall meetings. In this case, the,Cooperative Discourse' may have reached a consensus proposal because this proposal is socially not very relevant. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis has long cited poetry as the expressive vehicle for unconscious production. This article addresses the sexual politics of psychoanalysis's conjoining of poetry and the "feminine." The argument of this text is that the coupling of the "feminine" and the poetic in Lacanian discourse is a metaphorical double cross which most often leaves "woman" at a loss for words.

This paper argues that Frege's notoriously long commitment to Kant's thesis that Euclidean geometry is synthetic _a priori_ is best explained by realizing that Frege uses ‘intuition’ in two senses. Frege sometimes adopts the usage presented in Hermann Helmholtz's sign theory of perception. However, when using ‘intuition’ to denote the source of geometric knowledge, he is appealing to Hermann Cohen's use of Kantian terminology. We will see that Cohen reinterpreted Kantian notions, stripping them of any psychological connotation. Cohen's defense of (...) his modified Kantian thesis on the unique status of the Euclidean axioms presents Frege's own views in a much more favorable light. (shrink)

(2006). Taking Our Obligations to Research Participants Seriously: Disclosing Individual Results of Genetic Research. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 6, No. 6, pp. 32-34.

Generally speaking, naturalism is the view that the methods of empirical science are our best, perhaps only, methods for obtaining knowledge. Merrick reshapes this debate by introducing a new question: Is naturalism compatible with fostering appreciative love for the created order? She argues the naturalism's operating paradigm for evaluating explanations is well-tailored to achieve the goal of scientific inquiry championed by Francis Bacon in the 17th century. But it systematically weeds out explanations more likely to induce appreciative love for the (...) phenomena. Merrick concludes by looking at C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves and Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved for attitudes and practices that inquirers should adopt. (shrink)

The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview and a qualitative analysis of such syntactic characteristics as length and structure of sentences and noun phrases. The analysis is viewed in the broader context of genre characteristics of court forms, their role within legal proceedings, and their function for eliciting narratives from court users. The findings show that while the elicitation strategies are not always coherently aligned with the guidance sections, the guidance itself condenses legal and (...) procedural information into overly complex and verbose syntactic constructions. Comprehensibility barriers are thus created through breaks in information flow, ambiguous syntactic constructions, missing information and misalignment between questions and guidance. Such comprehension challenges have a negative impact on the potential of court users to effectively engage with legal proceedings. (shrink)

Shortly following the Second World War, and under the medical direction of ex-army psychiatrist T. F. Main, the Cassel Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders emerged as a pioneering democratic ‘therapeutic community’ in the treatment of mental illness. This definitive movement away from conventional ‘custodial’ assumptions about the function of the psychiatric hospital initially grew out of a commitment to sharing therapeutic responsibility between patients and staff and to preserving patients’ pre-admission responsibilities and social identities. However, by the mid-1950s, hospital practices (...) had come to focus pre-eminently on patients’ relationships with family members, and staff had developed a social model of mental health that focused on the family as the irreducible unit of mental treatment. By the late 1950s, this culminated in the in-patient admission of entire families for mental treatment, even when only one family member was exhibiting symptoms. At the heart of this growing post-war social-psychiatric preoccupation with the family was a new emphasis on the close relationship between mental health and individuals’ successful development toward mature responsible adulthood. The family came to be conceived as the quintessential space where both were forged. This article examines the process through which the Cassel’s social-psychiatric commitment to ‘therapeutic community’ became focused on the family as a key therapeutic site. While the family had become a central point of focus in social, political and psychological discussions of the foundation for stable democratic culture and political peace in post-war Britain, the Cassel Hospital actively experimented with these connections in therapeutic practice. This article thus illuminates the important, but frequently overlooked, role of psychiatric practices in the development of a post-war psychopolitics that established important links between the nuclear family, mental health and democratic social life. (shrink)

Scholars have posited both a positive and a negative relationship between political openness and transnational activism, arguing that while closed opportunity structures positively affect activism by creating strong incentives for activists to “go transnational,” they also negatively affect activism by inhibiting local groups from participating. The author argues that these contrary arguments are largely the result of an insufficiently developed comparative approach to the study of transnational activism. By examining countries at different levels of openness and multiple types of activism, (...) she shows that different types of activism are affected in distinct ways by the level of political openness. (shrink)

In this study, we explain differences in support for interreligious lawful and violent protests against the religious outgroup. Combining religiosity and social identity approaches, we take three dimensions of religiosity into consideration related to support for interreligious conflict, next to relevant control characteristics. The analysis is based on survey data collected among a random sample of Muslims and Christians across the Indonesian archipelago. Our findings show that members of the Muslim community are, on average, more inclined to support interreligious conflict, (...) both lawful and violent protests. Participation in rites of passage is a crucial aspect of religious practices found to be positively related to both kinds of protest. Religious beliefs show great importance but vary in their influence: particularistic views and intratextual fundamentalism are related to support for lawful protest, whereas religiocentrism is related to support both for lawful and violent protests. In contrast, salience reduces support for violent protest. As such, the findings offer a differentiated way to understand present-day interreligious conflicts among the general population in Indonesia. (shrink)

High prevalence of musicians’ physical and mental performance-related health issues (PRHI) has been demonstrated over the last 30 years. To address this, health promotion strategies have been implemented at some post-secondary music institutions around the world, yet the high prevalence of PRHI has persisted. In 2018, an international group of researchers formed the Musicians’ Health Literacy Consortium to determine how best to decrease PRHI, and to examine the relationship between PRHI and health literacy. An outcome of the Consortium was the (...) development of a new health literacy tool for musicians, the MHL-Q19, which drew from the theoretical framework of the European health literacy suite of tools, HLS-EU. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the validity and reliability of the MHL-Q19. Participants completed a battery of questionnaires, including the HLS-EU-Q16 for the assessment of general health literacy; the Musculoskeletal Pain Intensity and Interference Questionnaire for Musicians (MPIIQM); the RAND-12 quality of life questionnaire; and the General Self-Efficacy scale (GSE). We hypothesized that the MHL-Q19 would have a weak correlation with the HLS-EU-Q16; moderate correlation with the physical component scale and weak correlation with the mental component scale of the RAND-12; moderate correlation with the GSE; and finally, moderate correlation with pain interference and weak correlation with pain intensity of the MPIIQM. A total of 549 post-secondary music students from six English-speaking countries completed the battery of questionnaires, and 328 of these participants provided valid responses to the MHL-Q19 alone 2 weeks later. The tool showed acceptable internal consistency and test–retest reliability. Three of our hypotheses were supported, although the strength of the correlations varied from what we had predicted. The fourth hypothesis was not supported; our findings indicate that lower health literacy scores were weakly related to higher MPIIQM pain intensity and interference scores. The results of this study support the notion that musicians’ health literacy is a distinct construct that cannot be fully evaluated with existing health literacy tools. Given that this is a new instrument, the evidence presented is positive and promising. Further studies will be needed to refine the tool. (shrink)

Prior negative performance and wrongdoing are difficult for applicants to overcome during their job search. The result has often been that they resort to lies and deception in order to obtain employment. The present study examines “stealing thunder” as a trust repair tactic that might be useful for overcoming prior indiscretions when it is used by applicants during the selection interview process. Stealing thunder refers to the self-disclosure of negative information that preempts allegations of wrongdoing by third parties such as (...) hiring managers. Data were collected using a scenario-based 2 X 2 experimental design in which perceptions of integrity, trust, and employability were measured. Results indicated that a stealing thunder strategy that involved accepting responsibility under a low likelihood of transgression discovery led to higher ratings of trust than blaming others when discovery of wrongdoing was imminent. The stealing thunder strategy was somewhat more effective than when a traditional, post-allegation apology was used. But stealing thunder did not lead to higher levels of an overall willingness to hire the applicant. (shrink)

Our question “How many chickens does it take to make an egg?” was inspired by the successful replacement of egg-based mayonnaise with plant-based mayonnaise in general dining at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in order to increase animal welfare. Our indicator of improved animal welfare due to decreased egg consumption was the reduction in number of chickens in the stressful and unhealthy conditions of the US egg industry. To measure this we calculated the ratio of chickens to eggs and (...) found it takes 6.3 chickens to make 1000 eggs. This equals 158 eggs per chicken, less than half the amount of eggs per laying hen because of mortality from hatching to entering the laying flock, including the disposal of male chicks. In addition, greenhouse gas emissions, irrigation water, reactive nitrogen, and land use would be reduced 43–98% from that of eggs. While the impact of plant-based mayonnaise was relatively small, we also estimated the substitution of eggs with tofu, which had a much greater impact: substituting 50% of eggs with tofu in first-year student breakfasts on all UC campuses would reduce the number of chickens in the egg industry by 9245. If this substitution was made by the US population, the welfare and environmental benefits would be 29 thousand times greater. Reducing egg consumption would greatly improve chicken welfare even if welfare certified eggs are replaced, since the requirements of the most commonly used chicken welfare certification programs do relatively little to reduce chicken suffering. (shrink)

Following Hartry Field in distinguishing disquotational truth from a conception that grounds truth conditions in a community's usage, it is argued that the notions are materially inequivalent (since the latter allows truth-value gaps) and that both are needed. In addition to allowing blanket endorsements ("Everything the Pope says is true"), disquotational truth facilitates mathematical discovery, as when we establish the Gödel sentence by noting that the theorems are all disquotationally true and the disquotational truths are consistent. We require a more (...) substantial notion, however, if we intend to use truth values and truth conditions in explaining communication by language. (shrink)

The question—what is a political constitution?—might seem, at first blush, fairly innocuous. At one level, the idea of a political constitution seems fairly well settled, at least insofar as most political constitutionalists subscribe to a similar set of commitments, arguments and assumptions. At a second, more reflective level, however, there remains some doubt whether a political constitution purports to be a descriptive or normative account of a real world constitution, such as Britain’s. By exploring the idea of a political constitution (...) as differently articulated by J.A.G. Griffith, Adam Tomkins and Richard Bellamy, this essay explores why the normativity of a political constitution may be indistinct and ill-defined, and how compelling reasons for this indistinctness and ill-definition are to be found in the very idea of a political constitution itself. A political constitution is here conceived as a ‘model’ which supplies an explanatory framework within which to make sense of our constitutional self-understandings. The discipline of thinking in terms of a model opens up a critical space wherein there need not be some stark, all-encompassing choice between constitutional models, which, in turn, allows for more subtle understandings of Britain’s constitution as neither exclusively ‘political’ nor ‘legal’. (shrink)

When multiple individuals interact in a conversation or as part of a large crowd, emergent structures and dynamics arise that are behavioral properties of the interacting group rather than of any individual member of that group. Recent work using traditional signal processing techniques and machine learning has demonstrated that global acoustic data recorded from a crowd at a basketball game can be used to classify emergent crowd behavior in terms of the crowd's purported emotional state. We propose that the description (...) of crowd behavior from such global acoustic data could benefit from nonlinear analysis methods derived from dynamical systems theory. Such methods have been used in recent research applying nonlinear methods to audio data extracted from music and group musical interactions. In this work, we used nonlinear analyses to extract features that are relevant to the behavioral interactions that underlie acoustic signals produced by a crowd attending a sporting event. We propose that recurrence dynamics measured from these audio signals via recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) reflect information about the behavioral dynamics of the crowd itself. We analyze these dynamics from acoustic signals recorded from crowds attending basketball games, and that were manually labeled according to the crowds' emotional state across six categories: angry noise, applause, cheer, distraction noise, positive chant, and negative chant. We show that RQA measures are useful to differentiate the emergent acoustic behavioral dynamics between these categories, and can provide insight into the recurrence patterns that underlie crowd interactions. (shrink)

This paper discusses how we understand and use a concept or the meaningof a general term to identify the objects falling under the term. There aretwo distinct approaches to research on the problems of concepts and meaningthe psychological approach and the formal (or logical) approach. My majorconcern is to consider the possibility of reconciling these two differentapproaches, and for this I propose to build a psychologically plausibleformal system of conceptualization. That is, I will develop a theory-basedaccount of concepts and propose (...) an explanation of how an agent activates aperspective (which consists of theories) in response to a situation in whichreasoning using a concept is called for. Theories are represented as sets offacts and rules, both strict and defeasible. Each theory is organized in acoherent perspective which stands for an agent's mental state or an agent'smodel of another agent's perspective. Perspectives are organized intohierarchies and the theory for a concept in one perspective may defeat thetheory for the same concept in another perspective. Which perspective issuperior is context-dependent. (shrink)

In 2003 Japanese folk horror game Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly directed by Makoto Shibata, the protagonist bears witness to an ancient tradition of a community linked to the ritual sacrifice of twins, which results in the female victim becoming a malevolent spirit. Gradually the player, as Mio, equipped with the Camera Obscura, transitions from observer to participant in the cycle of events that results in sacrificing their own twin sister. This article focuses on establishing the game within the folk (...) horror subgenre, before examining three female characters: Mio, the protagonist, who shifts from witness/voyeur to participant; Mayu, their twin, who transitions from unwilling to willing sacrifice; and Sae, the victim of the original ritual and antagonist. In Fatal Frame II, the Camera Obscura, which captures the supernatural world, is the lens through which past and present blur as the player is confronted by the twisted beliefs of the village. Through analysis of the game’s narrative, ludic elements, and visual aesthetics, I examine how these roles fit within the context of folk horror, gender and Japanese folklore. (shrink)

Three experimental tasks—spontaneous telling of a story, reading, and parsing the story—were used to determine whether empirical data reflect the narrative structure of stories and can be predicted by a plot unit analysis of the stories (Lehnert, 1981). It was found that spontaneous pause durations at sentence breaks were highly correlated with the importance of these breaks as predicted theoretically. Only low correlations were obtained, however, when reading pause durations were correlated with the model. As for parsing values, the value (...) of the correlation coefficients depended on whether stories had sufficient superficial linguistic cues to help the subjects in parsing. It was concluded that spontaneous pausing not only reflects the narrative structure of stories, but can be used as a guide to constructing theories of narrative structure as well as for deciding between competing theories. (shrink)

While there may be several practical concerns regarding the practice of corporate lobbying of government officials, there is the more basic question of a corporation’s moral right to do so. I argue that group agents such as corporations have no moral rights, and thereby cannot have the right to lobby. There may be a basis for some legal rights for corporations, but I argue that lobbying cannot be one of the legal rights, even by reference to the rights of the (...) individuals that make up the corporation. I end the paper by a discussion of how this argument applies to all private organizations, including public interest organizations. (shrink)