In this chapter I argue for a socio-technical approach to technology design for the common good that addresses its ethical and political aspects. The background is that the life of marginalized people in contemporary society is challenging and uncertain. The marginalized can face health and cognitive issues as well as a lack of stability in social structures such as family, work and social inclusion. In this context, certain democratic values embedded in technology design can conceal political asymmetries and fail to (...) deliver ethical value exchange, where value extraction is not dominated by one party but equally shared across all stakeholders. I discuss two socio-technical perspectives called human work interaction design (HWID) and Technological Frames (TF) to expose and tackle the challenges of designing technology for the common good. I introduce and evaluate an ongoing case of a digital service delivered through an app to support a fishing community in Alibaug, India. The evaluation of the socio-technical infrastructure surrounding this app is done in two parts: firstly, I use HWID to highlight inwardly and outwardly socio-technical, ethical and power relations between human work and interaction design; secondly, an argument for the use of the concept of TF to understand the constructionist and semiotic power dynamics of different groups in participatory technology design is presented. It is shown how dominant groups’ frames can construct meanings of design decisions in terms of whether they are appropriate or not. The political leverage of the scripts embedded in artefacts used in the process of design is also explained from a semiotic perspective. I conclude by highlighting the value of an ethical and political socio-technical framework for technology design for the common good with people at the margins. (shrink)

Being shunned from a tight-knit religious community, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, may be a traumatic event. The accounts of twenty-one participants, qualitatively analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis, elucidate the extent to which religious shunning impacts an individual’s life. Two dominant themes stemmed from the data: ‘Losses due to Shunning’ and ‘The Rebuilding of Self post-shunning.’ This article will explore the impact that being shunned has on the lives of the participants, considering its psychological consequences and daily challenges. The article (...) will then discuss the positive aspects which may characterise the experiences of those shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community. (shrink)

This article presents a partial history of visions of technodomesticity in the global north, concentrating on dwellings which seek to problematize, challenge, or reorganize unpaid household labour. It is structured around three case studies, primarily drawn from the United States in the 1950s and 60s: the single-family suburban dream house, the bachelor pad, and the fully-automated future home. While these chosen examples may lend us certain resources for thinking about how best to mitigate the challenges of reproductive labour via living (...) arrangements, they also possess a number of clear drawbacks or limitations. The article will argue that contesting these imaginaries (as much as learning from them) is likely to prove necessary in unpicking the connections between an inequitable distribution of unpaid intrafamilial domestic labour and the house itself as both a concrete site and an ideological formation – necessary, that is to say, in terms of building a meaningfully feminist conception of anti-work architecture. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue for a socio-technical approach to technology design for the common good that addresses its ethical and political aspects. The background is that the life of marginalized people in contemporary society is challenging and uncertain. The marginalized can face health and cognitive issues as well as a lack of stability in social structures such as family, work and social inclusion. In this context, certain democratic values embedded in technology design can conceal political asymmetries and fail to (...) deliver ethical value exchange, where value extraction is not dominated by one party but equally shared across all stakeholders. I discuss two socio-technical perspectives called human work interaction design (HWID) and Technological Frames (TF) to expose and tackle the challenges of designing technology for the common good. I introduce and evaluate an ongoing case of a digital service delivered through an app to support a fishing community in Alibaug, India. The evaluation of the socio-technical infrastructure surrounding this app is done in two parts: firstly, I use HWID to highlight inwardly and outwardly socio-technical, ethical and power relations between human work and interaction design; secondly, an argument for the use of the concept of TF to understand the constructionist and semiotic power dynamics of different groups in participatory technology design is presented. It is shown how dominant groups’ frames can construct meanings of design decisions in terms of whether they are appropriate or not. The political leverage of the scripts embedded in artefacts used in the process of design is also explained from a semiotic perspective. I conclude by highlighting the value of an ethical and political socio-technical framework for technology design for the common good with people at the margins. (shrink)

Background: Research indicates that shunning and ostracism may have long-lasting and severe effects on the individual’s well-being. However, there is scarcity of research into shunning enacted in a religious context. Therefore, using Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example, the present research explores the experiences of being shunned from a religious community, with particular reference to the impact on the lives of individuals, and the strategies employed to cope with such an event. Methodology: Social Identity Theory and Identity Process Theory, integrated with (...) the constructs of power and the Social Dominance Theory, provide the theoretical framework which underpins the current thesis. The narratives of two groups of participants, those of members who have been shunned as well as PIMO and former Elders, form the research data. The data are analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Results: The thesis has generated three main findings. First, the participants’ journey is a complex experience, where intrinsic and extrinsic forces combine in influencing the individual’s behaviour and decisions. Second, shunning may produce constructive outcomes, but by-and-large, shunning is an experience of loss which has serious impacts on the individual’s physical and emotional well-being. Third, the individual after being shunned embarks on a journey towards personal emancipation which culminates with a cognitive revolution. However, the process towards regaining ownership and autonomy is not defined by fixed stages of coping. Rather, it appears to be a continuum with the individual advancing from personal stagnation to personal progression over time. Implications: By developing an awareness of the underlying factors which may facilitate or hinder personal progression, this research may assist healthcare professionals in providing a more effective support that aims at helping the shunned client to progress towards autonomy and self-reliance. Also, the contribution of this research leads to new lines of inquiry. Future work would focus on the need of informing and engaging the police force, legislators, educational stakeholders, and policy makers. This is firstly, to properly address reports of discrimination because of religious shunning, secondly, to enhance child safety in ensuring their best interests are met, and lastly, to guarantee the individual’s basic rights during the judicial process. (shrink)

Two approaches to bioethical and broader applied philosophical debate are discussed and their implications in the context of the current Covid discourse are examined. It is argued that an approach designed to be more 'practical' can be counter-productive, and a more traditional approach to critical thinking has a new and vital role in the context of our current moral and epistemic controversies.

Self-driving cars don’t drink and medical AIs are never overtired. Given our obvious flaws, what can humans still do best?

Keynote address to the final meeting of the CAUSEHEALTH project: “Towards a Person-centred Healthcare and Practice: a causehealth conference on philosophy, persons and value, in memory of Stephen Tyreman”.

The importance of values in occupational therapy is generally agreed, however there is no consensus about their nature or their influence on practice. It is widely assumed that occupational therapists hold and act on a body of shared values, yet there is a lack of evidence to support this. The research tested the hypothesis that occupational therapists’ responses to ethically challenging situations would reveal common values specific to the occupational therapy profession. 156 occupational therapists were asked to decide what should (...) be done in 5 common-place yet ethically complex situations, presented as scenarios for debate. The results show that while most occupational therapists share very general values, they frequently disagree about what to do in practice situations, often justifying their choices with different and sometimes conflicting specific values. In some cases, the same respondents espouse contradictory values in similar situations. The extensive literature about decision-making - together with the study’s results – confirm that when occupational therapists make decisions, they draw on multiple factors, consciously and unconsciously. These factors vary between individuals. Value judgements are one part only of a complex process which includes personal experience, intuition, social influences, culture, psychological influences and relationships with both colleagues and clients. (shrink)

Paper presented at Philippe Garrel, le temps incorporé/Embodied Time Université Paris 8 Nanterre 29 & 30 novembre 2018 This paper proposes a loose typology of space and place in Garrel’s cinema. Its point of departure is the 1969 round table organised by Jacques Rivette which was a supplement to a series of film screenings chosen to illustrate the theme of space in cinema. Among the films chosen was Garrel’s Le lit de la vierge, which, for Rivette, is of interest in (...) the way it exemplifies the cinema of an ‘adventure of place’ rather than an ‘adventure occurring in a place’. The film for Rivette escapes from the “dénoté géographique, topographique”. Although the round table represents a particular juncture it offers a potential line of enquiry regarding the spatialities of Garrel’s subsequent work. Given the crucial role played by memory linked to place, temporality must also be considered. I propose to explore certain examples from Garrel’s body of work through the idea, borrowed from Michael Tawa in his book of this title, of agencies of the frame. Through the possibilities in this conception, a rethinking of the link between character and place/space emerges. Linking the idea of agencies of the frame – which Tawa himself adapts from Simondon – back to Rivette’s early insights, I propose a survey and typology featuring, inter alia, the generic spaces of urban encounter and circulation, specific places of significance to Garrel, types of urban space, screen spaces, abstraction and spatiality and Parisian topographies. (shrink)

Nunn's critique of the placebo concept is a radical and refreshing contribution to the debate. While there is much that can be contested in his analysis, his use of empirical and theoretical arguments to defend his conclusion - that the time has come to abandon the placebo construct altogether - presents an important challenge.

These are exciting times for the defenders of Person-Centred Medicine(PCM). A recent editorial of the International Journal of Person-Centred medicine celebrates the new interest policy-makers are taking in PCM, but worries that: ‘the nomenclature of “person-centred medicine” risks the accusation that such a term represents a further rhetorical addition to the already rhetorically overburdened nature of health services.’ The worries are indeed justified. Practitioners struggling to do their jobs in the resource-constrained environments of contemporary health services may well react cynically (...) to the latest linguistic innovation, especially if it seems, like its predecessors, to combine the blindingly obvious with the ‘revolutionary’. With reference to the case studies of ‘quality theory’ in management studies and Evidence-based medicine, the paper argues that initially promising ideas are compromised when required to meet the agendas of policy-makers looking for a quick fix to what are in fact deep, structural problems in the delivery of health services. We must resist such moves if we are to preserve the intellectual and moral integrity of PCM as a critical perspective on medical practice, and to develop ideas that are actually helpful to practitioners and the users of health services. (shrink)

Annual conference of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, speaker against the motion “This house believes that, in the absence of research evidence, an intervention should not be used”: The motion sounds inherently reasonable so why oppose it? Its rhetorical plausibility disguises a crucial lack of clarity, and lack of consensus among expert commentators, practitioners and policy-makers, about the proper understanding of "research evidence" in the context of physiotherapy. In an area where the "gold standard" of double-blind RCTs is not applicable, (...) there is a real need to be clear on the nature of proper research evidence, before we agree to any general propositions limiting the nature of proper practice. It is rational to know what you are voting for before you vote for it, not to find out afterwards that you in fact voted for something which limits you in ways you did not anticipate. Practitioners in this area need to defend their corner and to develop and agree explicitly their own conceptions of good practice. (shrink)

Invited keynote speaker, “Person-centred care and evidence-informed practice,” Winter summit of the European Academy of Nursing Science: What is the relationship between Person-Centred Healthare and Evidence-Informed Practice? Historically, there has been a tension between defenders of 'evidence-based' practice in medicine and healthcare, and defenders of patient-centred approaches. Fortunately, developments over a number of years in the EBM debate have led to an expanded conception of 'evidence', acknowledging the normative and socially situated nature of knowledge and evidence in health and social (...) care. We are now able to recognise that there is no opposition between PCH and EIP. While some contributors still discuss the idea of “integrating” more forms of phenomenological and social evidence into EIP, others are recognising the need for the essential, scientific aspects of clinical reasoning to be subsumed within a broader, humanistic understanding of clinical reasoning. As numerous examples illustrate, this broader conception of reasoning presents greater opportunities for such important ideas as patient expertise and epistemic injustice to be incorporated into our understanding of the current problems for health practice, and to develop imaginative solutions to them. (shrink)

Address to the Second Annual Conference, European Society for Person Centred Healthcare: A key motivation for Boorse's biostatistical theory of health was to defend the objectivity of medical diagnosis. There are background assumptions at work here about the relationship between knowledge, truth, objectivity, science, value and reality that require urgent analysis in the context of the current debate about person-centred healthcare. The clearest illustration of these assumptions can be found in the debate about the reality of mental illness, where there (...) has historically been a divide between those who accept that diagnosis is 'value-laden' and therefore accept a relativist/subjectivist account of mental illness, and those who feel the need to deny the value-laden nature of diagnosis to defend the reality of mental illness. However, more nuanced analyses note that all medical diagnosis is arguably value-laden & this does not imply that medical conditions are unreal. Instead of denying the value-laden nature of diagnosis, we need to adopt an alternative philosophical framework which requires us to make explicit, and to justify, the value-judgements implicit in diagnosis. Objections to this are considered from philosophy of science and political philosophy, and are seen to embody the same philosophical framework that needs to be revised. (shrink)

Address to the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice conference, Aarhus: Philosophers and scientists often pride themselves on being party to a discourse more rational than popular debate. However, all attempts by theorists to make a positive impact on practice are mediated by the economic and political contexts in which theoretical and practical debates interact. The challenges this presents are analysed with reference to the history of the EBM debate and illustrations are also taken from earlier debates about (...) organisational theory and the developing area of person-centred care. Research in these areas needs to acknowledge the difficulties in balancing meeting the demands of the policy agenda with retaining intellectual integrity and making contributions which are of genuine use to practitioners. (shrink)

Address to the first meeting of the CAUSEHEALTH project, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Oslo: Defenders of the 'CauseHealth' project have identified and criticised an implicitly Humean account of causality in the work of many authors in evidence-based medicine. They argue persuasively that the model of clinical reasoning suggested by this account fails to incorporate an understanding of the complexity and uniqueness of individual cases. They propose instead a dispositional model of causality as the basis for a new approach to (...) clinical reasoning. This seems to differ from both mechanistic and bio-psychosocial models, but the extent of the overlaps and differences still needs clarification. If the protagonists of 'CauseHealth' are defending a broadly Aristotelian approach to understanding health and well being then this suggests a return to an explicitly teleological account of health, one which revises our understanding of the role of value judgement in diagnosis and challenges modern dichotomies between 'fact' and 'value', epsitemology and ethics. (shrink)

Opening keynote address on “The Philosophy of Person-Centred Healthcare”, Brazil Roundtable in Philosophy of Medicine, Third Symposium in Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care Practices, University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil: What is person-centred healthcare? What are its advocates supporting that is distinctive, different from other approaches to medicine and healthcare? There are at least two alternative versions of PCH, which I characterise as “science plus” additional, “personal” factors and a call for (...) a broader philosophical reframing of the medical enterprise, raising underlying questions about the nature of science and its relationship with value. PCH in this second sense is set up in opposition to “scientism”, a philosophical view about science and its relationship with truth, knowledge and reality. Scientism can be objected to on many grounds, including its implications for mereology and for the ontology of value. Debates about how we conceptualise health, disease and illness are still beset by the suspicion that “value judgements” are in some special sense “subjective”. A motivation for defending biomedical definitions of health and disease that are “value-neutral” is to defend the objectivity of diagnosis. PCH is frequently associated with the idea that medical diagnosis is inevitably value-laden. Until the assumptions of scientism are brought to the fore and rejected, PCH risks being seen as anti-science and associated with relativist accounts of health and illness. All judgement requires a subject, but it does not follow that it is 'subjective' in any sense implying ontological relativity. The implications are substantial: either all medical judgement is relative or realism about value is true. To justify our claims in diagnosis, we need to discuss and defend our value-judgements. We must reject scientism for an openly value-laden account of human functioning. Medical epistemology requires value-realism. (shrink)

Discussions of diagnosis in mental illness are still beset by the suspicion that ‘value judgements’ are in some special sense ‘subjective’. The history of the debate about the reality of mental illness has seen a divide between those who accept that diagnosis is ‘value-laden’ and therefore accept a relativist/subjectivist account of mental illness, and those who feel the need to deny the value-laden nature of diagnosis to defend the reality of mental illness. More nuanced analyses note that all medical diagnosis (...) is arguably value-laden & this does not imply that medical conditions are unreal. All judgement requires a subject, but it does not follow that it is ‘subjective’ in any sense implying ontological relativity. The implications are substantial: either all medical judgement is relative or realism about value is true. To justify our claims in diagnosis, we need to discuss and defend our value-judgements. We must reject ‘scientism’ for an openly value-laden account of human functioning. Medical epistemology requires value-realism. The contentious nature of the value-judgements in the case of mental illness should not mislead us into concluding they are relative. (shrink)

Philosophy of medicine encompasses a broad range of methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives—from the uses of statistical reasoning and probability theory in epidemiology and evidence-based medicine to questions about how to recognize the uniqueness of individual patients in medical humanities, person-centered care, and values-based practice; and from debates about causal ontology to questions of how to cultivate epistemic and moral virtue in practice. Apart from being different ways of thinking about medical practices, do these different philosophical approaches have anything in (...) common? Are they committed to incompatible assumptions about the nature of science and its relationship to experience, value, and the art of medicine, or are different approaches nonetheless complementary? The chapter examines the questions these different approaches and perspectives raise and considers why so many theorists of medicine seek to find a “base” or “center” for medicine—as though there is, or should be, some general conceptual thread linking the things we call “usual clinical practice” in the real world. It further considers whether there are alternative approaches to the philosophy of medicine, which do not embody this philosophical assumption; and it suggests that a key tool for evaluating approaches must be their ability to contribute something of genuine value to clinical medicine. (shrink)

This is the full-chapter version of an earlier conference paper of the same name. It is being published in a book on New Perspectives on Neurath's work which includes the entire 1940-45 Neurath-Carnap correspondence as an Appendix, and so the article assumes some familiarity with Neurath’s reputation and philosophical work. My chapter addresses Neurath's version of functionalism and how he applied certain ideas about design in 1940s Britain, during and after his internment on the Isle of Man between 1940-1941 and (...) in talks, papers and correspondence from this period. It does not focus on the Isotype institute, which would usually be considered his principal intervention in design, but on his commentary on everyday objects and practices. In particular I focus on four objects (if they can be called that) – tennis courts, fireplaces, chairs and shoes – and through these elaborate some of the connections between Neurath’s ideas about the design of everyday life, and the significance of everyday practices, and his logical empiricism. (shrink)

Reflective practice is well-established as a tool for practitioner development in areas such as nursing, social work and education. Reflection involves the integration of theoretical constructs and practical action; therefore it seems somewhat ironic that there is little written on reflective practice within the natural sciences – where theory and action are often juxtaposed. This paper attempts to address this gap through examining biological fieldwork in relation to a balanced system of reflection that embraces the cognitive, psychomotor, affective and conative (...) aspects of practice. A model of reflective practice that asks practitioners to log their reflections against these four domains was applied to a biodiversity survey of tropical mountain streams in Trinidad. It was found that there is clear evidence that biological fieldwork can embrace a reflective methodology, and that reflective practice can be used in fieldwork as a tool for making explicit that which is already implicit. A holistic vision of fieldwork is sketched out here, where the introduction of a balanced model of reflective practice can support an approach that moves beyond the consideration of the environment and the researcher as two separate entities and, instead, considers the relationship between environment and researcher. (shrink)

The full text of the introduction can be read on the publisher's website.

A basic question for virtue epistemology is whether it represents a ‘third force’ – a different source of normativity to that offered by internalism and externalism. It is argued that virtue epistemology does not offer us a distinct source of normativity. It is also argued that virtue theories offer us nothing that can unify the internalist and externalist sub-components of their preferred state of ‘virtue’. Claims that phronesis can unify a virtues-based axiology are specifically opposed.

Text of a response to a paper by Linda Lai - ‘Presencing the past, a montage experience: walking through a series of temporal nodes’ - at Urban Encounters 2017: Cartographies, Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain, November 11 2017.

Short essay commissioned by Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.

What would happen if a Tweet appearing on the Twitter dress is re-tweeted and appears the dress of another unknown user in the same room, causing them to recognize each other in person through a message launched in the web? A new wave of interactive ready-to-wear technologies is dealing with the concept of embedding technology into the body in an even more radical way than the much talked about “Apple watches” or “Goggle glasses”. What will this new environment imply? Will (...) this create an entire new conception of immersion which will alter altogether the real/ virtual dichotomy (Jenkins, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2013 )? What elements will come into play within the extra-virtual immersive environment? What will the differences be with other immersive environments like Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality? (shrink)

As Jenkins' famous "convergence paradigm" shows, the "digital turn" transformed the media sphere in three main directions. First, by facilitating the flux of contents across different platforms. Secondly, by promoting the cooperation among different media industries sectors. third, by allowing the audience's migration from media to media in a constant search for different entertainment experiences. My main general focus revolves around the question of whether our sense of participation to contemporary historical events is effectively being facilitated or not by the (...) media we are using. In particular, my question revolves around the kind of agency that takes place in a communication space where offline and online actions contribute in the same amount in the shaping of the constitutional space of the communication exchange. My main example is the space of Tahrir Square as an example of the 'communicating vessels' dynamic between online and offline spaces which took place there. In fact, if we consider Hayden White, Keith Jenkins's conception of history as the discourse that is accepted and circulated as history within a particular culture and period, then we will conclude there is always a good/bad/contested/partial history. It is 'what counts as history', rather what has some special claim to truth, that we should use as a concept to defne the context of the historical action in which we are moving. The question becomes then what kind of history does the e.g. Facebook/Twitter record from Cairo represent? Does it produce an evidence of participation in what exactly? Should Tahir Square be considered a 'new communication space' which is extended by social media and instant messaging service? (shrink)

If Beckett’s study of Proust has belatedly received the criticisms its author no doubt anticipated, another influential study published a little over thirty years later has, like its predecessor, elicited, among others, the critical response that the author of the Recherche finds himself recruited to the self-serving project of the critic. Gilles Deleuze’s Proust is cast not as the pessimistic Schopenhauerian which Beckett makes of him, but rather, as a force of affirmation in the quasi-Nietzschean register of the ‘powers of (...) the false’. Deleuze would studiously augment his 1964 study with two additions in an effort to improve it. The consequence of this is to render its textual genesis a testament to one of the themes, and for Deleuze the theme of the Recherche, namely, apprenticeship. Moreover, the ‘pedagogy’ to which Proust’s novel subjects the philosopher becomes itself an example of the ‘untimely’ operations of art upon what Deleuze calls the upright or dogmatic image of thought. (shrink)

This chapter explores the rather striking manner in which at key moments in the history of philosophy, in the discipline’s attempts at self-definition, the genre or literary form of poetry plays a key role. Philosophy, at these moments, has been defined, inter alia, as the enemy of poetry, the guiding light for the philosopher who can only try and inevitably fail to emulate its brilliance, or as the anomalous guest at the philosophical table with whom the host discipline has relations (...) which result in either generative or degenerative effects. Insofar as it lays claim to or liaises with philosophy – as we have come to know it today – poetry has thus played a part in the self-definition of genre theory. The aim of this chapter is to capture a very specific set of transfers, transpositions, metonymies and other modes of reversible relations of substitution and surrogacy between philosophy and poetry, and along the way between genre-theory-as-philosophy and poetry. (shrink)

Which modernism or modernisms circulate in Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema? Can one meaningfully claim that both or either The Movement-Image and The Time-Image maintain connections with literary modernism? What relationship if any may be forged between theoretical debates in the areas of literary and film studies as these have been influenced by engagement with Deleuze’s work on cinema? The first obstacle to any successful negotiation of these questions lies in the absence in the books of any reference to the (...) category of modernism – a fact which is after all hardly surprising in a French author of Deleuze’s generation. A second consideration is summed up well by Joost Raessens when he argues that “For Deleuze the term ‘modernity’ is not a neutral category. In effect modern cinema is a representation of differential thought which is determined [...] as a fundamental critique of the classic thought of Plato and Hegel.” Scholars often assert that Deleuze’s modernity owes much to Nietzsche, in the shape of the latter’s demand for a new approach to questions of truth and knowledge. Once life is no longer judged in the name of a higher authority such as the good or the true, the stage is set for Nietzschean transvaluation. This is a process which subjects “every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve” to evaluation. This normative model of a cinema which has the capacity to carry out a Nietzschean total critique by means other than philosophy presides over The Time-Image in particular. In terms of the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought, total critique is opposed, in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, to Kantian critique as well as to Hegelian sublation. The thinking images of modern cinema, more specifically of its preeminent auteurs in Deleuze’s pantheon such as Welles, Resnais, Godard, and others, can effectuate this new image of thought. Thus is rendered tangible Deleuze’s claim that films think, that cinema thinks. Thus are linked a modernism of cinema and a project which dates back to Difference and Repetition, namely the challenge to a certain image of thought. In this challenge the allies include the two philosophers who dominate the film books – Bergson and Nietzsche. This chapter assumes the position that it is impossible to consider Deleuze’s modernism as being in any way other than intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system and therefore that it is only in this context that connections with literary modernism can be explored. (shrink)

This essay argues that the representation of pain in Beckett’s writing exposes the paradox in his work concerning the relationship of the individual suffering subject and the community. Making reference to studies of pain and literature generally and to salient studies of Beckett, the essay shows how the narration of pain in Beckett’s prose works in particular is closely linked to its more general interrogation of subject-object relations. As the preeminent agent, source as well as repository of pain, writing in (...) Beckett itself comes to occupy, in a transpositional manner, the poles of subject, object and work. If ‘pain’ names the subject-object continuum, that very conjunction exposes the co-habitants to their own mutual espacement – qua subject and object. The common feeling is countermanded in advance by separation. The conjunction gives rise to a sapping, devastating and agonising attempt to conjure an image, an image which holds out the possibility of the felicity, or at least palliation, offered by community. The image is, however, both a wounding regime and a generative regime. The two components, pain and community, are illustrated with specific reference to Texts for Nothing, through an analysis of which a new conjuncture of the themes of pain, community and the role of the work of art is proposed. (shrink)

Communal statistics and media reports reflect that there has been a resurgence of antisemitism. This paper explores whether this evidenced rise of antisemitism is effecting the Jewish community, in particular the Orthodox Jewish community. It elucidates the perceptions of Orthodox Jews in North London about the scale and significance of antisemitism. The study, which was informed by sociological framework, employed a qualitative approach using 28 semi-structured interviews and 5 focus groups. This article is important because it explores whether the perceptions (...) of antisemitism were accentuated among this prime target group. This paper will first consider the shift in the manifestation of antisemitism which has been noted by Orthodox Jews. Second, this paper will consider the various contributory factors which influenced the framing of those varied perceptions. (shrink)

This is the full-chapter version of an earlier conference paper of the same name. It is being published in a book on New Perspectives on Neurath's work which includes the entire 1940-45 Neurath-Carnap correspondence as an Appendix, and so the article assumes some familiarity with Neurath’s reputation and philosophical work. My chapter addresses Neurath's version of functionalism and how he applied certain ideas about design in 1940s Britain, during and after his internment on the Isle of Man between 1940-1941 and (...) in talks, papers and correspondence from this period. It does not focus on the Isotype institute, which would usually be considered his principal intervention in design, but on his commentary on everyday objects and practices. In particular I focus on four objects – tennis courts, fireplaces, chairs and shoes – and through these elaborate some of the connections between Neurath’s ideas about the design of everyday life, and the significance of everyday practices, and his logical empiricism. (shrink)

Milgrom is right to identify scientism as a major influence on both current medical practice and education. Whatever its advantages with regard to focusing attention in particular areas of study, a theoretical framework that renders the previously straightforward inherently problematic is clearly not an unequivocal advance. Scientism fractures the subject of proper medical attention. To repair the fracture, we need a revised conception of medical and scientific reasoning which understands the latter as an aspect of a broader, humanistic conception of (...) reasoning. (shrink)

This paper is part of an ongoing research regarding the relationship between branding and moral values, focusing on Western postmodern societies. It is also linking, in a rigorous way, academic research and industry thinking. The aim of this research is to find out the relationship between branding and self-identity in terms of authenticity, which is quite relevant nowadays amid a brand authenticity emergence. Following philosophical and sociological postmodern developments, which focus their epistemology in the understanding of everyday social practices, this (...) research concentrates mainly on everydayness phenomenology and hermeneutic. One of the main, quotidian and traditional ways brands have to communicate with their target audiences and, therefore, to communicate meaningful authentic contents to them, is advertising. An advertisement analysis has been done using semiotics, in order to identify the values related with the moral ideal of authenticity. The results suggest that branding, by communicating authentic moral values, can give shape to individuals’ self-identity in terms of authenticity. Successful brands become moral frameworks and, therefore, an important part of their audiences’ culture. That guarantees a successful trajectory for brands, whilst establishing the moral challenge or duty of communicating moral values and building their own loyalty systems. (shrink)

Effective person-centred care requires recognition of the personhood not only of patients but of practitioners. This chapter explores the consequences of this recognition for major debates in medical epistemology, regarding clinical reasoning and the relationship between research and practice. For too long these debates have been dominated by false dichotomies - subjectivity versus objectivity, judgement versus evidence, reason versus emotion. Based on flawed understandings of such core concepts as “objectivity” and “engagement”, this distorted dissection of the subject-object relationship has served (...) to depersonalise practice. The costs of this depersonalisation include over-regulation and micromanagement of healthcare processes by administrators and payers at the same time that information from clinical research remains under-utilized and the personhood of patients risks being ignored. Science is a human practice, founded in a broader conception of human reasoning, ontologically dependent on human beings living and engaging with the world in social, emotional and ethical contexts. After looking at different conceptions of epistemic hierarchies and their uses in the analysis and evaluation of reasoning in a range of practice contexts, we propose a “nested hierarchy” that effectively turns upside-down the flawed evidence hierarchies that have helped to depersonalise care. T.S. Eliot’s “wisdom, knowledge, information” scheme (to which we add “data” below “information”) provides a model for a person-centred epistemic hierarchy. This crucial, person-centred inversion represents levels of awareness that characterise more or less developed thinking and judgement on the part of the particular practitioner. (shrink)

Fulford’s chapter discusses the conceptual challenges facing person-centred care and the role of philosophy in addressing these challenges. He is right that this role - to investigate underlying meanings and reveal assumptions - need not and should not be restricted to the search for definitions of key terminology. The methods of “ordinary language philosophy” enable us to understand the meanings of terms by systematically examining their use in context, with a view to mapping a term's “logical geography”. He makes effective (...) use of this methodology to show that alternative accounts of what it means to be “person-centred” need not be contradictory and can indeed be fully complementary. The approach of mapping the usage of the key terms is necessary if we are to understand the discourse, but it is by no means sufficient in gaining a coherent understanding of the meaning and value of PCC - let alone one that could provide the basis for its effective implementation. While it is true that distinct accounts can reveal different and compatible “aspects” of PCC, the language of PCC - like that of “evidence” and “ethics” - is not simply diverse, it is contested. Fulford argues that “genuine” PCC provides a proper balance between the “extremes” of paternalism and consumerism. This language is clearly normative, going beyond what he characterises as the “empirical” exercise of mapping usage. A broader inquiry, based on the distinction between philosophy as a body of theory and as dialogue, and incorporating a direct engagement with normative questions, is necessary if we are to address the challenges Fulford identifies. The exercise of “mapping logical geography” reminds us that health discourse has no clear borders such that, by following its links to their logical limits, we will find ourselves inevitably in the midst of broader dialogues about the social nature of persons, the nature of value, agency and the basis for our obligations to one another. (shrink)

The ideas and terminology of person-centred care have been part of health discourse for a very long time. Arguments that in healthcare one treats the whole person, not her/his component parts, date back at least to antiquity and the need to treat the patient as a person is articulated persuasively by clinical authors in the early twentieth century. Yet it is only in recent years that we have seen a growing consensus in health policy and practice literature that PCC, and (...) associated ideas including patient expertise, co-production and shared decision-making, are not simply “fine ideals” or “ethical add-ons” to sound scientific clinical practice, but rather they represent indispensable components of any genuinely integrated, realistic and conceptually sound account of healthcare practice. The underlying conviction of this volume - one belief that, despite their differences, unites all of its contributors - is that PCC should not become the latest “revolutionary” concept to be “operationalised” before being “conceptualised”. It is imperative that we develop an open and inclusive dialogue about what we do and do not mean by “person-centred” to inform our attempts to implement PCC. (shrink)

A basic question for virtue epistemology is whether it represents a ‘third force’ – a different source of normativity to that offered by internalism and externalism. It is argued that virtue epistemology does not offer us a distinct source of normativity. It is also argued that virtue theories offer us nothing that can unify the internalist and externalist sub-components of their preferred state of ‘virtue’. Claims that phronesis can unify a virtues-based axiology are specifically opposed.

Short essay commissioned by Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.

While positioning and contextualising the short story 'Green Tea' by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) in relation to existing Le Fanu scholarship, this article seeks to explore further the textual reflexivity for which it is renowned. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes in the audio and the visual, in particular, through an attention to the interrelationship of the scopic, auditory and textual regimes of ‘Green Tea’, and to the manner in which writing is explicitly figured as both the source of (...) disjunction and the site of interpenetration of the regimes, it is suggested, in conclusion, that a specific understanding of allegory (in a semantic register drawing on work by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man) can provide a fresh perspective on ‘Green Tea’ as an archive of the regimes of language and light of its time. (shrink)

Philosophy of medicine encompasses a broad range of methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives—from the uses of statistical reasoning and probability theory in epidemiology and evidence-based medicine to questions about how to recognize the uniqueness of individual patients in medical humanities, person-centered care, and values-based practice; and from debates about causal ontology to questions of how to cultivate epistemic and moral virtue in practice. Apart from being different ways of thinking about medical practices, do these different philosophical approaches have anything in (...) common? Are they committed to incompatible assumptions about the nature of science and its relationship to experience, value, and the art of medicine, or are different approaches nonetheless complementary? The chapter examines the questions these different approaches and perspectives raise and considers why so many theorists of medicine seek to find a “base” or “center” for medicine—as though there is, or should be, some general conceptual thread linking the things we call “usual clinical practice” in the real world. It further considers whether there are alternative approaches to the philosophy of medicine, which do not embody this philosophical assumption; and it suggests that a key tool for evaluating approaches must be their ability to contribute something of genuine value to clinical medicine. (shrink)

Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, this book critically examines intercultural theory and its interrelations with globalisation, education and dialogue in multicultural societies. Applying the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, the author repositions intercultural communication within a new paradigm that challenges static interpretations of self and other, and suggests future directions for the development of a post-methodological framework based on the decentring of the researcher. This innovative work will provide researchers and language teachers with the critical tools needed to challenge instrumentalist approaches (...) to communication in a diverse global context, characterised by conflict and fear of the other and fresh insights to scholars of education, applied linguistics and sociology. (shrink)

Audio recording of 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal, based on two live performances at St James's Piccadilly and Cowdray Park plus extra recordings.

In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution? These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the 'Laboria Cuboniks' collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto 'Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation'. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and (...) gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction. Challenging and iconoclastic, this visionary book is the essential guide to one of the most exciting intellectual trends in contemporary feminism. (shrink)

'Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film' is an edited collection of essays exploring the intersection between cognitive and documentary film studies. Given that most Western societies are mass-mediated cultures in which their citizens largely understand “reality” through factual-based media, documentary film has significantly informed the consolidation of the audience’s emotional and cognitive understanding of the world. This understanding is informed through the intricate interplay between two apparent opposites inherent to the documentary film text: Firstly, on an extra-textual dimension, truth assertions establish (...) a strong indexical link between representations and their real-life counterparts. Secondly, on an intra-textual dimension, narrative and aesthetic strategies are employed to achieve a particular kind of “immersion”, whether emotional or intellectual. The co-occurrence and interplay of these two dimensions has arguably resulted in documentaries having a far higher potential than fiction films to impact on our attitudes towards, and interaction with, the world, but also on the construction of our own social, cultural and individual identity. Unfortunately, there has been very little convergence between cognitive film theory and documentary studies. Cognitive film scholars have largely focussed on the analysis of fiction film, whilst documentary scholars have deemed cognitive models too limited in that they only address the hardwired attributes of audience reception, thus hypothesising a universal body of spectators and dismissing social, cultural and historical contexts of authorship and spectatorship. However, the new wave of cognitive film theory has moved from neo-formalist and purely cognitive concerns towards the study of emotional and embodied engagement, taking into account social, cultural and individual aspects. Thus, cognitive models have the potential to explore not only narrative-driven and expository documentaries, but also more contemporary formats, such as essay films, participatory documentaries, docu-dramas and docu-musicals. This anthology explores cognitive approaches to documentary film texts, production practices, institutions and spectatorship. It seeks a better understanding of the reception, as well as the production and exhibition of documentary films, establishing the practitioner/institution/platform as a socio-cultural entity driven by similar mechanisms as the spectator. (shrink)

This chapter discusses my documentary film practice, which explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity through materiality on two levels: the pro-filmic event and the film form. The concept of “materiality” offers a good starting point for identifying and capturing physical manifestations of subjectivity in line with Searle’s theory of externalized subjectivity. ‘Materiality refers to the fleshy, corporeal and physical, as opposed to spiritual, ideal and value-laden aspects of human existence’. Chateau posits that the filmic mediation of subjectivity constitutes in the (...) employment of specific signs of subjectivity, depending ‘both on the subjectivity taken as a reference point … and on the material and formal choices made to the purpose of subjectivity’. This distinction between referred or pro-filmic subjectivity, and depicted subjectivity, is key to the process of mediation. I argue that these two levels of subjective experience require different, though interrelated methodologies, which requires their distinction from each other. But, this distinction should not be seen as a structuralist-semiotic separation. It is rather a cross-disciplinary interpretation of Searle’s anti-representationalist approach to subjective perception. ‘There is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed, between the perception and the object perceived’. For the first level that relates to the pro-filmic encounter I will propose two anthropological methods that facilitate the identification and filming of subjective experiences manifested through objects and spaces: the “biographical object” and the concept of “objectification”. For the second level that relates to film form and its impact on the audience, I will suggest methods based on film spectatorship theories, especially cognitive film theory. I demonstrate the proposed methodology by reference to a particular scene from my current documentary film, “Material Experiences”, which is work-in-progress and explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity with regards to the representation of blind people. (shrink)

When was photography invented, in 1826 with the first permanent photograph? If we depart from the technologically oriented accounts and consider photography as a philosophical discourse an alternative history appears, one which examines the human impulse to reconstruct the photographic or “the evoking of light”. Its significance throughout the history of ideas is explored via the Platonic Dialogues, Iamblichus' theurgic writings, and Marsilio Ficino's texts. This alternative history is not a replacement of other narratives of photographic history but rather offers (...) a way of rethinking photography's ontological instability. (shrink)

Review published in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 28:3 1997.

The ethical dimension of dialogue represents a major concern in the context of current research in intercultural responsibility. In this paper, I discuss the modalities in which the notion of competence is used to conceptualise responsibility and the relationship between self and other in intercultural research, in order to critique the Cartesian presuppositions of intercultural communication theory. I argue that models of competence and responsibility that are employed to design intercultural training operate within the paradigm of the autonomous rational agent (...) that informs Kantian ethical thinking. I contrast the model of the competent intercultural speaker that emerges in intercultural research with the distinction proposed by Levinas between the saying and the said (le dire and le dit, meaning the event of speech and the content of speech), to suggest two scenarios of intercultural interaction that show two different approaches to responsibility, one operating in the dimension of the said and the other in the dimension of the saying. Thus, in this paper, I discuss the implications of Levinas’s reflection on the nature of language for the development of an ethical framework that addresses the limitations of current conceptualisations in intercultural communication theory of competence and responsibility. (shrink)

In this chapter I adopt an interdisciplinary approach in the form of a philosophical investigation into the epistemological assumptions of the concept of competence and the ethical implications for intercultural dialogue. I intend to argue that the notion ofculture represents an ‘essentialist trap’ that fails to account for the complexity that characterises intercultural exchanges. Thus, in this paper I shift the focus from culture to the ‘inter’ of the intercultural, indicating the process of interaction in communication. From this perspective, I (...) illustrate the notion of promise and I introduce the metaphor of the promise of understanding to critique the epistemological underpinnings of the notion of intercultural competence as it is presented in two frameworks that are paradigmatic of current thinking in intercultural research: the pyramid model and the ICOPROMO project. Through this critique, I introduce the idea of a deferred promise of understanding as a guiding principle for intercultural communication. (shrink)

This is a pre-publication author's version of a text published in 'Understanding Bergson, understanding modernism'.

While positioning and contextualising the short story ‘Green Tea’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in relation to existing Le Fanu scholarship, this article seeks to explore further the textual reflexivity for which it is renowned. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes in the audio and the visual, in particular, through an attention to the interrelationship of the scopic, auditory and textual regimes of ‘Green Tea’, and to the manner in which writing is explicitly figured as both the source of disjunction (...) and the site of interpenetration of the regimes, it is suggested, in conclusion, that a specific understanding of allegory can provide a fresh perspective on ‘Green Tea’ as an archive of the regimes of language and light of its time. (shrink)

Serge Daney is widely recognised in his homeland as the most important French film critic after André Bazin. In a career devoted to criticism for Cahiers du cinéma and later Libération, including a key period as editor during the transition from the journal’s PCF and then Maoist phase beginning in 1973, Daney also held a lecturing position for a spell at the University of Paris, Paris III, La Censure. He was a significant public intellectual and featured in several documentaries, including (...) Claire Denis’ film Jacques Rivette – Le veilleur. From 1985 to 1990 Daney presented a programme on cinema on the radio station France Culture. Following the publication of a book on Haitian politics in 1973 under the assumed name Raymond Sapène, Daney’s journalism was collected in several volumes. He left Libération in 1981 to establish Trafic, a journal which, since his death from Aids in 1992, has continued his legacy. The only book-length English translation of Daney’s writings to date – Postcards from the Cinema – is of the posthumously published Persévérances. (shrink)

I here respond to four SERRC commentators on my paper ‘Perspectivism, Deontologism and Epistemic Poverty’: Shira Elqayam, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Rik Peels and Hamid Vahid. I maintain that all accounts of epistemic justification must be constrained by two limit positions which have to be avoided. One is Conceptual Limit Panglossianism (an excessively subjective, ‘emic’, ‘bounded’ and ‘grounded’, relativistic perspectivism, whereby anything the epistemic agent takes to be justified, is). The other is Conceptual Limit meliorism (an excessively objective, ‘etic’, ‘unbounded’, ‘ungrounded’, absolutism, (...) whereby the fundamental normative-epistemic notion of justification is wholly divorced from regulative, human, capacities). Within these bounds one may offer an account of rationality or epistemic justification that is closer to Meliorism or Panglossianism. Remarked upon are my respondents’ considerations on Alston, on suggestions for a separation between a more-subjective epistemic justification and a more-objective rationality, and objections to my position based on the assumption that we must embrace a very objective and truth-conducive concept of epistemic justification. (shrink)

To a large extent, if higher education institutions seek to inscribe themselves within a transformative agenda, this will be done by academics acting as ‘transforming agents’, and by instantiations of transformation both in the curriculum - i.e. in what is being taught in universities, and the knowledge, worldviews, and values that are being conveyed – and in the pedagogies – i.e. the methods, in a broad sense, including techniques, media, and interpersonal approaches - used to communicate this curriculum. In this (...) chapter, we speak from our position as researchers on higher education in the United Kingdom (UK). From this position, we normatively examine the interplay between epistemologies and identities (knowing and being) in the academy, from this transformational perspective. We propose ways of re-thinking academic practices through a focus on professional learning that cultivates ‘authenticity’, and engagement with curricula and pedagogies that challenge current models in Western universities. (shrink)

This is a discussion piece in a popular philosophy magazine which nevertheless, is a intended as an intellectually serious (albeit stylistically light) work of metaphilosophy. The paper asks reflexive questions about the value of philosophy, addressing these, in the first instance, via the critical, polemical title question.

I show how the high profile media story of a pandemic outbreak was a product of active societal agents and forces that fed off each other to shape, generate and exploit crises. Using media articles and interviews with public health leaders, public relations practitioners, and journalists who covered the 2009 H1N1 story in Canada, I combine media and communications studies, cultural studies and science and technology studies to explore how relevant social actors–in this case members of the media and public (...) health officials–constructed the H1N1 pandemic as a public health crisis. I argue that the media used the circumstance of widespread health danger to invigorate their role and importance in the public sphere, to produce what they saw as sound discourse for the public, whom they believed were eager for balanced and objective information. In doing so, the media promoted the idea of their audiences being bound together in bodily risk, and I argue that this tendency encouraged the idea of “biological citizenship” to create value in their news stories. I also contend that public health officials set up critical limitations by failing to recognize the news media as a complex mediator. The media response included strong elements of this failure. Public health and state leaders thought that journalists and their work could be controlled, yet had few tools to constrain the media or transmit a version of their messages. A breakdown in the management of the crisis ensued. Finally, I describe how public health and the media furthered a discourse that an ill and endangered body could be made resilient by a restored nation. This argument came to life with the H1N1 pandemic, when stability hinged on a nationalist frame and the population was invited to find comfort by sharing ways to reduce the global and invisible threat. I conclude by suggesting alternative approaches to the use of the news media in public health work, arguing that the extreme volume and intensity of media coverage during this outbreak should act as the catalyst for new thinking and approaches. (shrink)

This paper discusses my documentary film practice, which explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity through materiality on two levels: the pro-filmic event and the film form. The concept of “materiality” offers a good starting point for identifying and capturing physical manifestations of subjectivity in line with Searle’s theory of externalized subjectivity. ‘Materiality refers to the fleshy, corporeal and physical, as opposed to spiritual, ideal and value-laden aspects of human existence’. Chateau posits that the filmic mediation of subjectivity constitutes in the (...) employment of specific signs of subjectivity, depending ‘both on the subjectivity taken as a reference point … and on the material and formal choices made to the purpose of subjectivity’. This distinction between referred or pro-filmic subjectivity, and depicted subjectivity, is key to the process of mediation. I argue that these two levels of subjective experience require different, though interrelated methodologies, which requires their distinction from each other. But, this distinction should not be seen as a structuralist-semiotic separation. It is rather a cross-disciplinary interpretation of Searle’s anti-representationalist approach to subjective perception. ‘There is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed, between the perception and the object perceived’. For the first level that relates to the pro-filmic encounter I will propose two anthropological methods that facilitate the identification and filming of subjective experiences manifested through objects and spaces: the “biographical object” and the concept of “objectification”. For the second level that relates to film form and its impact on the audience, I will suggest methods based on film spectatorship theories, especially cognitive film theory. I will demonstrate the proposed methodology by reference to a particular scene from my current documentary film, “Material Experiences”, which is work-in-progress and explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity with regards to the representation of blind people. (shrink)

This is a version of a paper delivered at the Beckett centenary conference held at University College Cork, May 26-27, 2006. It was subsequently published under the title ‘Stellar Separation orMachine? Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari on Beckett’ in Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary, edited by James Carney,Mi chael O’Sullivan, Leonard Madden and Karl White, pp. 92-107, ISBN 1443835005. This is a pre-publication version of the paper as it appeared in the latter publication. OPENING PARAGRAPH: In the most important study (...) to date of the respective use of Beckett’s writings in the work of Deleuze and Badiou, Jean-Jacques Lecercle concludes by surmising that “Perhaps the close proximity, in the French edition, of Deleuze’s essay, ‘The Exhausted’, to Beckett’s own text, is indeed more than a fortunate coincidence: perhaps it is a symptom”.1 For, Lecercle, despite his long-term support for Deleuze and indeed despite his misgivings concerning Badiou’s characteristically strong reading of Beckett, decides that there may be, after all, something more compelling in the Badiou than in the less consistent Deleuze. This may also be, he suggests, attributable to Deleuze’s own modernism as a writer, which, though it gives him greater access to, and understanding of, the materiality of Beckett’s writing, also in the final analysis, renders his reading of Beckett somewhat orthodox. By contrast, the defiantly declarative and unhesitatingly dogmatic reading advanced by Badiou, is able to disclose strikingly original insights, not least because of the co-implication and reversibility of the readings of Badiou-Beckett and Beckett-Badiou. This essay seeks to examine the symptomatology of one text in particular as it operates and produces or is indicative of symptoms in the work of Badiou and Deleuze respectively. (shrink)

This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on genre and identifies developments in genre studies in the early 21st century. Genre approaches are applied to examine a fascinating range of texts including ancient Greek philosophy, Holocaust visual and literary texts, contemporary Hollywood films, selfies, melodrama, and classroom practices.

This paper explores the framing qualities of architecture in conjunction with the framing operations of cinema. In doing so it refers to philosophical inquiry into architecture and to architectural philosophy as well as to attempts to think film and the architectural together. In what sense or senses can architecture be considered 'primary' in relation to cinema? This first question will be explored by considering the inscription or encompassment of the architectural as a foundational gesture in cinema. Even if film does (...) not necessarily figure the built environment, even if it need not be dependent on the presence or generative force of buildings, film will always participate in its own version of architecture's modelling into a form of territory. (shrink)

This chapter takes as its point of departure the frequent injunction in Beckett’s late prose works to build or construct an environment for a character to inhabit. It is proposed that this instruction is central to the textual operations of the late prose. Making use of the work of Philippe Hamon on text and architecture, and through a close reading of Beckett’s short prose piece (originally written as a libretto for Morton Feldman), it is argued that, despite its sparse nature, (...) ‘Neither’ can, in large part, still be read as exemplifying Hamon’s insights into the operations of the textual and the architectural as these were manifest in the classic realist novel. The specific challenges which Beckett’s late prose present, however, require a supplementary critical vocabulary in order to account for the manner in which the textual and the architectural interpenetrate and expose each other in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Fungating wounds are poorly understood and research in this area is scant. Due to this fact, a Husserlian phenomenological approach was adopted to begin the exploration of this subject from the perspective of the patient. The aim of the study was to explore the lived experiences of patients with cancer suffering from fungating/cancerous wounds. Eight patients were recruited in a hospice setting in the UK and six in home care or hospital setting in Italy to explore the lived experiences and (...) cultural differences with respect to the phenomena. In depth semi-structured interviews were carried out. Data analysis was carried out using "the conceptual framework", which consists of a structure wherein the data and emergent concepts are organized and exposed in a way that allows for rigorous and transparent data management. One of the themes extracted from the data was The impact of having a fungating wound. From the data that emerged, it became apparent that the growing wound represented an abnormality that could not be controlled or predicted and this posed problems of both a managerial and emotional nature. In all cases, this went on over considerable time, generally causing the patients to become disheartened. There was a distinct wish to avoid seeing the wound and eventually to estrange oneself from one's body. The boundaries between what was inside the body and what was outside went askew. The wound became a reminder and a hallmark of the imminent death and of the progress of the disease. Amongst the symptom intrusions, functional limitations and pain were the most frequent issues related by the patients. When the pain was very intense, all energy was centred on surviving the pain. Looking at differences in the two groups, it would appear from this small sample that the Italian participants experienced more pain, possibly because the pain management was inadequate. The British participants generally attempted to "think positive", complained less, and used words such as "suffering" less frequently than did the Italian participants. Participants experienced a range of emotions fluctuating from despair to hope - emotions that were rarely static or fixed. Patients tended to concentrate on one key problem they were facing, which varied across the study population. In this sense, each participant was unique and had specific individual needs. In the study, difficulties were encountered relating to conducting research on dying patients with cancer and gaining access to them. Such difficulties often reflected the HCPs' unresolved issues around death and cancer. Similar difficulties were also experienced by the researcher all related to this sensitive topic. Recommendations for practice in the future: looking at the current research it becomes apparent that the participants have a need to talk about their experience and HCPs need to be able to listen in an empathic way. More education regarding dressing technique skills and correct choice of dressing for nurses is needed. Implementation of wound care strategies and psychosocial support for patients with malignant fungating wounds in oncological departments would be useful. (shrink)