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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
A powerful claim for the virtues of a more thoughtful and collegiate approach to the academy today. This book offers a response to the culture of metrics, mass digitisation, and accountability (as opposed to responsibility, or citizenship) that has developed in higher education world wide, as exemplified by the UK's Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF), and the increasing bureaucracy that limits the time available for teaching, research, and even conversation and collaboration. Ironically, these are problems that will be solved only by academicsfinding the time to talk and to work together. The essays collected here both critique the culture of speed in the neoliberal university and provide examples of what can be achieved by slowing down, by reclaiming research and research priorities, and by working collaboratively across the disciplines to improve conditions. They are informed both by recent research in medieval studies and by the problematic culture of twenty-first century higher education. The contributions offer very personal approaches to the academic culture of the present moment. Some tackle issues of academic freedom head-on; others more obliquely; but they all have been written as declarations of theacademic freedom that comes with slow thinking, slow reading, slow writing and slow looking and the demonstrations of its benefits. CATHERINE E. KARKOV is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Leeds. Contributors: Lara Eggleton, Karen Jolly, Chris Jones, James Paz, Andrew Prescott, Heather Pulliam
From 1815 to 1914, European governments and their political oppositions were engaged in a constant "war" for the minds of the general population, especially the working classes. The German socialist newspaper, Hamburger Echo, declared on September 27, 1910, "In waging our war, we do not throw bombs. Instead we throw our newspapers amongst the masses of the working people. Printing ink is our explosive." The most comprehensive study ever published about European censorship practices during the 1815-1914 period, this book discusses the censorship of books, newspapers, caricatures, theater, and film through an analytical introductory survey and six chapters by leading specialists who summarize 19th-century censorship practices in the six major countries of continental Europe: Germany, Italy, France, Austria, Russia, and Spain. As a result of the massive transformation of European life in the post-Napoleonic period and the simultaneously rapid growth in industrialization, urbanization, literacy, transportation, and communication, the average European emerged quite suddenly as a potential player who could no longer be ignored by the ruling elite.
Shocked by the fact that, in the Netherlands, psychiatric patients are considered potentially appropriate candidates for physician-assisted suicide, Olevitch examines the research and data and finds that, even in the United States, the situation is threatening. She describes how the rhetoric of the assisted-suicide movement can confuse potential suicide victims and their helpers, and how surrogate medical decisions are a growing threat in the lives of incompetent patients. Olevitch argues the assisted-suicide movement is based not on the level-headed realism its advocates claim, but on a lack of information about up-to-date ways of bringing about psychological wellness, on a misguided panic about finances, a phobic view of medical procedures, a lack of understanding of the support needed by average medical patients, and a misguided belief in superficial safeguards. Olevitch describes how Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy can be used to help terminally ill or disabled people overcome their profound depression. Another cognitive focus is added as she presents material answering questions including what patients are really thinking when they request assisted suicide or when they decline medical procedures. Well-known psychologist Albert Ellis says of the volume, Carefully read this unusual book and see how it can be useful to you, whether you are a physician, a mental health professional, or an unfortunate patient
This book is a critical analysis of the technologies of identity-formation in governmental family planning policy. Panu argues that in order for contemporary liberalism to govern legitimately, governmental discourses have to create and subsequently alienate certain identities as "other" that is, as the polar opposite of the good, normal citizen. These identities usually center on the poor, the racialised, and the gendered. These arguably discriminatory practices are illustrated through the investigation of the U.S. bio- and anatomo-politics of reproduction in the national family planning strategy, in an analytical framework that relates them to the welfare benefit policies in the same country. Panu argues that as long as neo-liberal governmental apparatuses map and rule society using this combination of "othering" and foundational assumptions, each governmental intervention reinforces the systems that make domination, inequality, and exclusion possible.
This is an authoritative study on the role of mass media in Third World development. Using broad historical, economic, and political perspectives, Gunilla L. Faringer details the obstacles to a genuinely free, mass circulation press in Black Africa and offers a thorough analysis of the African press. The volume's six chapters meticulously catalog all pertinent data on press development, performance, and goals in English-speaking, sub-Saharan Africa, with primary focus on Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, countries that represent three different courses of political development. Faringer critically analyzes widely held attitudes among scholars and international organizations as to the role of mass media in Third World development. Her findings challenge the prevalent belief that the primary task of Third World media is to function as a tool for economic development. Outlining both present and future responsibilities of Third World mass media, Press Freedom in Africa stresses the need for deeper understandings by mass media policy makers of the importance that history, macroeconomic structure, and political traditions hold in the Third World. The detailed introduction considers the philosophical issues that underlie the crucial role of mass media in political change and national development. Faringer surveys the unique obstacles confronting African nations as they have attempted to develop their own comprehensive media structures. Subsequent chapters trace the history of newspapers in Black Africa before World War II; survey the role of the press in the independence movement; and examine the changing relations between government and press. Two final chapters offer a critical perspective on press freedoms and functions and lay the groundwork for a more realistic concept of the press in the Third World. This up-to-the-minute resource will find broad acceptance for courses in international journalism, African studies, Third World development, communications and mass media, government and politics of Africa, area studies, political science, political economy, and civil rights.
My mother was a prostitute. My grandmother and great-grandmother were prostitutes. Maybe I should have given the family business a chance... BBC RADIO 4 PICK OF THE WEEK, Katie Puckrik 'Eliska's story is an extraordinary and powerful read. It's the ultimate book about survival and an against-all-odds fight to make it in life. Highly recommend.' Clover Stroud 'A scintillating, devastating memoir, and a fiercely witty and unabashed tribute to the toughness of the human spirit.' Damian Le Bas __________________________________________________ To westerners, being Gypsy means being wild, romantic and free. To Eliska Tanzer, it means being rented out to dance for older men. It means living without running water. It means not being allowed a job or an education. It means being stuffed into a bare room with all your aunts and cousins, fighting over the thin, stained blanket the way you fight over the last piece of half-mouldy bread. It means joining the family prostitution ring when you're still a child. But Eliska was given a way out. Slung out of Hoe School and shipped to England in a washing machine box, she thought she had made it. But her dream soon turned into a nightmare. A moving and timely memoir from a powerful new voice in literature.
Scientific research is often influenced by financial interests, political interests, or personal career interests of the scientists involved. For instance, the pharmaceutical giant Merck manipulated clinical trial data in order to make sure that data confirmed the safety of one of its products, Vioxx, in order to serve the company's short-term commercial interests. This case is obviously unacceptable. But why exactly is it unacceptable? One way to account for this judgment is on the basis of the ideal of purity. According to this ideal, scientific decision-making should be pure- that is, unaffected by financial interests, political interests, career interests, and so on. Although this ideal is questionable, many people (including philosophers of science) still hold on to it. In Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science: A New Framework to Assess Interest Influences in Scientific Research Processes, Jan De Winter first argues that it is better to fully abandon the ideal of purity, then proposes an alternative ideal to assess interest influences in science: the ideal of epistemic integrity. He spells out and systematically defends a new concept of epistemic integrity, using it not only to analyze the Vioxx debacle, but also to identify unacceptable interest influences in aerospace science, climate science, and biology, and to explain exactly why these interest influences are unacceptable. These analyses make a compelling case for the new concept of epistemic integrity which will be interesting and useful for philosophers of science, scientists, engineers, science policymakers, and anyone else concerned about the integrity of science.
Drawing together interview material, medical publications, and first-hand accounts, this book shows that what is being remade in the burgeoning medical field of face transplantation is not only the lives of patients, but also the very ways that state institutions, surgeons, and families make sense of rights, claims for inclusion, and life itself.
Nonprofit organizations hold a special place in society as the nation's ethical sector. They promote service, goodwill and kindness and serve to better humanity. Like any business, however, they can also experience ethical indiscretions. The group of organizations whose sole purpose in this world is to "be" good and to "spread" that good has yet to fully form an operational code of ethics--a code that promotes humanity as only the nonprofit sector can. Describing the challenges facing today's charities, Doug White explains how nonprofits must reassess their commitment to their role in society. This corrective journey can serve as a role model for all the for-profit businesses as well as the government sector. By reexamining the business of philanthropy with a new and ethics-based mindset, nonprofits can push themselves to be their very best and continue to make the world a better place.
Birth control offers women the opportunity to prevent pregnancy, plan and space their births, or have no births at all. And yet, in the United States, half of all pregnancies remain unintended, and access to birth control is beset by inequities in education, access, and coverage. Research indicates that women are familiar with the range of contraceptive methods available today. But the persistently high rates of unintended pregnancy, combined with common dissatisfaction and discontinuation, suggest that women's contraceptive needs continue to be unmet. Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know will offer more than a user's guide to available means of contraception: it will examine how supported family-planning infrastructure impacts society as a whole. Through reviews of policy, scientific literature, and supplemental interviews with women, it will uncover women's concerns and apprehensions about contraception, as well as the ways birth control empowers women and increases access to educational and professional opportunities. It will provide an overview the history of birth control, the risks and benefits of contraception, the role of menstruation, and the future of birth control. The goal of this book is to provide accurate, unbiased scientific information about contraception in the context of women's lived experiences and the realities of how individuals make decisions about birth control.
This book examines how feminist movements have contested the dominant discourses and state politics that have impeded women's autonomy over their bodies since the late 1960s. It deals with two important facets of this struggle, prostitution and the right to abortion, as they relate to the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.
Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman 1 Purpose of this Collection What are our obligations with respect to persons who have not yet, and may not ever, come into existence? Few of us believe that we can wrong those whom we leave out of existence altogether-that is, merely possible persons. We may think as well that the directive to be "fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth" 1 does not hold up to close scrutiny. How can it be wrong to decline to bring ever more people into existence? At the same time, we think we are clearly ob- gated to treat future persons-persons who don't yet but will exist-in accordance with certain stringent standards. Bringing a person into an existence that is truly awful-not worth having-can be wrong, and so can bringing a person into an existence that is worth having when we had the alternative of bringing that same person into an existence that is substantially better. We may think as well that our obligations with respect to future persons are triggered well before the point at which those persons commence their existence. We think it would be wrong, for example, to choose today to turn the Earth of the future into a miserable place even if the victims of that choice do not yet exist.
Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management discusses the ethical issues associated with deliberately engineering a cooler climate to combat global warming. Climate engineering (also known as geoengineering) has recently experienced a surge of interest given the growing likelihood that the global community will fail to limit the temperature increases associated with greenhouse gases to safe levels. Deliberate manipulation of solar radiation to combat climate change is an exciting and hopeful technical prospect, promising great benefits to those who are in line to suffer most through climate change. At the same time, the prospect of geoengineering creates huge controversy. Taking intentional control of earth s climate would be an unprecedented step in environmental management, raising a number of difficult ethical questions. One particular form of geoengineering, solar radiation management (SRM), is known to be relatively cheap and capable of bringing down global temperatures very rapidly. However, the complexity of the climate system creates considerable uncertainty about the precise nature of SRM s effects in different regions. The ethical issues raised by the prospect of SRM are both complex and thorny. They include: 1) the uncertainty of SRM s effects on precipitation patterns, 2) the challenge of proper global participation in decision-making, 3) the legitimacy of intentionally manipulating the global climate system in the first place, 4) the potential to sidestep the issue of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, and, 5) the lasting effects on future generations. It has been widely acknowledged that a sustained and scholarly treatment of the ethics of SRM is necessary before it will be possible to make fair and just decisions about whether (or how) to proceed. This book, including essays by 13 experts in the field of ethics of geoengineering, is intended to go some distance towards providing that treatment."
Abortion is one of the most compelling public policy issues facing government and the public in the United States today. Most societies have enacted laws and statutes regarding abortion, and most societies have strong feelings regarding birth control and abortion. But the legal statutes and attitudes follow markedly different approaches. Simon examines how this issue is being faced in the United States, Canada, a sample of Western and Eastern European countries, Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American societies, and, among Asian countries, Japan, China, and India, along with Australia. After a brief historical introduction, Simon examines the legal statutes pertaining to abortion in the selected countries and then reviews public attitudes toward abortion based on responses to national public opinion polls. She concludes by discussing the relationships between the laws and statutes pertaining to abortion and the nations' policies vis- DEGREESDa-vis population growth and control. "Abortion" is the first volume in a series that will examine major public policy issues using an explicitly comparative approach. Each will serve as a handbook for students, researchers, and scholars, containing basic empirical data and comprehensive references on the social issue or practice under examination.
This study of prostitution addresses issues of female agency and experience, as well as contemporary fears about sexual coercion and the forced movement of girls/women, and police surveillance. Rather than treating prostitutes solely as victims or problems to be solved, as so often has been the case in much of the literature, Nancy M. Wingfield seeks to find the historical subjects behind fin-de-siecle constructions of prostitutes, to restore agency to the women who participated in commercial sex, illuminate their quotidian experiences, and to place these women, some of whom made a rational economic decision to sell their bodies, in the larger social context of late imperial Austria. Wingfield investigates the interactions of both registered and clandestine prostitutes with the vice police and other supervisory agents, including physicians and court officials, as well as with the inhabitants of these women's world, including brothel clients and madams, and pimps, rather than focusing top-down on the state-constructed apparatus of surveillance. Close reading of a broad range of primary and secondary sources shows that some prostitutes in late imperial Austria took control over their own fates, at least as much as other working-class women, in the last decades before the end of the Monarchy. And after 1918, bureaucratic transition did not necessarily parallel political transition. Thus, there was no dramatic change in the regulation of prostitution in the successor states. Legislation, which changed regulation only piecemeal after the war, often continued to incorporate forms of control, reflecting continuity in attitudes about women's sexuality.
Despite its safety and efficacy, emergency contraception (EC) continues to spark political controversy worldwide. In this edited volume, authors explore how emergency contraception has been received, interpreted, and politicized, through the in-depth examination of the journey of EC in 16 individual countries.
Fair trade is a growing global movement. A huge and widening range of fair trade goods are now available in the shops. Why is fair trade so important? This book provides 50 reasons why buying fair trade delivers a host of benefits to people and the planet. It's an inspiring account of how every consumer can play a part in improving and even saving lives and making global trade work better for poor people. Did you know that buying fair trade: -- Helps eradicate sweatshops -- Helps end child labour -- Reduces the debt burden on developing countries' farmers -- Ensures small-scale farmers can earn a living wage -- Supports and protects the environment? This book provides a critical guide to international trade and shows that fair trade presents a realistic and positive alternative for farmers and producers in developing countries. By improving schools, healthcare and working conditions, the fair trade movement has already saved lives and empowered whole communities. This book shows how every consumer can help make a difference in the fight to end poverty and inequality.
Bowers argues that, when correctly interpreted and applied, the Constitution and the theory of liberty on which it is based require government to reject the conventional pro-choice and anti-abortion perspectives as too extreme and incomplete. Instead, this book sets forth a position that government is constitutionally obligated to approach abortion policy from a middle perspective. Relying on a jurisprudence of original theory, Pro-Choice and Anti-Abortion forcefully asserts that government is constitutionally constrained to formulate abortion policy that is at once pro-choice and anti-abortion. In so arguing, this book walks readers through this constitutionally mandated middle position by introducing them to the liberal teachings of John Locke that were so influential to the framers of the Constitution and by applying this political theory to the major issues of the abortion controversy--including the individual liberty interest in the abortion decision, minors and abortions, the liberty interest of the fetal-being, and the Freedom of Choice Act.
This study analyzes American, Vietnamese, and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small differences in personal values between cultures. D'Andrade argues that people live in two distinct value worlds; the world of "personal values" and the world of "institutionalized values." Assessing these value worlds, D'Andrade is able to explain the contrast between ethnography and survey data, while making vital commentary on American, Vietnamese, and Japanese culture. With insight and precision, this book contributes to the important debate that the Culture, Mind, and Society series has initiated.
A volume in Educational Leadership for Social Justice Series Editor Jeffrey S. Brooks, University of Idaho, Denise E. Armstrong, Brock University; Ira Bogotch, Florida Atlantic University; Sandra Harris, Lamar University; Whitney H. Sherman, Virginia Commonwealth University; George Theoharis, Syracuse University The purpose of this book is to examine and learn lessons from the way leadership for social justice is conceptualized in several disciplines and to consider how these lessons might improve the preparation and practice of school leaders. In particular, we examine philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, public policy, and psychology. Our contention is that the field of educational leadership might consider taking a step backward in order to take several forward. That is, educational leadership researchers might re-examine social justice, both in terms of social and individual dynamics and as disciplinary-specific, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary phenomenon. By adopting this approach, we can connect and extend long-established lines of conceptual and empirical inquiry and thereby gain insights that may otherwise be overlooked or assumed. This holds great promise for generating, refining, and testing theories of social justice in educational leadership and will help strengthen already vibrant lines of inquiry. That is, rather than citing a single, or a few, works out of their disciplinary context it might be more fruitful to situate educational leadership for social justice research in their respective traditions. This could be carried out by extending extant lines of inquiry in educational leadership research and then incorporating lessons gleaned from this work into innovative practice. For example, why not more clearly establish lines of educational leadership and justice research into the Philosophy of Social Justice, Economics of Social Justice, Political Studies of Social Justice, Sociology of Social Justice, Anthropology of Social Justice, and the Public Policy of Social Justice as focused and discrete areas of inquiry? Once this new orientation toward the knowledge base of social justice and educational leadership is laid, we might then seek to explore some of the natural connections between traditions before ultimately investigating justice in educational leadership through a free association of ideas as the worlds of practice and research co-construct a "new" language they can use to discuss educational leadership. Such an endeavor may demand reconceptualization of both the processes and products of collaborative research and the communication of findings, but it will demand a breaking-down of methodological and epistemological biases and a more meaningful level and type of engagement between primary and applied knowledge bases.
After the granting of the vote to women in 1918, the struggle for women's rights intensified with a nationwide campaign for the right to birth control. This campaign was met with a great deal of hostility; it threatened to overturn Victorian ideas about female sexuality, female empowerment and the traditional roles within the family. The most well known of the campaigners, scientist and early feminist Marie Stopes, opened clinics across England which fitted 'contraception caps' to women for free. The first history of this grassroots social movement, "Birth Control and the Rights of Women" offers a window into the social and cultural history of the period, and features new archival material in the forms of memoirs, personal papers and press cuttings. This is an essential contribution to the influential field of women's history and a vital addition to the history of feminism.
Presenting an overview of information control in America, this volume discusses why some works of art and literature are controversial, and examines the arguments of both those who advocate unlimited free speech and those who would impose some limits. Censorship in America discusses why many objects of art, literature, and popular culture are considered controversial, and examines the arguments of both sides. It explores the current wave of censorship in the form of political correctness and covers groundbreaking litigation and proposed legislation.
Revelations published by the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks, including the releases of U.S. diplomatic cables in what became referred to as 'Cablegate', put WikiLeaks into the international spotlight and sparked intense about the role and impact of leaks in a digital era. Beyond WikiLeaks opens a space to reflect on the broader implications across political and media fields, and on the transformations that result from new forms of leak journalism and transparency activism. A select group of renowned scholars, international experts, and WikiLeaks 'insiders' discuss the consequences of the WikiLeaks saga for traditional media, international journalism, freedom of expression, policymaking, civil society, social change, and international politics. From short insider reports to elaborate and theoretically informed academic texts, the different chapters provide critical assessments of the current historical juncture of our mediatized society and offer outlooks of the future. Authors include, amongst others, Harvard University's Yochai Benkler, Graham Murdoch of Loughborough University, net activism scholar, Gabriella Coleman, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jillian York, and Guardian editor, Chris Elliott. The book also includes a conversation between philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and its prologue is written by Birgitta Jonsdottir, Icelandic MP and editor of the WikiLeaks video, Collateral Murder. |
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