So what is feminism anyway? Why are all the experts so reluctant to give us a clear definition? Is it possible to make sense of the complex and often contradictory debates? In this concise and accessible introduction to feminist theory, Chris Beasley provides clear explanations of the many types of feminism. She outlines the development of liberal, radical and Marxist//socialist feminism, and reviews the more contemporary influences of psychoanalysis, postmodernism, theories of the body, queer theory, and attends to the (...) ongoing significance of race and ethnicity. Given the diversity of feminist ideas, Chris Beasley a number of ways of looking at feminist theory and offer an open-ended approach which allows for variety and change. What is Feminism? is a clear and up-to-date guide to Western feminist theory for students, their teachers, researchers and anyone else who wants to understand and engage in current feminist debates. `Over the last three decades feminist theories and methodologies have become an increasingly complex as well as somewhat fraught terrain where ideas and egos alternately clash productively and destructively. This is an up-to-date and intelligent introduction to a field which remains a vital component of contemporary sociopolitical issues and debates' - Sneja Gunew, Professor of English and Women’s Studies, University of British Columbia. (shrink)
This volume will be of special interest to anyone concerned with modern applied ethical issues, particularly those in the areas of philosophy, communication, media studies, and journalism. This volume brings together leading experts in journalism, communication studies, and philosophy to discuss the value of truth in an age of social media.
This volume will be of special interest to anyone concerned with modern applied ethical issues, particularly those in the areas of philosophy, communication, media studies, and journalism. This volume brings together leading experts in journalism, communication studies, and philosophy to discuss the value of truth in an age of social media.
Trevor Pearce has done something remarkable and all too rare: written a book at the intersection of philosophy, science, and history that is equally excellent in all three respects.
With each major technological shift, the question of well-being arises with new purpose. In this book, leading scholars in the philosophy and communication disciplines bring together their knowledge and expertise in an attempt to define what well-being means in this perpetually connected environment.
I analyzed 298 open-ended responses of undergraduate students who have been reported for cheating to the question, “What, if anything, would have stopped you from committing your act of academic dishonesty?” These responses included a few major themes: students pled ignorance of what constitutes academic dishonesty and the consequences/seriousness associated with violations; students tended to deflect blame, usually by saying that their professor could have done something differently ; students did not feel they had enough time, resources, and/or skills to (...) get the desired result without taking responsibility for this lack of time, resources, and/or skills ; students felt they did not manage their time well with accepting the blame for the poor time management; and that a bad grade was not an option. These data and results are discussed in relation to the extant literature on the topic. (shrink)
In times like these, a new ethico-political ideal is required to contest the adequacy of dominant understandings of social interaction as matters of choice and rational decision-making and in contesting these understandings encourage us to imagine social alternatives. We wish to make a contribution to this project of expanding the universe of political discourse as a means to invigorating ethico-political debate. A range of existing vocabularies — the languages of trust, care and associated concepts, including corporeal generosity — are currently (...) put forward as the means to contest the dominance of neo-liberal premises about `atomistic individualism'. While many of these accounts focus on nation-states, others attend to an emerging global community. Nevertheless, we have some reservations about these languages and their premises. In our view they tend frequently to locate the `problem' in the character of citizens. We also make the case that such languages and their associated political agendas reinstate aspects of social hierarchy that mimic neo-liberal conceptions of autonomous individualism. Central to our critique is the claim that the problematic aspects of these existing languages of connection are due to an attenuated understanding of embodiment and an inadequate dialogue between the socio-political and embodiment. It is this inadequate dialogue we wish to redress. In this paper we offer a new ethical ideal called `social flesh' to ground an alternative politics for reconfiguring exploitative social relations. As an ethico-political starting point, `social flesh' highlights human embodied interdependence and in the process configures a new, more transformative political vision. It draws attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources. Insistence upon this shared reliance underpins a profoundly levelling perspective, a radical politics. (shrink)
When speaking or producing music, people rely in part on auditory feedback – the sounds associated with the performed action. Three experiments investigated the degree to which alterations of auditory feedback during music performances influence the experience of agency and the possible link between agency and the disruptive effect of AAF on production. Participants performed short novel melodies from memory on a keyboard. Auditory feedback during performances was manipulated with respect to its pitch contents and/or its synchrony with actions. Participants (...) rated their experience of agency after each trial. In all experiments, AAF reduced judgments of agency across conditions. Performance was most disrupted when AAF led to an ambiguous experience of agency, suggesting that there may be some causal relationship between agency and disruption. However, analyses revealed that these two effects were probably independent. A control experiment verified that performers can make veridical judgments of agency. (shrink)
The Clinton administration has been characterized by numerous efforts to encourage the use of technology in public education, rooted in the conviction that such activities are a prerequisite for improvements in the econonomy, the environment, and the overall quality of life. Urban public schools face particularly difficult challenges to such technology implementation. The challenges include aged physical plants, extreme funding difficulties, high levels of administrative turnover, and inadequate professional development programs. This article examines the implications of attempting to integrate extensive (...) technology into such environments and considers the perspective that technology is best viewed as part of, rather than a competitor to, the implementation of a school reform model. (shrink)
Only a small proportion of academically dishonest students ever receive an official report of academic dishonesty, and the sociology of deviance literature is ripe with studies illustrating disproportionalities in detecting, policing, and prosecuting crimes. This study addresses the degree to which disproportionalities exist in the application of relatively few official sanctions levied upon students for academic dishonesty. I compared the demographics of those who have been reported for cheating with those of an entire undergraduate student body and of self-reported cheaters (...) in the literature. I found that international students are much more likely than domestic students to get reported. (shrink)
The difficulty faced by research ethics committees in evaluating ethical conduct in journalism can be considered a recent conundrum. Journalistic investigation has traditionally been seen as residing outside the need for ethics clearances owing to debates around its status as research and to the reluctance of journalism practitioners to subject their investigations to committee evaluation. The inclusion of creative industries in revamped definitions of research, however, means that if journalistic inquiry is to be tallied under national research reward schemes, it (...) must be ethically accountable. This article interrogates the difficulties caused by a conflict of cultures between ethics committees and journalism research and poses a number of possible resolutions. It aims to function as an exploration of key thinking in the field, thus acting as a frame for further development of case-specific examples of the issues raised. (shrink)
The disconnection between the idea of nation-based citizenship and the current practices of migrants presents the opportunity to reconceptualize and redefine the idea of citizenship and thereby grasp the realities of movement. I employ Giambattista Vico's theories of universal rights and his history of civilizations to interrogate rhetorically national origins and expand on what I call a renovation of citizenship. This is a process that embraces daily practices of nation-based citizenship and encourages us to imagine new ways to express citizenship, (...) ways that comport with the realities of a mobile world, specifically the human right of freedom of movement. In formulating this renovation of citizenship based on mobility, I introduce the metaphor of stochastic citizenship to resolve the tension between the legal structures governing citizenship and the promotion of mobility as a human right. The Roma people in Europe serve as a test for stochastic citizenship. (shrink)
This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal's “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors' assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully (...) ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness. (shrink)
Huw Price has developed versions of naturalism and anti-representationalism to create a distinctive brand of pragmatism. ‘Subject naturalism’ focuses on what science says about human beings and the function of our linguistic practices, as opposed to orthodox contemporary naturalism’s privileging of the ontology of the natural sciences. Price’s anti-representationalism rejects the view that what makes utterances contentful is their representing reality. Together, they are to help us avoid metaphysical ‘placement problems’: how e.g. mind, meaning, and morality fit into the natural (...) world. By combining subject naturalism and his own ‘global’ version of expressivism with Robert Brandom’s inferentialism about content, Price proposes a pragmatist ‘anthropology’ as a replacement for substantively metaphysical approaches to placement problems. In this paper I argue that Price’s project cannot succeed, and that this shows something important about what form pragmatism ought to take. Price’s view doesn’t work because no subject naturalist vocabulary is sufficient to describe any assertional practice; there is no way to connect his expressive-functionalist explanations to the practices and concepts which are their subject – nor, even, to the human subjects who are the focus of a philosophical anthropology. I close by suggesting how we might improve on these shortcomings of Price’s pragmatism. (shrink)
Robert Smithson argues that considerations stemming from Kantian and post-Kantian idealism undermine naturalistic arguments that seek to debunk elements of the ‘manifest image’ in favour of the ‘scientific image’. The idealist tradition, on this view, holds that philosophy’s task is to uncover and clarify the principles and norms which underlie different forms of inquiry, and is thus well placed to dispel the apparent ‘placement’ problems that stem from the collision of our ordinary worldview with contemporary philosophical naturalism. Smithson also argues (...) that this idealist critique of naturalism is preferable to the Liberal Naturalist critique of naturalism. In this response, I argue that Smithson’s view contains a gap which the naturalist can exploit to evade idealist critique, but that a Hegelian idealism contains no such gap, making it the better idealist choice. Further, I argue that that Hegelian idealism is itself plausibly a version of liberal naturalism. (shrink)
On the basis of the characterization of autonomy set out by Beauchamp and Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, we first explore some of the parameters along which autonomy may vary in degree through a series of hypothetical examples drawn from various settings; and, second and in more detail, we examine how the range of autonomy is affected through informed consent to various medical diagnostic tests. Our conclusions are (1) that there are significant implications for patient autonomy inherent in new (...) and forthcoming diagnostic modalities, and (2) that attention should be paid to these implications in formulating policies for both clinical practice and research. We close with (a) some specific policy recommendations for clinical practice and research, and (b) some metaphysical speculations raised by our explorations. (shrink)
This article discusses implicit conceptions of reticence in the early philosophical writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Contrary to the image of Bakhtin as a thinker of dialogue, polyphony, and voice, it finds a strand in Bakhtin's thought that suggests that there might be good reasons for remaining silent and not stepping into the world in speech: in reticence, the human being avoids both judgment and being judged, eludes the risk of the addressee's absence or unreliability, and resists the finality of utterance (...) that shares in the finality of death. This essay makes a case for a Bakhtinian apology for quietism and seeks to contribute to recent work in Common Knowledge on that subject. Bakhtin's conception of reticence is usefully understood with reference to threshold situations: in withholding a future word, a human being hovers on the borders of nonbeing and being, on the borders of the present, future, and past. In this sense, reticence is allied to conceptions of fuzziness and blur that have also been concerns of this journal in recent years. In making these claims, the essay relates Bakhtin's thought to a Russian literary tradition of thinking about silence (Tiutchev's and Mandelstam's Silentium poems), as well as to a more broadly European intellectual context (Arendt and Heidegger, for example), where thinkers understand being in terms of becoming and understand disclosure through speech. (shrink)
