University language programmes are often held to be a vital element in national preparedness to cope with an increasingly connected world. Yet we know very little about the social and intellectual organization of contemporary language departments or the networks through which staff manage their teaching, research and service to the community. I suggest that one starting-point for the necessary analysis is to recognize the anomalous status of languages among the Humanities and examine the ways in which challenges to that status (...) are resisted. I illustrate the argument by considering the evolution of Italian Studies in Australian universities. (shrink)

How are social and institutional circumstances linked to the knowledge that scientists produce? To answer this question it is necessary to take risks: speculative but testable theories must be proposed. It will be my aim to explain and then apply one such theory. This will enable me to propose an hypothesis about the connexion between social processes and the style and content of mathematical knowledge.

This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from non-human ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose (...) neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such associations and argue that the brain plasticity of human adolescence constitutes an “experience expectant” developmental period for ritual conditioning of sacred symbols. We suggest that such symbols evolved to solve an ecological problem by extending communication and coordination of social relations across time and space. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper describes the way in which a simple device, the pregnancy wheel, has been used by the medical profession to impose a new way of measuring and experiencing pregnancy.The change involves counting in weeks instead of counting in months and it is gradually replacing a commonsensical method that had deep physiological and cultural roots. In contrast, the medical methodology of counting forty weeks is more complicated and lacks direct connections to the events of pregnancyIn the encounter between the (...) doctor and the pregnant woman the pregnancy wheel has a variety of uses, among them determinations of the age and estimated size of the fetus.It plays an additional role, however, in the medicalization of pregnancy by providing the doctor with privileged information. It also influences modes of thinking through the way in which it deals with the question of the beginning of pregnancy, a question that has clear moral implications. (shrink)

This article examines how migrant ‘illegality’ is experienced in the Swedish context. How do ‘illegal‘ migrants manage work, housing, healthcare, safety and a family life in the absence of access to formal provisions? What are their survival strategies? I use direct quotations from undocumented migrants themselves to build a multifaceted picture of migrant ‘illegality’. Following Willen's (2007) call for a ‘critical phenomenology of illegality’, I move beyond the socio-political situation of undocumented migrants to their embodied experiences of being ‘illegal’. I (...) conclude that undocumented migrants are not excluded but are excepted; they have not been thrown out, but neither are they considered participants. Undocumented migrants are included in society without being recognised as members. (shrink)

Accounts from the humanities which focus on describing the nature of whole body plastinates are examined. We argue that this literature shows that plastinates do not clearly occupy standard cultural binary categories of interior or exterior, real or fake, dead or alive, bodies or persons, self or other and argue that Noël Carroll’s structural framework for horrific monsters unites the various accounts of the contradictory or ambiguous nature of plastinates while also showing how plastinates differ from horrific fictional monsters. In (...) doing so, it offers an account of the varied reactions of those responding to exhibitions of plastinated whole bodies. (shrink)

My purpose is to analyze lawyers creating meaning in three well-known cases in Anglo-American legal history: Commonwealth v. Woodward (1997) the famous Boston ‘nanny’ case, the O.J. Simpson Murder Trial (1995), and the John Peter Zenger Libel Case in Colonial New York (1734). In each case, creative lawyers were able to shift the question before the jury from the formal legal question—did Woodward and Simpson commit murder? Did Zenger publish libelous material?—to issues of vengeance and catharsis, and of the ability (...) of the legal system to represent the community’s sense of justice. (shrink)

Werner Herzog’s films often have characters that are on spiritual journeys that take transgressive turns. These quests are also existential in nature, for what the characters often seek is transcendence. Because transgression is a sociological, philosophical, and theological entity, Herzog’s films are demanding because his outsider characters are often not easy to admire. Still, because they take on very personal self-examinations in their search for transcendence, we can respect their tragic, horrific, or painful excursions. Herzog’s protagonists are almost always outsiders (...) in some form. Whether “being on the outside” quite literally or figuratively, protagonists like Nosferatu, Kasper Hauser, or Aguirre somehow eschew societal norms and become figures of empathy, fear, or disgust. Even the characters of his documentary work, like Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man , are people who somehow do not fit in with society, and so seek escape through crossing boundaries or intense trials of will and perseverance. As outsiders, they are shunned, but the way they handle this is sometimes different: through madness (Aguirre), spirituality (Kasper Hauser), or rebellion (the cast of Even Dwarves Started Small ). These characters are in constant conflict with others, society, and themselves. I want to argue that one of the main reasons Herzog makes both artful, meditative films and ones that challenge spectators’ expectations, is due to the recurrence of the theme of spiritual transformation—or transcendence—that often is transgressive. Such Herzog heroes as Aguirre, Stroszek, Fitzcarraldo, or even the entire cast of Heart of Glass push beyond the limits of sanity, freedom, and societal restrictions in order to transgress or “pass” into a different mental state. Furthermore, such moves are spiritual in nature, since the characters become individual disciples of their own imaginings, their own beliefs, and their own codes of behavior. Both physically and psychically, these characters undertake journeys that allow us to see how difficult, yet ultimately manageable, these passages to transcendence are. I will discuss several Herzog films and characters that exemplify this tendency, including, Even Dwarfs Started Small , Aguirre, the Wrath of God , and Grizzly Man .  . (shrink)

In 2007 new meat inspection regulations standardizing meat production throughout the Province of British Columbia (BC), Canada came into effect moving food for local consumption closer to continentally harmonized production standards. Critics argue that the economic viability of small-scale livestock farmers is threatened. Small-scale women farmers are central to the creation of alternative local agri-food networks in BC. Using gender as an analytically enabling tool this paper argues that public food-safety regulation can create the conditions for the dominance of private (...) agri-food governance. The discursive creation of a feminized privileged consumer legitimates much non-democratic agri-food governance. The paper argues that more just and ecologically sustainable futures require a ‘gender troubling’ of agri-food governance in which the privileged identity of the food consumer is reconstructed as global citizen in the context of the food sovereignty of the farmers who produce their food. (shrink)

This paper explores the interrelationship between maize farming, the discourse of modernity, and the performance of a modern farmer in southern Zambia. The post-colonial Zambian government discursively constructed maize as a vehicle for expanding economic modernization into rural Zambia and undoing the colonial government’s urban modernization bias. The pressures of neo-liberal reform have changed this discursive construction in ways that constitute maize as an obstacle to sustained food security in southern Zambia. Despite this discursive change, maize continues to occupy a (...) central position in the farming systems of the region. I argue that the continued prevalence of maize in southern Zambia can be understood as a performance that allows farmers to maintain their identities as modern rural subjects. The paper concludes with the policy implications of the field of performance on two contemporary debates in Zambian food security: the use of GMO crops and the promotion of cassava as a drought tolerant alternative to maize. (shrink)

This article develops a research position that allows cultural sociologists to compare morality across sociohistorical cases. In order to do so, the article suggests focusing analytic attention on actions that fulfill the following criteria: (a) actions that define the actor as a certain kind of socially recognized person, both within and across fields; (b) actions that actors experience—or that they expect others to perceive—as defining the actor both intersituationally and to a greater extent than other available definitions of self; and (...) (c) actions to which actors either have themselves, or expect others to have, a predictable emotional reaction. Such a position avoids both a realist moral sociology and descriptive-relativism, and provides sociologists with criteria for comparing moral action in different cases while staying attuned to social and historical specificity. (shrink)

In this paper Foucault’s thought on monstrosity is explored. Monsters appear whenever and wherever knowledge/power assemblages emerge. That which eludes the latter, and which threatens to subvert them, is the monstrous. Foucault distinguished the production, throughout history, of juridical-natural monsters, moral monsters, and political monsters. In this paper it is argued that Foucault must have sensed that monstrosity eludes all notions of identity and difference, and therefore also the notion that places it ‘outside’. It is the space of emergence itself, (...) i.e. the location where sheer potentiality becomes the possible of and in the event. All monstrosity is therefore deeply, and inevitably, political. It is the promise of unsettling subversion. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology and human sociobiology often reject the mere possibility of symbolic causality. Conversely, theories in which symbolic causality plays a central role tend to be both anti-nativist and anti-evolutionary. This article sketches how these apparent scientific rivals can be reconciled in the study of disgust. First, we argue that there are no good philosophical or evolutionary reasons to assume that symbolic causality is impossible. Then, we examine to what extent symbolic causality can be part of the theoretical toolbox of (...) the evolutionary social sciences. This examination leads to the conclusion that it is possible to make evolutionary sense of Mary Douglas’s theory of disgust, and that her view of symbolic causality can and should inform evolutionary theories of (sociocultural) disgust. (shrink)

Emile Durkheim's "Antis?mitisme et crise sociale," written in 1899 during the Dreyfus Affair in France, is introduced. The introduction summarizes the principal contributions that "Antis?mitisme et crise sociale" makes to the sociology of anti-Semitism, relates those contributions to Durkheim's broader theoretical assumptions and concerns, situates his analysis of anti-Semitism in its social and historical context, contrasts it to other analyses of anti-Semitism (Marxist and Zionist) that were prominent in Durkheim's time, indicates some of the revisions and additions that a fuller (...) and more complete Durkheimian theory of anti-Semitism would entail, and highlights the significance of Durkheim's ideas for the contemporary study of ethnic and racial antagonism. While noting the limitations of Durkheim's analysis, the introduction concludes that "Antis?mitisme et crise sociale" has sadly regained its relevance in the light of a revival of anti-Semitism at the turn of the millennium. (shrink)

The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of (...) a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around problematizations (Foucault). (shrink)

An increasingly popular suggestion is that empathy and/or sympathy plays a foundational role in understanding harm norms and being motivated by them. In this paper, I argue these emotions play a rather more moderate role in harms norms than we are often led to believe. Evidence from people with frontal lobe damage suggests that neither empathy, nor sympathy is necessary for the understanding of such norms. Furthermore, people's understanding of why it is wrong to harm varies and is by no (...) means limited to considerations of welfare arising from the abilities to sympathize and/or empathize. And the sorts of considerations of welfare that are central to sympathy and, to some extent empathy, are often already moralized. As such, these considerations cannot form the non-moral foundation of harm norms. Finally, empathy and sympathy are not the only emotions that motivate harm norms. Indeed, much of the evidence that has been adduced in favor of the motivational force of empathy and sympathy are studies on helping, which is quite a different behavior than aggression inhibition. Understanding and being motivated by harm norms are complex abilities. To understand them better, we need to move beyond the current fixation on empathy and sympathy. (shrink)

Epistemology, I will argue, is of crucial importance to the sociology of knowledge— not just by way of definition of the phenomenon under study, but also because approaches to the sociology of knowledge rely on too-often implicit epistemological stances. I will make this argument through a series of categorizations: first, I will classify the field of epistemology into its three main forms; second, I will classify the sociology of knowledge into epistemological categories; third, I will classify the sociology of science (...) into these same categories. All the while, I will be making an argument for an empirical epistemology and "agnostic" studies of knowledge. This article does not cover the field of epistemology exhaustively, but tries to offer an orderly overview of classic positions for the benefit of social scientists. (shrink)

It is common for philosophers to argue that psychopaths are not morally responsible because they lack some of the essential capacities for morality. In legal terms, they are criminally insane. Typically, however, the insanity defense is not available to psychopaths. The primary reason is that they appear to have the knowledge and understanding required under the M’Naghten Rules. However, it has been argued that what is required for moral and legal responsibility is ‘deep’ moral understanding, something that psychopaths do not (...) have either due to their lacking empathy or practical reason. In the first part of the paper, I argue that psychopaths do not lack the abilities required for deep moral understanding, although they have deficits in those areas. According the M’Naghten Rules, therefore, psychopaths are not insane. Under a less strict formulation of the insanity plea, like the Model Penal Code, however, there is a good case to be made for their lacking substantial capacity. I argue that because psychopathy is an essentially moral disorder, and because of the nature of psychopathic violence, psychopaths should not be excused under the insanity plea. It would be tantamount to excusing someone for committing a crime because they are bad. Arguably, this contravenes the entire system of law. (shrink)

In contrast to rigid conceptions of nonhuman animals, several philosophers have put forth ideas that suggest a more flexible and extended vision of other animals. In articulating the condition of humans in the world, philosophers have referenced ideas that necessarily bring other beings in common with humanity. Significantly, conceptions of movement and biological transformation have played a central role in these ruminations, thereby suggesting the importance of geographical variables in human/nonhuman relations. By drawing out the connections between these perspectives, this (...) paper outlines an ethics of extension. (shrink)

In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that ground our value judgments in the (...) first place. Invoking symbolic arguments thus refers to how certain new technologies risk undermining our fundamental symbolic distinctions by which we organize and evaluate our interactions with the world and in society. Such symbolic distinctions, moreover, tend to be resilient against logical argumentation, mainly because they themselves form the basis on which we argue in the cultural and ethical sphere in the first place. Therefore, effective strategies to evaluate and counter these arguments require another approach, showing that these technologies either do not challenge these classifications or, if they do, how they can be accompanied by the proper actions to integrate these technologies into our society. (shrink)

The paper addresses the scarcity of research on the new rich in urban anthropology. It argues that sumptuary spending is meant to establish and display an honourable ascendancy, and stems from a need for public recognition. This is particularly visible in the palaces of the nouveau riche in Eastern Europe. Too often, these buildings are unduly ethnicized; the paper claims that this ideological approach aims at denying Easter European Roma the possibility of taking part in the urban competition of the (...) new rich and at excluding them from the wider urban context of the new rich in the post-Socialist territories, from Bucharest to Batumi and Astana. From Roma businessmen to a parvenu doctor in Cluj, the identity strategies of the new rich resemble each other. They draw on universal artistic heritage to create an image of ancient virtue for their owners. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the multiple meanings that the invention of the brick – this simple artefact that has permitted the raising of complex and durable buildings – has brought to civilisation and to humans in their relationship with the world. I suggest that bricks may have brought a number of novel experiences to society, whose meanings are important for the understanding of the modern condition and its emphasis on rationalism, replicability, precision, standardisation and modularity among other principles. (...) I also point out that bricks, along with rectangular types of packaging, are eminently liminal objects that entail a peculiar form of violence. (shrink)

This article tests the hypothesis that all pandemics are inherently translational. We argue that translation and translation theory can be fruitfully used to understand and manage epidemics, as they help us explore concepts of infectivity and immunity in terms of cultural and biological resistance. After examining the linkage between translation and coronavirus disease from three different yet interlinked perspectives—cultural, medical, and biocultural—we make a case for a translational medical humanities framework for tackling the multifactorial crisis brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 (...) infection. This innovative entanglement of perspectives has the merit of carving out a new space for translation research at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, providing sustainable ways to conceptualize the production of science at times of crisis, and challenging conventional views of translation as a primarily linguistic and cultural phenomenon that traditionally does not engage with science. (shrink)

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be (...) transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (shrink)

This article examines discursive strategies used by police and politicians to describe and justify the application of penalty notices to minor criminal offences. Critical discourse analysis is used as an analytical tool to show how neoliberal economic thinking has informed the prism through which infringement notices have been rationalised as a legitimate alternative to traditional criminal prosecution, while also highlighting the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology through which to view the embrace of legally hybrid powers in the criminal (...) justice system. Discursive strategies identified in the article include the use of ideological keywords ordinarily associated with free market economics and managerial efficiency; the adoption of militaristic vocabulary and metaphors in representations of policing and space; the strategies of assimilation and formulation to represent police views as uniform and coherent; and the use of nominalisations to legitimise the lack of procedural safeguards attached to infringement notices. The logic of—and the language ordinarily associated with—the domain of private business, the ‘free market’, and deregulation has infiltrated the criminal justice sphere. In addition, the naturalisation of neoliberal economic discourse in political and police representations of infringement notices produces and sustains important ideological effects, by disguising the ways in which the expanded use of administrative sanctions in public order policing intensifies state power at the expense of due process of law. (shrink)

Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver have been invited by the editors of this special issue to enter into discussion with each other – to conduct a series of interchanges – because of the careful attention their research has paid to the ways in which transness as a lived reality is ontologized in humans, non-human animals, bacteria, and viruses. With this issue’s interchanges, we would like to further the conversation on critically approaching the consequences of merging transness with animality. In the (...) following series of four essay questions, we particularly invited each of these scholars to consider moments of classificatory tension in which taxonomies of human and non-human become inflected and redirected by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and geopolitical location. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a theoretical framework for the analysis of expertise and experts in contemporary societies. It argues that while prevailing approaches have come to see expertise in various forms and functions, they tend to neglect the broader historical and societal context, and importantly the relational aspect of expertise. This will be discussed with regard to influential theoretical frameworks, such as laboratory studies, regulatory science, lay expertise, post-normal science, and honest brokers. An alternative framework of expertise is introduced, showing (...) the limitations of existing frameworks and emphasizing one crucial element of all expertise, which is their role in guiding action. (shrink)

The history of the field of business ethics in the U.S. remains understudied and misunderstood. In this article I begin to remedy this oversight about the past, and I suggest how it can be beneficial in the present. Using both published and unpublished primary sources, I argue that the business ethics field emerged in the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of the establishment of business schools in major universities. I bring to light four important developments: business ethics lectures at (...) the University of California and Yale University, Leon Marshall’s curriculum at the College of Commerce of the University of Chicago, and the William A. Vawter Foundation on Business Ethics at Northwestern University. Then, I consider the payoffs of my historical account for business ethics theory, pedagogy, and practice. Specifically, I present four implications of my account under these headings: business ethics as a public problem; the place of ethics in business schools; historicizing business ethics; and historical self-knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers the highly ambivalent attitude of the Austrian-Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest toward contemporary developments in both science and society. On the one hand, he was in the vanguard of the quantum and relativity revolutions, supported industrialization and economic planning based on mathematical models, and, in general, cherished technocratic ideals. The essay highlights several influences that shaped his attitude in these respects, from his ties with the Philips Physics Laboratory and his sojourns in the United States to the (...) utopian visions of H. G. Wells. On the other hand, he was extremely worried about the harmful consequences of contemporary changes in science and society, such as specialization, the growing pace of city life, and the increasing dependence on modern technologies, be they material or mathematical. In this regard, he agreed with cultural critics such as Max Nordau, Henri Bergson, Ostwald Spengler, and Ludwig Klages. Rather than attempting to solve this paradox, the essay suggests that this kind of ambiguity characterized a great deal of innovative science in the period. (shrink)

The segregation of the sexes in sport still seems to be regarded as a matter of course. In contrast to other performance classes, e.g., age and weight, which are constructed on the grounds of directly relevant performance features, in the case of gender it is dealt with the merely statistical factor that women on average perform less well than men. And yet unlike weight or age classes, which can be interchanged if the required performances are provided, the segregation between the (...) sexes in many types of sport seems to be quite impermeable. Contrary to popular beliefs women were not excluded from the beginning of modern sport. Hence, the meaning of gender differences varies in the course of time and in types of sport. Thus, this paper firstly gives a short summary of the different relevance of gender differences in high performance competitions of various types of sport. Then the historical construction of gender as central dimension in modern sport will be illustrated by using the example of soccer. Here in this paper, the elaborate processes of reproducing this incommensurability between women and men in sport is the main focus: At first big sport organisations tried to exclude women whose performances were well above the expectations by establishing so called “Gender verifications” which suspected them of fraud. Although it became certain that there is no clear differentiation between the sexes, gender segregation was not abolished. Instead new regulations have been invented to treat and “normalise” people who are difficult to categorise, e.g., transsexuals and women with Hyperandrogenism, in order to subsume them into the existent gender categories. So finally, gender segregation in sport seems to be just another example for Goffman’s institutional reflexivity: While the separation of the competitions are said to be a natural consequence of the differences between men and women, it actually is just a tool to create those differences. (shrink)

In most rewilding projects, humans are still the agents in control: it is us who decide to no longer want to fully control nature. Spontaneous rewilding changes the nature of this game. Once we are confronted with species that have their own agency, that cannot fully be controlled, and that behave in ways that we do not always like, then it proves hard to co-exist and tolerate nature’s autonomy. Nowhere is this more clearly visible than with the resurging wolf, whose (...) return to parts of western Europe challenges our existing ideas about ourselves and our place in the landscape. (shrink)

Central to the development of geology has been the growth of systematic empirical observation as a programme of scientific practice. Fieldwork has focused on many objects—strata, fossils, and landforms—and has issued in a variety of products, such as maps, sections, and monographs on regional geology, particular rock formations and fossils. Early in the nineteenth century, above all, many influential geologists sought to define their science as one exclusively of field observation, description, and the accumulation of data. The rise of fieldwork, (...) in Britain as elsewhere, is an important phenomenon in the making of geology. It must be explained. (shrink)

Disgust, the emotion of rotting carcasses and slimy animalitos, finds itself at the center of several critical questions about human culture and cognition. This article summarizes recent developments, identify active points of debate, and provide an account of where the field is heading next.

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation (...) of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison. (shrink)

SCOTT A and WILSON L. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 40–49 Valued identities and deficit identities: Wellness Recovery Action Planning and self-management in mental healthWellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP) is a self-management programme for people with mental illnesses developed by a mental health consumer, and rooted in the values of the ‘recovery’ movement. The WRAP is noteworthy for its construction of a health identity which is individualised, responsibilised, and grounded in an ‘at risk’ subjectivity; success with this programme requires development of (...) an intensely focused health lifestyle. We draw on Bourdieu and Giddens to argue that what is being developed is a ‘reflexive health habitus’, which is not equally accessible to all social groups, and is in tension with WRAP’s recovery-orientated aims. However, it is understandable that such a programme developed in mental health, because people with mental illness are highly stigmatised as ‘a risk’ and viewed as in need of risk management. By developing their own form of self-monitoring ‘at risk’ identity, mental health consumers are, paradoxically, able to construct themselves as ideal health citizens and no longer a risk, thus re-entering the moral community. We conclude by suggesting some changes to WRAP practice. (shrink)

Skin as cover: the discursive effects of 'covering' metaphors on wound care practicesThis paper outlines a Foucauldian analysis of interactions between nurses and patients during wound care procedures in a burns unit. It explores the use of Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of abjection and the abject body to illuminate the emotional affects of wounds on nurse and patient. In this process, I identify how cultural metaphoric understandings about skin influence and organise the care of burns patients. Such analysis suggests the import (...) of the complete skin, the medical scientific control over the definition of this work, and the emotional forces that resist such control. (shrink)