An archive is an integral part of literate and social life and is in the custody of political institutions for their historical value. It is argued that societies who lack the faculty of recording histories contribute to the archive-making process in a different context. To advance this, the work of anthropologists on the Igorots, more specifically the Kalingas, of the Philippine Cordilleras, and their tattooing practices are considered for heuristic purposes. It is in these societies, where the concept of the (...) Western archive is absent, that the body becomes a repository of significant life events and rituals concretized by tattoos. Tattooing becomes a form of memory on how bodies remember and create narratives and counter-narratives. To serve as a provocation for further research, Derrida’s two-fold understanding of the archive is utilized. The archive, on the one hand, as a commencement that evokes the writing of the archive and, on the other hand, the understanding of the tattoos as disjointed and incomplete, allows us to understand tattoos as a trace. (shrink)

Health equity is a global concern. Although health equity extends far beyond the equitable distribution of healthcare, equitable access to healthcare is essential to the achievement of health equity. In Canada, Indigenous Peoples experience inequities in health and healthcare access. Cultural safety and trauma‐ and violence‐informed care have been proposed as models of care to improve healthcare access, yet practitioners lack guidance on how to implement these models. In this paper, we build upon an existing framework of equity‐oriented care for (...) primary healthcare settings by proposing strategies to guide nurses in operationalizing cultural safety and trauma‐ and violence‐informed care into nursing practice at the individual level. This component is one strategy to redress inequitable access to care among Indigenous Peoples in Canada. We conceptualize barriers to accessing healthcare as intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural. We then define three domains for nursing action: practicing reflexivity, prioritizing relationships, and considering the context. We have applied this expanded framework within the context of Indigenous Peoples in Canada as a way of illustrating specific concepts and focusing our argument; however, this framework is relevant to other groups experiencing marginalizing conditions and inequitable access to healthcare, and thus is applicable to many areas of nursing practice. (shrink)

Following Foucault, ‘critique’ could be regarded as being the art not to be governed in this way or as a project of desubjectivation. In this paper it is shown how such a project could be described as an e‐ducative practice. It explores this idea through an example which Foucault himself gave of such a critical practice: the writing of ‘experience books’. Thus it appears that such an e‐ducative practice is a ‘dangerous’, public and uncomfortable practice that is not in need (...) of pastoral care but requires generosity, presence and attention. As such it demands a pedagogy of experience which is to be invented in order to ‘make’ oneself into a question, to transgress the limits of a governmental regime. (shrink)

Legal institutions are created at a certain point in time, intended to be applied to ‘life’ as it is perceived at the specific moment when they are elaborated and cast into legal form. As a result, legal institutions always already refer, in their original design, to a certain normality, but between the moment of creation of a legal institution and its application to future situations there is always a certain time lag. Some legal institutions—referred to in the paper as “legal (...) survivals” –outlive the epoch in which they were created and continue their legal life long after the conditions which lead to their creation had, in the meantime, disappeared. The aim of this paper is to put forward an archaeologico–genealogical perspective on legal survivals not only as a method of studying continuity of law and the resilience of juridical form, but also as a line of enquiry capable of enriching our understanding of the juridical in its relation to the changing circumstances of life. The study of legal survivals allows to combine three aspects of legal continuity: firstly, the continued use of the same legal forms in different circumstances and for different purposes, whereby the same juridical form is filled with different socio-economic substance; secondly, the gradual adaptation of legal forms to new circumstances; thirdly, the emergence of new legal forms in close reference to old ones. The study of legal survivals allows to address the foundations of law’s claims to authority, based on stability and predictability of juridical forms. It also reveals the complex and multilayered nature of legal form which effectively has the structure of a palimpsest. (shrink)

The author discusses why the philosophy of the subject has been important\nto postmodernists. The author commences with a discussion on the\nintellectual background of postmodernism and its relations with other\nkinds of philosophy and with history. This paper concludes with a\ndiscussion about Michel Foucault's views on education and training\nand what impact this had on development of policy in New Zealand.

ABSTRACT This article considers how five single mothers, who used adoption or donor conception to bring children into their lives, negotiate a persistent and pervasive discourse of ‘problematic single motherhood’ in their interview talk. Tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall [2005]. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.), especially the overlapping strategies of distinction, authorisation and illegitimation, are shown to be particularly salient for these parents, as they work to legitimise their routes to motherhood by distancing (...) themselves from widely stigmatised positions such as young motherhood, working-class motherhood and unplanned motherhood. I argue that these single women’s intersubjective positioning serves to protect them against stigma and discrimination, but often relies on the reproduction of other polarising and discriminatory discourses, which feed into idealised constructions of mothers as responsible, middle-class, and appropriately aged citizens. Overall, the analysis suggests that it is difficult for these single mothers to challenge the multiple and intersecting discriminatory discourses, ideals and stereotypes that converge in exclusionary and limiting constructions of single motherhood, whilst maintaining a recognisably legitimate social position for themselves. (shrink)

In his recent paper, Winch attacks a group of theories he calls cognitivism. These theories agree in holding that ‘the ability to think, both consciously and subconsciously, amounts to an ability to internally manipulate symbolic representations of that which we think about.The relevance of this attack to education is that ‘Cognitivism’ supplies plausible‐looking reasons for thinking that learning can take place without instruction, practice, memorisation or training and its prestige as a theory of learning devalues those activities within education.Its rejection (...) should therefore lead us to re‐examine our need for explicit teacher‐oriented pedagogies’.Cognitivism has led to an emphasis on autonomous learning and a consequent devaluing of the role of overt teaching, ‘the active transmission of knowledge and technique by an authoritative figure’. (shrink)

The ArgumentThere can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social (...) distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work. Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organizedtopical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting. (shrink)

Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s conceptualization of ‘affirmative biopolitics’, this article examines the relationship between bedbugs and humans in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. Through an analysis of ethnographic field notes and interviews with people who live in the area, this article traces their experiences from first encounters. The trajectory of this experience shows a shift from a desire to immunize their homes through total annihilation of the creatures to the more pragmatic position of learning how to live with them through (...) an orientation toward ‘shared vulnerability’. This case study raises interesting questions for biopolitical theory: how can we conceive of affirmative biopolitics when the limitations of species being are evident, and is it possible to conceive of a multi or even interspecies munus or obligation? (shrink)

What does the word clinic mean? The clinic is first a place to diagnose and treat sick persons. The clinic is also a way of thinking and speaking; it is a discursive practice that links health with knowledge. For Michel Foucault the clinic is a mode of perception and enunciation that allows us to see and name disease and to place statements about illness among statements about birth and death. Within the clinic resides understanding of disease visible on the surface, (...) yet hidden within the tissual depths, of an ailing patient. Foucault shows that by the dawn of the nineteenth-century medicine is no longer a two-dimensional reading of symptoms, but a three-dimensional probing from symptomatic surface into disease interior. The anatomical site of disorder hidden within tissual depths is visible to the scrutiny of pathologist, endoscopist or radiologist. The clinic, a discourse that enables us to think about disease when we make statements about health and death, operates not only in its familiar textual domain, the medical journal, but in pictures of the scene at the sickbed, and poetry about disease. The truth of disease and placement of that truth in a general plan of the world in Renaissance woodcuts and John Donne's poetry is different from the regime of truth after the birth of the clinic in Bichat'sTreatise on Membranes, the paintings of Laennec, Agnew and Gross, the modern lithographs and the verse of Walt Whitman and L. E. Sissman. Foucault's clinic is where knowledge and sickness some together in the modern period. (shrink)

The growing consumerism has its opponents. Among these are environmental activists within the freegan subculture. The goal of the study is to describe how freegans construct and practice non-consumerism. The qualitative research on the freegan subculture was conducted in Brno, the Czech Republic. Two main categories were identified. Each category is conceptualized as a “picture of non-consumerism”, showing how freegans construct and practice non-consumerism. “Individual modesty” is an inward non-consumerist strategy, aimed at the individual life careers of the subculture members, (...) while “agents of social change” is an outward strategy, aimed at the general public and endeavouring to reduce consumerism in society. (shrink)

Although same-sex couples and their offspring have been legitimised in many European countries, heteronormativity is still embedded in institutions and practices, thereby continuing to affect the daily lives of LGBT individuals. Italy represents a clear example of the hegemonic power of heteronormativity because of the fierce opposition to recognising lesbian and gay parenthood among many parts of society. This paper focuses on the peculiarities of the Italian scenario with the aim of highlighting how heteronormativity works in contemporary neoliberal contexts. By (...) drawing on queer and feminist perspectives, the article also analyses how LGBT equal rights demands can contribute, to some extent, to reinforcing heteronormativity. Implications concerning strategies for challenging the regime of normality and queering kinship are discussed. (shrink)

In their own words: nurses’ discourses of cleanliness from the Rehoboth Mission For nurses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cleanliness was often seen as a virtue next to godliness. For missionary nurses, this analogy took on multiple meanings. This study focuses on discourses of cleanliness at one site of missionary nursing in the early twentieth century: the Rehoboth Mission and its hospital, which provided health‐care to the Navajo in the southwestern USA from 1903 to 1965. Data sources included (...) denominational publications, institutional records, correspondence, questionnaires and interviews of the Dutch–American missionary nurses who practiced at the Rehoboth Mission. Discourse analysis was conducted on references to cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation in these texts. Secondary discourses of embodiment in daily practice, initiation and assimilation, caring, ignorance, environmental factors and gendered work were identified and analyzed. The study interrogates the whiteness of the nurses’ dominant culture and sheds light on nurses’ relationships with normative discursive frames that reflect and perpetuate inequalities, discredit non‐dominant practices, and leave little room for competing discourses. It also illustrates a blurring of religion and health‐care, and the need for a reflective and informed stance as a basis for cultural competence. (shrink)

In her influential article published in 2016, Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, coined the metaphor that ‘Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian’. Traditionally viewed as neutral storehouses of official records passively awaiting historians’ scrutiny, conceptions of archives have expanded in recent decades. Archives are now understood as complex social and cultural entities that actively participate in shaping understandings of the past. This paper examines shifting perspectives on the nature and functions of (...) archives through a critical analysis of key debates. Specifically, this paper adopts a hermeneutic lens to critically engage Walsham’s metaphor and move beyond its potential limitations through situated analysis and interpretation. This paper explores how archives are actively implicated in knowledge construction through their contents, organisational frameworks, and interactions with historians. Recognising archives as fragmented, culturally contingent remnants that mediate engagement with the past, the paper calls for collaborative, reflective approaches between archivists and historians. The paper also acknowledges historians’ subjective interpretive roles while advocating consultation of archivists’ contextual expertise. Ultimately, it advances methodological discussions on writing history through a nuanced appreciation of archives as dynamic mediators within historical research, not transparent conduits neutrally supplying facts. (shrink)

The chapter explores comparatively the attention to the practical dimension that—each in his own way—Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the classic pragmatist thinker William James pay when confronted with the challenge of providing a non-skeptical response to the relativist stance on truth that arose in the post-Kantian age. Particular focus will be given to the extent to which these three authors conceived of the practical framework as the only one that allows us to meaningfully address and determine truth.

Inquiry into the history of practices in the manner of Foucault's philosophical genealogy requires that we distinguish between practical action, on the one hand, and mere behavior, on the other. The need for this distinction may help explicate an aspect of Foucault's philosophical genealogy that might otherwise appear misplaced, namely his attention to rationalities and its attendant conceptual material. This article shows how a genealogical attention to practice goes hand in hand with an attention to the role of the conceptual (...) within our practices. This is done by first drawing on considerations furnished by a Wittgensteinean branch in analytic philosophy recently developed by Robert Brandom. With an account of conceptual normativity and reflexivity in hand, the article turns second to a crucial site of conceptual self-transformation by drawing on work from a particular Foucauldian lineage developed in the work of Arnold Davidson. Davidson's work helps us understand the crucial status of concepts of persons for any historical inquiry into practices. (shrink)

This article outlines a discursive framework for understanding public policy uses in different narrative contexts. The framework describes a definition of the term «discourse,» its historic and intuitionally related nature, and how descriptions of «state» and «policy» transforms into legal, political science, managerial, and «public/state policy» discursive practices. The author postu- lates that the discourse of public policy is a place of a «clash of rationalities» in the industry. Because of this, the SS concludes that the essence of public policy, (...) its perception, understanding, and reaction to it are determined by the dominance of certain institutional discourses and the dominance of their bearers: «political scientists», human rights defenders, lawyers, managers and their ideas about the nature of the state and its «politics». The dominant discourses have the na- ture of uncritical extrapolations, or transfers of certain rationality inherent in one area to another, qualitatively different from it. The consequence of such an expansion of rationality from one sphere to another is the «inadequacy» of the discourse. It then discusses a comparative explica- tion of fundamentals, which constitute the narrative practices of each discourse. Furthermore, it proposed an explanation of the subject specifics of «public policy» as an area centered around «problems,» «options,» «impacts,» and «interests / stakes,» and then traces the significant distor- tions and contortions of this topic in the semantic horizons of related discourses. The article focuses on the rising issues of public policy, depending on the specifics of the discourse — whether «political», «legal,» or «managerial». For example, «political science» discourse emphasizes the problems of the consequences of one of the dimensions of influence for the interests of different parts of society; «Legal» discourse focuses on one group of instruments of influence (norms); «Managerial» discourse draws attention to a separate stage of implementation of already estab- lished public policy. Finally, this paper indicates the dominance of such discourses and their dependency on the historical context of contemporary Ukraine. (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)

Many mothers with intellectual disabilities lose their parental rights due to child welfare (CW) concerns. Despite the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on parenting with intellectual disabilities, there is scant research that has explored the discursive practices embedded within CW or family courts involving mothers with intellectual disabilities. The aim of this study is to explore portrayals of mothering with intellectual disability in CW court reports filed in Québec, Canada. A three-level critical discourse analysis was performed, focusing on 10 reports that were (...) retrieved from a publicly available legal database, and their larger discursive societal context. Analysis highlighted unequal power relations as discursive practice underpinned by the following discursive patterns: (1) The ideal caregiver vs the unfit mother (2) Devalued voices of mothers with intellectual disability (3) Professionals as holding authoritative knowledge and (4) Decision-making based on the best interest of the child. Revealing the hidden ideological assumptions embedded in discourse can help to challenge and confront injustice faced by mothers with intellectual disability within the CW system. (shrink)

The so-called new economy based on the global network of digitalized communication was welcomed as a platform of innovations and as a vehicle of advancement of democracy. The concept of virtuality captures the essence of the new economy: efficiency and free access. In practice, the new economy has developed into an heterogenic entity dominated by practices such as propagation of trust and commitment to standards and standard-like technological solutions; entrenchment of locally strategic subsystems; surveillance of unwanted behavior. Five empirical cases (...) within the present field of opposing forces serve as fuel for reflection: football hooliganism, sand-boxing, digital vulnerability of nuclear technology, sensitivity of studio projects, and streamlining academic computing. The main argument of the article is that a historic re-materialization is taking place within the new economy. This means cognitive as well as material divisions. Incommensurability in science is comparable with product incompatibility from the point of view of their implications to the users of knowledge and computers. Hype and banal attached to the new media are related to two ways of assessing social capital: as a means of peaceful functionality or a condition for cultural conflicts. The paper ends in proposing that there is a re-materialization of the virtual now taking place especially on the meta-level of the system. (shrink)

Since management is about influencing - influencing people who work in the organization, the structure and practices of the organization, as well as its environment - how ‘influencing’ is understood evidently makes a huge difference. The still popular empiricist concept of cause-effect relations as presupposing regularities is mistaken, since it forms no sufficient basis for action in new and unique situations. As alternative notions of causation, the paper discusses the Critical Realist conception of causal powers and the counterfactual conditional view, (...) arguing that the classical notion of power (dunamis in Greek; power, potentiality, possibility, ability, capacity, capability in English) offers the most fruitful analysis of causal relations for managerial purposes. The paper presents the four ontological features of power scrutinised already by Aristotle in his Metaphysics and Physics, and actively discussed in current philosophy of science. These are the potentiality-actuality distinction, full power as consisting of an active and a receptive component, the distinction of rational and non-rational powers, and the idea of hierarchy of powers. These ontological distinctions suit management contexts not only because they allow room for new unique decision-making situations, but primarily because they imply invaluable practical advice. The relevance of the power ontology for management is illustrated in the context of the Bohm and the new Timeout dialogue. The paper concludes with a summary of the practical implications of the classical power ontology to management and the adoption of dialogical practices to managerial expertise. (shrink)

In this paper, we build upon Bruno Latour’s political writings to address the current impasse regarding algorithms in public life. We assert that the increasing difficulties at governing algorithms—be they qualified as “machine learning,” “big data,” or “artificial intelligence”—can be related to their current ontological thinness: deriving from constricted views on theoretical practices, algorithms’ standard definition as problem-solving computerized methods provides poor grips for affective dissensions. We then emphasize on the role historical and ethnographic studies of algorithms can potentially play (...) in the politicization of algorithms. By both digging into the genealogy of algorithms’ constricted definition and by making their contemporary constitutive relationships more visible, both historical and ethnographic studies can contribute to vascularizing algorithms and making them objects of enlarged disputes. We conclude by giving a flavor of the political potential of the vascularization efforts we call for, using materials from an ethnographic study conducted in a computer science laboratory. (shrink)

Based on an empirical study of the British think tank Demos, the article deliberates on the nature of current political ideas. The key argument is that such a deliberation must take into account not only ideas of production but also ideas of mediation. The article argues that the ability to disseminate, brand, and market political ideas in the public sphere through the mass media is a crucial part of the activities of modern idea producers such as think tanks. Ideas are (...) normally conceptualized as statements. As an analytical tool, the article makes a distinction between the two components of a statement. The two components are utterance (or impartation) and proposition (or semantic unit more generally). By so doing, it is possible to focus on (1) the necessity for think tanks to be an `impartational node' in communicative networks and (2) the importance of attributing certain meanings and values to the political ideas (to brand ideas). From this theoretical outset, the article then describes the logic or nature of the mediation, marketing and branding of political ideas. (shrink)

The article pays homage to the leading authority of 20th century Hungarian music aesthetics, József Ujfalussy, by connecting his heritage to more recent research on the problems of musical time and notably to the study pursued by Raymond Monelle. Rather than a perennial invariant, Monelle interpreted musical time as a historically changing phenomenon constituting implicitly the basic levels of musical semantics, as they have developed throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras. The present study focuses on the last of these (...) paradigms, claiming that the Romantic experience of musical time has dominated both the production and the reception of music culture up to this day. The Romantic musical experience is based on a latent ‘framework contract’ between composition and audience, which drives the meanings attached to the experience of musical temporality. This latent agreement warrants a need for conventional compositional forms and simultaneously the insufficiency thereof. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

Critical Data Studies explore the unique cultural, ethical, and critical challenges posed by Big Data. Rather than treat Big Data as only scientifically empirical and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that Big Data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages. Assemblages is a concept that helps capture the multitude of ways that already-composed data structures inflect and interact with society, its organization and functioning, and the resulting impact on individuals’ daily lives. CDS questions the (...) many assumptions about Big Data that permeate contemporary literature on information and society by locating instances where Big Data may be naively taken to denote objective and transparent informational entities. In this introduction to the Big Data & Society CDS special theme, we briefly describe CDS work, its orientations, and principles. (shrink)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

In this paper two concepts of the self are presented and contrasted, namely a narrative and a substantial self. The discussed concepts have been variously assessed in contemporary philosophy. It seems, however, that the substantial concept is nowadays an object of severe criticism, whereas the narrative notion celebrates its genuine triumph. In the paper, the author argues that this asymmetry is exaggerated and disproportionate, and opposition between them is not so obvious and clear-cut. The author argues that those two concepts (...) in fact need each other and can, to a certain degree, complement one another. In the article, an example of such complementarity is sketched. (shrink)

Most studies of academic inbreeding have focused on assessing its impact on scholarly practices, outputs, and outcomes. Few studies have concentrated on the other possible effects of academic inbreeding. This paper draws on a large number of studies on academic inbreeding to explore how the practice has been conceptualized, how it has emerged, and how it has been rationalized in the creation and development of higher education systems. Within this framework, the paper also explores how academic inbreeding shapes and maintains (...) a powerful academic oligarchy, leading to the stonewalling of both knowledge and institutional change to maintain social and political structures somewhat akin to those of medieval societies. The paper shows that the key to mitigating academic inbreeding practices lies in ensuring that academic recruitment processes are open, meritocratic, and transparent. However, a more difficult task is to change longstanding mentalities and disrupt a system that serves the interests of certain groups but not the advancement of knowledge or the fulfillment of universities’ social mandates. (shrink)

I seek to draw out the unique character of Levinas’ theory of recognition by highlighting its transitional character in a double sense. It is transitional, firstly, in that it stands between two models of recognition: the earlier agonistic model of Kojeve and the later model of Honneth which takes as its point of departure a primordial relation of mutual affirmation between individuals. It is transitional secondly in the sense that, while Levinas initially employs the concept of recognition, he is later (...) explicit in his rejection of it. The interest of Levinas’ transitional model of recognition for the philosophy of religion is that Levinas negotiates both transitions by calling on archetypes borrowed from the Jewish tradition. An exploration of this model thus provides us with a fresh vantage point from which to address anew the question of the articulation of social philosophy and the philosophy of religion in his work. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWushu is widely misunderstood and its essentially combative nature is being challenged in public discussion. Understanding and recovering its essential nature has become a core issue. This...

James Tully's Strange Multiplicity uses the example of indigenous minorities in the white settler colonies of North America to develop a remarkably powerful critique of liberal constitutionalism's rule of uniformity. In proclaiming the identity of all persons before the law, he insists, liberal constitutional arrangements commonly discriminate against indigenous and other minorities. While the force of this critique is undeniable, it nevertheless takes at face value one of the central claims of liberal consitutionalism, namely, its claim to be based on (...) the rule of uniformity. Examination of liberal reflections on the government of subject peoples, most of whom were regarded as being, in Mill's words, “not sufficiently advanced for representative government“, suggests a rather different picture. In place of the rule of uniformity we find a variety of alternatives but, most commonly, an insistence, first, that the government of such peoples should focus on their welfare and eventual improvement rather than on their liberty and, second, that they should be governed as far as possible through their own institutions and structures of authority. The result was a highly differentiated form of rule in which what were believed to be indigenous arrangements were adapted to the joint requirements of improvement and administrative convenience. Thus, what seems to be a powerful commitment to individual liberty on the part of liberal political reason should be seen as simply one element in a broader liberal perspective on the government of populations. At least as important in this perspective as the rule of uniformity is the presumption that some cultures are more advanced than others and a corresponding view of many cultural differences in historical and developmental terms. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship betweenperformativity, as it appears in Judith Butler's work, andplasticity, as it appears in the work of Catherine Malabou. I argue that these concepts are isomorphic. Butler and Malabou both hold that resistance to contemporary forms of power, or “insubordination,” is contingent on a subject's ability to become other than what it is; Butler articulates this ability in terms of performativity, and Malabou articulates it in terms of plasticity. I reveal the social-constructivist dimension of (...) Malabou's work while also making apparent the extent to which Butler's work, contrary to her own way of conceptualizing it, and hence surprisingly and uneasily, presupposes a biologically basic capacity for change. Plasticity is this biologically basic capacity. Both thinkers affirm the idea that insubordinate forms of transformation can be impeded by the discourse that conditions what a subject can think. I suggest that this is an insight that must be heeded, even as I seek to affirm a form of plasticity beyond discourse. (shrink)

Alisdair MacIntyre argues that the virtues necessary for good work are everywhere and always embodied by particular communities of practice. As a general surgeon, MacIntyre’s work has deeply influenced my own understanding of the practice of good surgery. The task of this essay is to describe how the guild of surgeons functions as a more-or-less coherent tradition of moral enquiry, embodying and transmitting the virtues necessary for the practice of good surgery. Beginning with an example of surgeons engaged in a (...) process of moral discernment, I describe how the practice of surgery depends on the cultivation of a certain kind of practical wisdom (phronesis) that effectively orders the techniques of surgery toward particular notions of human flourishing within the limits of what is possible with the particular body on which the surgeon operates. I then argue that one reason why surgeons train in an apprenticeship model of "residency" is to cultivate not only the technical skill but also the practical wisdom to perform good surgery. I conclude by noting that the surgical profession is enduring necessary, but unprecedented, changes in the way it practices and transmits its art; and without deliberate and sustained attention to the character formation of surgeons, the profession runs the risk of creating excellent technicians who are nonetheless ill-equipped to practice wise and good surgery. (shrink)