This collection presents policy and research that addresses digital inequalities, access, and skills, from multiple international perspectives. With a special focus on the impact of the COVID-19, the collection is based on the 2021 Digital Inclusion, Policy and Research Conference, with chapters from both academia and civic organizations. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed citizens’ relationship with digital technologies for the foreseeable future. Many people’s main channels of communication were transferred to digital services, platforms, and apps. Everything ‘went online’: our families, (...) friends, partners, health, work, news, politics, culture, arts and protesting. Yet access to digital technologies remained highly unequal. This brought digital inclusion policy and research to the fore, highlighting to policymakers and the public the ‘hidden’ challenges and impacts of digital exclusion and inequalities. The cutting-edge volume offers research findings and policycase studies that explore digital inclusion from the provision of basic access to digital, via education and digital literacy, and on to issues of gender and technology. Case studies are drawn from varied sources including the UK, Australia, South America, and Eastern Europe, providing a valuable resource in the pursuit of social equity and justice. ​ This is an open access book. (shrink)

The dualism of nature/culture widely present within Western society at large is out of step with an increasingly urbanising world. Building on previous discussions of nature/culture duality, an integrative framework is presented that argues for the embracing of the 'mundane nature' found within human landscapes. As over half of the human population interacts with nature primarily within urban landscapes, increasing our awareness of such spaces is critical to understanding our ecological consciousness. The examples of a recent rooftop greening bylaw in (...) the city of Toronto and the social impacts of urban gardening are examined in this context. (shrink)

In recent essays, Jürgen Habermas endorses an account of political liberalism much like John Rawls'. Like Rawls, he argues that laws and public policies should be justified only in neutral terms, i.e. in terms of reasons that people holding conflicting world-views could accept. Habermas also, much like Rawls, distinguishes reasonable religious citizens, whose views should be included in public discourse, from unreasonable citizens in his expectation that religious citizens self-modernize. But in sharing these Rawlsian features, Habermas is vulnerable to some (...) of the same objections posed to Rawls. In this article I assess Habermas' ability to overcome two objections frequently posed to Rawls: (1) that religious citizens are unfairly expected to split their identities in public discourse, and (2) that the burdens of citizenship are asymmetrically distributed. I conclude that while he may be able to overcome the second, the first remains a problem for him. (shrink)

Frances Yates, leading Renaissance scholar of her time, revolutionised the study of art, science and ideas. She was a pioneer in her emphasis on visual culture, Fellow of the British Academy, and a remarkable twentieth century philosopher. This set provides immediate access to the work of this very important late twentieth century philosopher.

The creation of a sense of place has emerged as a goal of many community development initiatives. However, little thought has been given to the role of physical spaces in the shaping of possible senses of place. This article examines three Canadian examples of community sustainable development initiatives to demonstrate that sense of place can be shaped and constrained by the geographical and environmental features of the physical space a community occupies. This finding suggests that a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to community (...) sustainable development is unlikely to be successful; a community's sustainable development ethic will be informed by geography. However, there is some evidence that a strong individual sense of place shaped by local space may act as a barrier to the acceptance of new people and ideas. Conversely, a strong sense of place can result in mobilization for sustainable development initiatives. (shrink)

Americans have trillions of dollars invested in public and private companies, yet stock ownership is highly unequal: the wealthiest 1 percent of households possess 40 percent of all wealth, and there is a large and persistent racial wealth gap. What if innovations in distributed technologies allowed for democratic facilitation of new opportunities for wealth and a rebalancing of power within the capital markets? This article proposes using innovative financial technologies to create a “Public Investment Platform”—a public option for participation in (...) capital markets—and a “Public Investment Account” to universalize access to investment opportunities. Capital markets are currently governed by public policies that submerge the role of the public in structuring them and enable an inequitable accumulation of wealth. To democratize finance, new policies are required to democratize participation in investment. (shrink)

This study explores the status quo regarding the interface between marketing, social and environmental issues, culture and consumers, and strategic management by integrating sustainability. A qualitative display network technique, based on the bibliometric methodology of co-citation analysis, was applied to examine research clusters. An integrative review was conducted to explain the connections within these clusters. To evaluate potential patterns among the studies through citations, different sets of relationships among applicable sustainability theories in marketing practice were paired in different sets and (...) analyzed. After mapping the scientific structure of journal publications and intellectual linkages, six cluster groups emerged, reflecting the important role of marketing in linking sustainability, society, environment, consumers, and corporate sustainable development. This study contributes to social and marketing research and corporate sustainability practice by categorizing the intellectual structural network within various streams and indicating the influence of social and cultural notions on consumer-focused sustainable marketing. (shrink)

This note criticizes the political consequences Feyerabend draws from his ?epistemological anarchism?. Democratic relativism holds that since no traditions are ?true?, all must be given equal status in a free society. A basic protective structure is required, though, to keep the various institutions from overwhelming one another. I argue that Feyerabend provides no assurance that the protective structure would not be taken over by particular institutions; parallel problems exist for education. Hence Feyerabend's proposal is unworkable in principle. Furthermore it is (...) undesirable since members of traditions would not wish to have their beliefs regarded as ?one set among many?. The pluralism Feyerabend wants already exists naturally in nontotalitarian societies; hence the institutionalization of pluralism is unnecessary and would do more harm than good. (shrink)

Karen Warren claims that there is a “logic of domination” at work in the oppressive conceptual frameworks informing both sexism and naturism. Although her account of the principle of domination as a connection between oppressions has been an influential one in ecofeminist theory, it has been challenged by recent criticism. Both Karen Green and John Andrews maintain that the principle of domination,as Warren articulates it, is ambiguous. The principle, according to Green, admits of two possible readings, each of which she (...) finds flawed. Similarly, Andrews claims that the principle is fundamentally inadequate because it cannot distinguish cases of oppressive domination from cases of nonoppressive domination. In this paper, I elucidate Warren’s views and defend her against these and other criticisms put forward by Green and Andrews. I show that Warren’s account of “the logic of domination” successfully illuminates important conceptual features of oppression. (shrink)

Western music is characterized primarily by simple meters, but a number of other musical cultures, including Turkish, have both simple and complex meters. In Experiment 1, Turkish and American adults with and without musical training were asked to detect metrical changes in Turkish music with simple and complex meter. Musicians performed significantly better than nonmusicians, and performance was significantly better on simple meter than on complex meter, but Turkish listeners performed no differently than American listeners. In Experiment 2, members of (...) Turkish classical and folk music clubs who were tested on the same materials exhibited comparable sensitivity to simple and complex meters, unlike the American and Turkish listeners in Experiment 1. Together, the findings reveal important effects of musical training and culture on meter perception: trained musicians are generally more sensitive than nonmusicians, regardless of metrical complexity, but sensitivity to complex meter requires sufficient exposure to musical genres featuring such meters. (shrink)

C. Fred Alford contends that the manner in which I objected to Feyerabend's democratic relativism is vulnerable to Feyerabend's rhetorical strategy, and that a better strategy would be to show that Feyerabend fails to demonstrate that democratic relativism is desirable. I reply in defense of the ?plausibility? issue on the grounds that Feyerabend's theory lends itself to uses (and abuses) beyond Utopian critique (in Alford's sense). I argue that it is the fact that critics ? myself included ? have assumed (...) the burden of demonstrating the impossibility of Feyerabend's political theory that has led to the stalemate Alford describes, and that we may retain the ?plausibility? question while avoiding the stalemate by placing the burden of argument on Feyerabend to show that his theory is plausible. (shrink)

In his 1926 lectures on metaphysical poetry, T. S. Eliot describes the work of Jules Laforgue as the “nearest verse equivalent to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Hartmann,” a literary rendition of their philosophies of the unconscious and of annihilation.1 Yet, Eliot suggests, in Laforgue the system of Schopenhauer ultimately collapses; the poet does not find in the philosopher that metaphysical balance between thought and feeling he so desperately craves. Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Eliot asserts, is “muddled by feeling—for what is more (...) emotional than the philosophy of Schopenhauer or Hartmann?”2 Here, as elsewhere, Eliot paints Schopenhauer as a despairing, overwrought romantic. Such a presentation naturally.. (shrink)

This article builds on the food sovereignty literature to ask pointed questions about the interplay of market forces and political liberalism. Specifically, we use cuisine as a lens to interrogate the assumption that multiculturalism is compatible with Indigenous food sovereignty. Because multicultural inclusion is the means by which Indigenous Peoples’ gastronomies are commodified and alienated, they experience not gastronomic multiculturalism but culinary colonialism. Accordingly, food sovereignty in colonial contexts must embrace both the active sharing and the mindful withholding of food (...) as political acts, and acknowledge that culinary culture is not simply a market commodity but also a politically-embedded process. In drawing together the threads of this argument, we advocate for a broadening of the discussion on Indigenous food sovereignty to include the resistance and resurgence enacted through gastronomy. (shrink)

Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring the metaphysics of relations from antiquity to the present day. They address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent. From those who question (...) whether there are relational properties at all, to those who hold they are a fundamental part of reality, The Metaphysics of Relations covers a broad spectrum of positions on the nature and ontological status of relations, from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

Introduction: Archaeology and Post-Structuralism Ian Bapty and Tim Yates i If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our ...

Our incomplete understanding of carcinogenesis may be a significant reason why some cancer mortality rates are still increasing. This lack of understanding is likely due to a research approach that relies heavily on genetic comparison between cancerous and non‐cancerous tissues and cells, which has led to the identification of genes of cancer proliferation rather than differentiation. Recent observations showing that a tremendous degree of natural human genetic variation occurs are likely to lead to a shift in the basic paradigms of (...) cancer genetics, in that there is a need to consider both the nature of the genes involved, and the idea that not every genetic variation identified in these genes may be associated with carcinogenesis. Based on studies using LCM and micro‐genetic analyses, we propose that significant cancer initiating events may take place during the very early stages of development of cancer‐susceptible tissues and that using such techniques might greatly help us in our understanding of carcinogenesis. BioEssays 29:678–685, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This book provides an introduction to postphenomenology, an emerging school of thought in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which addresses the relationships users develop with the devices they use.