The study of death has the capacity to bring together a range of policy areas. Yet death is often overlooked within policy debates in the UK and beyond, and within gerontology. Bringing together a range of scholars engaged in policy associated with death, this collection provides a holistic account of how death factors in social policy. Within this, issues covered include inheritance, palliative care, euthanasia, funeral costs, bereavement support, marginalised deaths and disposal practices. At the heart of the book, the volume recognises that the issues identified are likely to intensify and expand over the next twenty years, as death rates continue to rise.

Weaving together a diverse range of scholarly-activist intersectional voices from around the world, Critical Animal Studies and Activism: International Perspectives on Total Liberation and Intersectionality co-edited by Anthony J. Nocella II and Richard J. White makes a powerful contribution to knowledge and understanding. It is essential reading for environmentalists, animal advocates, social justice organizers, policy-makers, social change-makers, and indeed for all those who care about the future of this planet. This book spans many scholar disciplines and activist social movements, and provides new insights to fundamental debates surrounding inter-species justice, liberation, and democracy. This critical theory for total liberation book expands the understanding of one struggle one fight: for human freedom, for animal rights, and for the liberation of the earth herself. Rooted in a radical praxis, the book argues that those in academia that claim critical animal studies, need to hit the streets with the protesters and the protesters need to join the theoretical conversations. Theory and practice and not binaries, but two pieces of a larger goal. Read this book and use its arguments to take the fight to smash capitalism, oppression, and domination in all its forms!

In Rescuing Humanity, Willem H. Vanderburg reminds us that we have relied on discipline-based approaches for human knowing, doing, and organizing for less than a century. During this brief period, these approaches have become responsible for both our spectacular successes and most of our social and environmental crises. At their roots is a cultural mutation that includes secular religious attitudes that veil the limits of these approaches, leading to their overvaluation. Because their use, especially in science and technology, is primarily built up with mathematics, living entities and systems can be dealt with only as if their "architecture" or "design" is based on the principle of non-contradiction, which is true only for non-living entities. This distortion explains our many crises. Vanderburg begins to explore the limits of discipline-based approaches, which guides the way toward developing complementary ones capable of transcending these limits. It is no different from a carpenter going beyond the limits of his hammer by reaching for other tools. As we grapple with everything from the impacts of social media, the ongoing climate crisis, and divisive political ideologies, Rescuing Humanity reveals that our civilization must learn to do the equivalent if humans and other living things are to continue making earth a home.

No federal law in the United States requires that egg or sperm donors or recipients exchange any information with the offspring that result from the donation. Donors typically enter into contracts with fertility clinics or sperm banks which promise them anonymity. The parents may know the donor's hair color, height, IQ, college, and profession; they may even have heard the donor's voice. But they don't know the donor's name, medical history, or other information that might play a key role in a child's development. And, until recently, donor-conceived offspring typically didn't know that one of their biological parents was a donor. But the secrecy surrounding the use of donor eggs and sperm is changing. And as it does, increasing numbers of parents and donor-conceived offspring are searching for others who share the same biological heritage. When donors, recipients, and "donor kids" find each other, they create new forms of families that exist outside of the law. The New Kinship details how families are made and how bonds are created between families in the brave new world of reproductive technology. Naomi Cahn, a nationally-recognized expert on reproductive technology and the law, shows how these new kinship bonds dramatically exemplify the ongoing cultural change in how we think about family. The issues Cahn explores in this book will resonate with anyone-and everyone-who has struggled with questions of how to define themselves in connection with their own biological, legal, or social families.

More than 15 years have passed since the law regarding sex workers in New Zealand has changed. As a model it has been endorsed as best practice by international organisations, leading scholars and sex worker-led organisations. Yet in some corners, speculation is ongoing regarding its impacts on the ground. Written by an international group of experts, this groundbreaking collection provides the much needed in-depth research into how decriminalisation is playing out in sex workers' lives and how different groups of sex workers are experiencing it, while uncovering the challenges and tensions that remain to be negotiated in this field. Using the evidence from New Zealand, it makes an invaluable contribution to the international debates regarding sex work laws and the global struggle to realise sex workers' rights.

A major new study of Robert Musil by one of the world's leading Musil scholars. Musil's extraordinary works, the study reveals, emerged from the problem of the "two cultures." The modern era is marked by the separate life of two cultures of understanding, one derived from art and its discourses, the other from science and its practices. This "problem of the two cultures" (as coined by C.P. Snow) describes the difficulty of bringing these distinct ways of understanding the world together. The works of the Austrian author Robert Musil (1930-33) represent the most distinguished treatment of this problem in the modern era. Nevertheless, doubts persist about Musil's true intentions. Did he maintain that the separation between art and science could be resolved? Or did he rise above the problem by advocating a new order of being or "other condition" that would dispense with it altogether? Mehigan's study moves these questions to center stage. He lends new clarity to the debate about Musil's position in regard to the two cultures by shining a light on ethical questions the author ultimately wished to clarify. It is the shape of a hard-won ethics, Mehigan argues, that provides the key to an effective response to the problem of the two cultures - an ethics, in the end, that can only be put forward as a new kind of art. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German and Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia.

This book starts from the discussion of a pornography, but does not end with pornography. Rather, it suggests that a pornographic star can be treated as a cultural product which obtains rich cultural meanings. It contributes to the debate between the global homogenization paradigm and the creolization paradigm which predominates in multiple disciplines, through a thorough examination of the entire process of the cross-cultural migration of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video (AV) actress who has achieved amazing popularity in mainland China since 2010. Through fifteen-month participant observation inside the two Chinese agencies of Sola, this study reveals that the transformative intermediaries play a significant role in the transformation of the cultural product in the Chinese context, even though their operations are usually invisible to outsiders. The findings challenge the conventional scholarly assumption that foreign products produced by global producers are consumed "directly" by local consumers or that the significance of these intermediaries can be ignored. This study further extends the participant observation inside the realistic field to the virtual space of media in different countries, which can be called the second field. It demonstrates that multiple local groups, including intermediaries, Chinese commercial news portals, Party media, and Chinese Internet users, respond to the dominant ideologies in Chinese society by reinterpreting Sola in different, even contradictory, ways. Thus, this research refutes the presumption that a local society is a coherent monolith in the acceptance of foreign cultural products. The book also deepens the reader's understanding of Chinese Internet usage.

This volume contributes to the growing literature on the morality of procreation and parenting. About half of the chapters take up questions about the morality of bringing children into existence. They discuss the following questions: Is it wrong to create human life? Is there a connection between the problem of evil and the morality of procreation? Could there be a duty to procreate? How do the environmental harms imposed by procreation affect its moral status? Given these costs, is the value of establishing genetic ties ever significant enough to render procreation morally permissible? And how should government respond to peoples' motives for procreating? The other half of the volume considers moral and political questions about adoption and parenting. One chapter considers whether the choice to become a parent can be rational. The two following chapters take up the regulation of adoption, focusing on whether the special burdens placed on adoptive parents, as compared to biological parents, can be morally justified. The book concludes by considering how we should conceive of adequacy standards in parenting and what resources we owe to children. This collection builds on existing literature by advancing new arguments and novel perspectives on existing debates. It also raises new issues deserving of our attention. As a whole it is sure to generate further philosophical debate on pressing and rich questions surrounding the bearing and rearing of children.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.

The contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, has been criticized for its neglect of the political dimensions involved in the etiology and treatment of trauma. By means of a philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis, the depoliticizing potential of the biomedical approach is tied to a more general 'ethical crisis' in post-traditional societies. Via the work of Lacan, Zizek and Badiou on the act and the event, this book constructs a conceptual framework that revives the ethical and political dimensions of trauma recovery.

"Ball's arguments are concise, compelling, and backed with considerable case law. This volume is highly recommended for upper-level undergraduates and above in law, philosophy, and the medical humanities interested in the 'right to die' debates. Summing up: Highly recommended." -Choice Over the past hundred years, average life expectancy in America has nearly doubled, due largely to scientific and medical advances, but also as a consequence of safer working conditions, a heightened awareness of the importance of diet and health, and other factors. Yet while longevity is celebrated as an achievement in modern civilization, the longer people live, the more likely they are to succumb to chronic, terminal illnesses. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 47 years, with a majority of American deaths attributed to influenza, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or other diseases. In 2000, the average life expectancy was nearly 80 years, and for too many people, these long lifespans included cancer, heart failure, Lou Gehrig's disease, AIDS, or other fatal illnesses, and with them, came debilitating pain and the loss of a once-full and often independent lifestyle. In this compelling and provocative book, noted legal scholar Howard Ball poses the pressing question: is it appropriate, legally and ethically, for a competent individual to have the liberty to decide how and when to die when faced with a terminal illness? At Liberty to Die charts how, the right of a competent, terminally ill person to die on his or her own terms with the help of a doctor has come deeply embroiled in debates about the relationship between religion, civil liberties, politics, and law in American life. Exploring both the legal rulings and the media frenzies that accompanied the Terry Schiavo case and others like it, Howard Ball contends that despite raging battles in all the states where right to die legislation has been proposed, the opposition to the right to die is intractable in its stance. Combining constitutional analysis, legal history, and current events, Ball surveys the constitutional arguments that have driven the right to die debate.

Social Work Ethics in a Changing Society analyzes the challenges social workers face in applying social work values and ethics due to recent significant social, political, cultural, and technological changes. It provides readers with guidelines for ethical practice based on a philosophic foundation rooted in social justice principles. The book begins with a summary of key ethical concepts and principles. It then provides a brief history of social work ethics and analyzes their core assumptions in the context of new realities. The book provides readers with several frameworks through which to analyze a variety of contemporary ethical issues. In subsequent chapters, it applies these frameworks to situations largely derived from real world experience. Global sources provide a comparative perspective on the interpretation and implementation of social work values and ethics. The book contains extensive case examples and reflection exercises that illustrate ethical dilemmas in all areas of practice and those created or complicated by increasing social and cultural diversity. It includes content on the application of ethics to policy practice through examples drawn from the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the nation's response to the coronavirus pandemic, and other current policy issues. Designed to help current and future social workers navigate a fractious, ever-evolving society, Social Work Ethics in a Changing Society is an excellent resource for students, faculty, and practitioners within the discipline.

'Patricia Lockwood is the voice of a generation' Namita Gokhale 'A masterpiece' Guardian 'I really admire and love this book' Sally Rooney 'An intellectual and emotional rollercoaster' Daily Mail 'I can't remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book' David Sedaris 'A rare wonder . . . I was left in bits' Douglas Stuart * WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2022 * * SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 * * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 * * A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK * ______________________________________________ This is a story about a life lived in two halves. It's about what happens when real life collides with the increasing absurdity of a world accessed through a screen. It's about living in world that contains both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. It's a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time. ______________________________________________ 'An utterly distinctive mixture of depth, dazzling linguistic richness, anarchic wit and raw emotional candour' Rowan Williams A 2021 Book of the Year: Sunday Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Evening Standard, The Times, New Statesman, Red, Observer, Independent, Daily Telegraph

The book demonstrates that food safety is a multidisciplinary scientific discipline that is specifically designed to prevent foodborne illness to consumers. It is generally assumed to be an axiom by both nonprofessionals and professionals alike, that the most developed countries, through their intricate and complex standards, formal trainings and inspections, are always capable of providing much safer food items and beverages to consumers as opposed to the lesser developed countries and regions of the world. Clearly, the available data regarding the morbidity and the mortality in different areas of the world confirms that in developing countries, the prevalence and the incidence of presumptive foodborne illness is much greater. However, other factors need to be taken into consideration in this overall picture: First of all, one of the key issues in developing countries appears to be the availability of safe drinking water, a key element in any food safety strategy. Second, the availability of healthcare facilities, care providers, and medicines in different parts of the world makes the consequences of foodborne illness much more important and life threatening in lesser developed countries than in most developed countries. It would be therefore ethnocentric and rather simplistic to state that the margin of improvement in food safety is only directly proportional to thelevel of development of the society or to the level of complexity of any given national or international standard. Besides standards and regulations, humans as a whole have evolved and adapted different strategies to provide and to ensure food and water safety according to their cultural and historical backgrounds. Our goal is to discuss and to compare these strategies in a cross-cultural and technical approach, according to the realities of different socio-economic, ethnical and social heritages.

A new look at the last four decades of the abortion law and its effects from a young conservative. Abortion was legalized with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case in 1973. Since that time, there have been more than sixty-one million abortions. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton told the country that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare," but growing numbers and new laws regarding late term abortion distress conservatives and those in the right-to-life movement. As a pro-life activist and speaker, Danielle D-Souza makes the case against abortion while providing commentary on various court cases, and the movement since the 1970s. Her goal with this book is to provide a fresh look at this divisive issue.

This book provides a sociological analysis of the controversy surrounding GM crops in Telangana, India. There is much debate as to whether GM technology holds the key to improving the welfare of poor farmers globally or serves primarily to increase the profits of multinational corporations while enhancing cultivator risk. Desmond's study is located in the economically vulnerable and politically volatile district of Warangal in Telangana, a context associated with high numbers of farmer suicides. Uniquely foregrounding the perspectives of cultivators and the landless, Desmond explores how GM crops are variously legitimated and delegitimated in three Warangal villages by those whose livelihoods are at stake in the debate, but whose voices are rarely heard within it. This book will be significant for those with an interest in GM crops, power and knowledge and their relation to understandings of development, democracy and risk management worldwide.

In this novel examination of the issue of abortion, the authors offer a primer in the biological aspects of fetal development and its impact on the abortion controversy. Although purely scientific study cannot offer a universal solution to the issue of abortion, nor can a purely political or moral response be fully informed without the benefit of the latest scientific knowledge.

Reviewing the latest developments in molecular biology, evolutionary biology, embryology, and neurophysiology, the authors reveal a surprising agreement of scientific opinion on when 'humanness' begins: with the development of a highly developed cerebral cortex. It is on this issue that the authors focus with sensitivity to the myriad of ethical and religious arguments that surround it.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.

'The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley, and I was reading a book about the death camp Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey...had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me.' The contract of mutual indifference In this classic work, newly reissued here with a preface by Oliver Kamm, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. A bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, Geras's argument focuses on the figure of the bystander - the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocity - to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active responses at persecution and great suffering. This book argues that we owe a duty of help to those who are suffering under terrible oppression. Geras contends that the tragedy of European Jewry - so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others - has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a sombre conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid. The contract of mutual indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory-building. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress. -- .

A comprehensive overview of the ethical dilemmas faced by journalists today. Written in an accessible style, with updated interviews from working journalists discussing challenges and lessons learned. Updated chapters address developments including the phone hacking scandal and Leveson Inquiry, the impact of social media, fake news and citizen journalism. Considers ethical issues surrounding race and representation, protection of sources, privacy and the use of drones.

The Politics of Evidence Based Policymaking identifies how to work with policymakers to maximize the use of scientific evidence. Policymakers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy problems. They use two shortcuts: 'rational' ways to gather enough evidence, and 'irrational' decision-making, drawing on emotions, beliefs, and habits. Most scientific studies focus on the former. They identify uncertainty when policymakers have incomplete evidence, and try to solve it by improving the supply of information. They do not respond to ambiguity, or the potential for policymakers to understand problems in very different ways. A good strategy requires advocates to be persuasive: forming coalitions with like-minded actors, and accompanying evidence with simple stories to exploit the emotional or ideological biases of policymakers.

People nowadays live in a human-made environment, or technotope. Their lives are entangled with technology. Because technology not only brings gifts but also costs and hazards, it is important to reflect on what good technology is and, indeed, whether a technology contributes to a good life.
The ethicists and social scientists united in this volume contribute to a novel approach to ethics and technology that initiates or enhances timely ethical reflection with scientists and engineers. Ethical reflection during research and development can help to anticipate how it can change human (social) like, and evaluate those changes. "Ethics on the Laboratory Floor" contributes to research decisions, for example with regard to what research goals to pursue, what research lines to prioritise, or how best to design user tests. By joining these deliberations "Ethics on the Laboratory Floor" helps to realise the best technological alternatives.

Global cybercrime is arguably the biggest underworld industry of our times. Global forces and technologies such as mobile phones, social media and cloud computing are shaping the structure of the global cybercrime industry estimated at US$1 trillion. Nir Kshetri documents and compares the patterns, characteristics and processes of cybercrime activities in major regions and economies in the Global South such as China, India, the former Second World economies, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and Middle East and North Africa. Integrating theories from a wide range of disciplines, he explains initiatives at the global, supranational, national, sub-national and local levels.

In the 1890s, Amos Lunt served as the San Quentin hangman, tying the nooses that brought the most dangerous criminals in the Wild West to their deaths. A former police chief who became the hangman of San Quentin due to an unfortunate turn of events, Lunt stood on the gallows alongside bank robbers, desperadoes and assassins throughout a five-year career. This book follows Lunt's trail from the Santa Cruz police department to the San Quentin State Prison. Covering his interesting friendship with a series of death row inmates to the gradual deterioration of his sanity, it is a one-of-a-kind biography that profiles an American executioner. Also profiled are his subjects-twenty of the West's most heinous criminals-as well as Lunt's preparations for their hangings and their final moments on the gallows.