In this paper, I investigate backward-looking accounts of death's badness. I begin by reviewing deprivationism—the standard, forward-looking account of death's badness. On deprivationism, death is bad for its victims when it deprives them of a good future. This account famously faces two problems—Lucretius’s symmetry problem and the preemption problem. This motivates turning to backward-looking accounts of death's badness on which death is bad for its victim (in a respect) when it involves a decline from a good life. I distinguish three (...) different backward-looking accounts of death's badness in terms of decline, and I argue for the attractiveness of one in particular. I conclude by considering how the backward-looking consideration of decline might factor into our overall account of death's badness. (shrink)

Occlusion is most commonly presented as an aspect of certain genres: occluded genres. Here, occlusion is proposed as a property of the processes by which genres are taken up. While routine use of genres creates expectations around when the genre’s uptake is commonly occluded, such expected practice can be subverted by deliberate disclosure. Occlusion and disclosure in the process of genre uptake thus become argumentative and powerful moves in communicative interaction. In three case studies, I analyze processes of occlusion in (...) relationship to the genre of the letter to the university president. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefit (CCA) has faced a barrage of objections from cases involving preemption, overdetermination, and choice. In this paper I provide a unified diagnosis of CCA’s vulnerability to these objections: CCA is susceptible to them because it evaluates each act by the same criterion. This is a mistake because, in a sense I make precise, situations raise prudential questions, and only some acts—the relevant alternatives—are directly relevant to these questions. To answer the objections, we (...) must revise CCA so that its evaluations foreground the relevant alternatives. The result is a question-centered account of harm and benefit. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the woman's page in the *Grain Growers' Guide,* edited between 1912 and 1917 by Francis Marion Beynon. I approach this material with questions that have become prominent in rhetorical studies of women's writing. How were women called forth to speak, and what were their motivations to participate in public debate? How did woman's page editors shape the conditions under which they themselves and other women could articulate their concerns? I show that suffragist editor Francis Marion Beynon (...) created situations in which she and other women could speak publicly and politically about issues such as women's suffrage. (shrink)

This article uses rhetorical genre theory to discuss methods for writing studies research in light of increasing participation of Indigenous scholars and students in disciplines throughout the academy. Like genres, research methods are embedded in systems of interaction that create subject positions and social relations. Using rhetorical genre theory to understand methods as the cultural tools of research communities, we argue that methods can be enacted as flexible resources in the interest of advancing ethical knowledge. In the context of Indigenous (...) epistemological activism, researchers can then take a contingent stance toward method, a stance we name “principled uncertainty.”. (shrink)

We advocate for the inclusion of Indigenous studies within first-year writing and academic English courses, particularly those taught to multilingual, international students. We argue that asking international students to learn about local and international Indigenous issues productively intersects with coursework in academic English. Our pedagogical approach emphasizes metalanguage and allows Indigenous studies and explicit language instruction to work in tandem, thereby recognizing the agency of Indigenous scholars and guiding non-Indigenous students in relation to it.

Trans rights advocacy is a social justice movement that is transforming language practices relating to gender. Research has highlighted the fact that language which constructs gender as binary harms trans people, and some trans studies researchers have developed guidelines for honouring trans people’s names and pronouns. The language of academic writing is an area of discussion where questions of trans rights and trans experiences have not yet been addressed. This paper draws on two data sources to explore the citation experiences (...) and practices of trans scholars and activists: a web-based archive of writers’ perspectives built between 2015 and 2016; and a corpus-based study of 14 research articles published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Our analysis highlights the sensitivity that is required of colleagues who work with transgender authors’ writing, furthering our understanding of citation as a collaborative and potentially intimate and caring practice. Practices of referring to work by trans scholars pose ethical questions about the social relations expressed in citation in general, enabling applied language scholars to develop a new and different awareness of the sociality of citation. (shrink)

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design—how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders—for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are articles, letters, and editorials on women's suffrage that were published between 1909 and 1912 in Canadian periodicals. In particular, the author analyzes noun phrases with which suffrage-skeptical women are addressed, (...) relying on the theory of constitutive rhetoric to highlight the interpellative force with which the audience design of this public political debate operates. (shrink)

From 1909 onward, the Canadian suffrage debate was heavily influenced by reports on suffrage militancy from Great Britain and the United States. Militancy played an influential role in Canadian suffrage history not through its practice–there was no Canadian militant campaign–but through an ongoing discussion of its meaning. Using Anne Freadman's notions of genre and uptake, this paper analyzes the discursive uptake of suffrage militancy—from news reports on front pages, to commentary on women's pages, to reviews of Emmeline Pankhurst's Canadian speaking (...) engagements. The Canadian debate about militancy is a fertile site for drawing out the roles of genre and uptake in the political positioning of both suffragists and suffrage sceptics. Talk about militancy serves as a way to regulate the uptake of this particular genre of political action, whereby both sides tended to share the optimistic view that Canadian suffragists where not yet in need of militancy. (shrink)

We assess the state of thinking about gender identities in computer vision through an analysis of how research papers in gender and facial recognition are designed, what claims they make about trans and non-binary people, what values they espouse, and what they describe as ongoing challenges for the field. In our corpus of 50 research papers, the seven papers that consider trans and non-binary identities use questionable assumptions about medicalization as a measure of transness, about gender transition as a linear (...) and bounded process, and about the concept of gender deception. Otherwise, non-normative gender identities are absent and their consideration is in fact hindered by prevailing research values, particularly deeply embedded ones such as performance and accuracy. We point out how the use of shared datasets calcifies binary conceptions of gender. In the way that the field of computer vision conceives of ongoing challenges for its research, it does not yet face questions that trans and non-binary user experiences pose and often falls back on biologically essentialist notions of sex classification. We make two recommendations: that computer vision researchers undertake interdisciplinary work with researchers who study gender as a socio-cultural phenomenon, and that journal editors and conference organizers do the same in peer review and conference acceptance processes. (shrink)

In the process of mentoring instructors of writing into the field of writing studies, there is a tension between practical surface of writing instruction and underlying theoretical depth. This paper calls for more systematic thinking about that tension between surface and depth. It emphasizes the important roles that metalanguage plays in mediating that tension and points out the indignities of contract employment that in many ways prevent writing instruction in Canada from becoming the deep and thoroughly researched practice it could (...) be. (shrink)

Literary studies are often seen as a discipline without method. Research articles in literature do not have method sections, nor do they list what type of evidence has been included in a particular project or by what procedures primary material was analyzed. Because of implicitness of questions of method and research design, writing in literary studies is difficult to teach and often relies on students' abilities to infer their own strategies for reading and writing. I analyze a textual corpus of (...) recent research articles from Canadian Literature and Studies in Canadian Literature in order to clarify typical discursive patterns that are used when discussing methods of literary scholarship. On the basis of these findings, we can ask: How can teaching in literary studies be adjusted in order to demystify the methodological practices of the discipline? (shrink)

This article reviews recent government incursions on questions of free speech at universities and colleges in Ontario and Alberta and presents the challenge they pose to university autonomy. Inherent in university autonomy is the possibility—or the obligation—that universities make decisions based on ethical responsibilities that can extend beyond the limits of current law. As a case study of university autonomy in matters of expressive freedom, I highlight events at the University of British Columbia, which leads me to a discussion of (...) how questions of ethical responsibility have been raised particularly in relation to the speech protection of transgender members of the university. A central issue is the need for universities to adjudicate when free speech rights meet related responsibilities with which they can conflict. I detail how, for instance, the invitation of some anti-trans speakers can pose such a conflict and should lead university communities to consider adjusting their responses in extreme cases so as to be able to more autonomously regulate hateful speech beyond applicable law. (shrink)

Standardized academic English is now understood to be rooted in histories and practices that are colonial, classist, nationalist, heteronormative, ableist, and sexist. Current teaching of academic English carries an ethos of making practices of research writing accessible to students from marginalized backgrounds through explicit attention to language patterns and genre structures. In the context of both ideological critique and explicit pedagogy, I discuss three pragmatic elements of research writing—positionality, citation, and evaluation—with examples from one of my courses. I present these (...) elements and my approach to teaching them as a practice that is attentive to both details of published scholarship and students’ agency and intentionality in shaping their own writing projects, claims, and arguments. My work is framed by a functional approach to grammar where grammar is not interesting as a standardized apparatus but as a code that provides a range of options for producing performative effects. I call this spacious grammar. (shrink)

Uncertainty, insufficient information or information of poor quality, limited cognitive capacity and time, along with value conflicts and ethical considerations, are all aspects thatmake risk managementand riskcommunication difficult. This paper provides a review of different risk concepts and describes how these influence risk management, communication and planning in relation to forest ecosystem services. Based on the review and results of empirical studies, we suggest that personal assessment of risk is decisive in the management of forest ecosystem services. The results are (...) used together with a reviewof different principles of the distribution of risk to propose an approach to risk communication that is effective aswell as ethically sound. Knowledge of heuristics and mutual information on both beliefs and desires are important in the proposed risk communication approach. Such knowledge provides an opportunity for relevant information exchange, so that gaps in personal knowledge maps can be filled in and effective risk communication can be promoted. (shrink)

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations. In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach, we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails (...) a harm that cannot be fully explained in terms of hedonistic welfare. We explore the implications of this idea for the assessment of current practices involving animals. (shrink)

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur sex stycken tillfrågade lärare för grundskolans lägre årskurser F-3 upplever sin undervisning kring läroplanens område sexualitet, samtycke och relationer. Studien utgår från Sandra Hardings genusteori samt Judith Butlers begrepp kring performativitet. Studien är tänkt att synliggöra hur lärare i de lägre årskurserna undervisar kring läroplanens område sexualitet, samtycke och relationer samt att lyfta hur undervisningen balanseras mellan kön och normer. -/- Resultatet av studien visar att det upplevs finnas svårigheter kring framför allt (...) ämnet sexualitet i läroplanens område sexualitet, samtycke och relationer där det framkommer en osäkerhet kring vad undervisningen förväntas innehålla samt den egna lärarens svårighet att veta hur ämnet ska anpassas till grundskolans lägre åldrar. Inte heller sexuella övergrepp och grooming lyfts av fler än två av de sex tillfrågade lärarna, något som inte svarar mot det eventuella behovet av sådan undervisningen med tanke på att forskning visar hur vanligt det är med sexuella övergrepp hos barn. -/- Studiens resultat visar också på att lärarna har ett väletablerat normkritiskt förhållningssätt där de aktivt reflekterar över sina egna normer och språkbruk för att inte förstärka normer i sin undervisning. I och med detta aktiva normkritiska förhållningssätt påvisade studien knappa svårigheter kring balansen mellan kön och normer i undervisningen inom området sexualitet, samtycke och relationer. Normerna kring genus uppfattades av de tillfrågade lärarna skapas utanför skolverksamheten. Eleverna upplevdes av lärarna att vara medvetna om normer hörande till de olika könen, vilket styrks av tidigare forskning där kulturella definitioner av manligt och kvinnligt påverkar barn även i yngre ålder. Resultatet av studien förklaras utifrån Hardings genusteori där lärarnas individuella normer kring genus, som är en produkt av hur de strukturella och symboliska normerna i samhället ser ut, kan ha en inverkan på hur de tolkar innehållet i läroplanens område sexualitet, samtycke och relationer. Det tolkas även utifrån Butlers begrepp om performativitet, att våra handlingar och ord skapar normer, där lärarna riskerar att påverka undervisningen i och med att undervisningen eventuellt kan föra vidare beteenden och normer som är påverkade av den individuella tolkningen av området. (shrink)

Starting with the first international publication of Le Van Thiem (Lê Văn Thiêm) in 1947, modern mathematics in Vietnam is a longstanding research field. However, what is known about its development usually comes from discrete essays such as anecdotes or interviews of renowned mathematicians. We introduce SciMath—a database on publications of Vietnamese mathematicians. To ensure this database covers as many publications as possible, data entries are manually collected from scientists’ publication records, journals’ websites, universities, and research institutions. Collected data (...) went through various verification steps to ensure data quality and minimize errors. At the time of this report, the database covered 8372 publications, profiles of 1566 Vietnamese, and 1492 foreign authors since 1947. We found a growing capability in mathematics research in Vietnam in various aspects: scientific output, publications on influential journals, or collaboration. The database and preliminary results were presented to the Scientific Council of Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM) on November 13th, 2020. (shrink)