Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 298-306
Author(s):  
Joshua Hordern

The Epilogue is a meditation on old age, combining further policy thinking on compassion and civic life with a reflection on how the terror of social death can be addressed through the life of the body politic and the body of Christ. The chapter sets an agenda for enquiring into three areas of urgent practical concern: (i) why and how the middle-aged and strong who are in government are investing across the different stages of the life-course; (ii) how growing old can be so consciously embedded as part of civic life’s self-understanding as to enable citizens to live in compassionate relationship to the end of their lives; and, (iii), how an innovative democratic professionalism will be important for the way policies and practices are reformed, especially with a view to collaborating with social movements such as churches in their work of diakonia. On this basis, the emphasis on the role of health professionals as innovators can, therefore, be expanded to include innovation in civic life. To the question of what narrative will bring healing and direction to wayfarers and pilgrims in the remains of their days, the response of the church has been a continual meditation on a particular second-person encounter of new birth amidst old age: Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.


Author(s):  
Yagyik Mishra ◽  
Negalur Vijay ◽  
Thakor Krunal ◽  
Bhat Nagaraj ◽  
Shubhasri B.

The growth of any country or society depends on the number of youth dwelling in that country but according to recent statistical data we soon will have older people more than children and more people at extreme old age than ever before. The number of people aged 65 or older is projected to grow from an estimated 524 million in 2010 to nearly 1.5 billion in 2050. Geriatrics (Jarachikitsa) is the branch of medicine dealing exclusively with the problems of aging and the diseases of elderly. The term Rasayana (rejuvination) refers to nourishment or nutrition. Rasayana therapy act essentially on nutrition dynamics and rejuvenate the body on both physical and mental levels. The problems of health due to modernization can be solved by increasing resistance against diseases and psychological improvement by implementing Rasayana therapy. Aging (Jara) is one among the Swabhavika Vyadhis. Jara Chikitsa is one among the Astanga of Ayurveda which is specifically dedicated for geriatric care. As per estimation, India currently has around 75 million persons over 65 years. By proper administration of Rasayana therapy as preventive tool one can delay Jara Janita Vyadhis to occur. This paper highlights the role of Rasayana in geriatric care.


Author(s):  
Nicola J. Smith

Focusing on Victorian England, this chapter examines how sex was increasingly constructed as something that was primarily biological in nature, and how this was bound up with discourses of prostitution as a threat to the reproduction of the body politic. In the first section, the author considers how the pathologization of commercial sex as abnormal and unhealthy worked to naturalize the public/private split on which capitalist development rested. In the second section, the author connects the medical, moral, and juridical regulation of sex work to the suppression and stimulation of other modes of sexual deviance including homosexuality. In the final section, the author explores the role of race and empire in constituting white, bourgeois sexuality as natural, privileged, and the antithesis of commercialized sex.


2008 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Shogimen

AbstractThe essay examines medical metaphors in the discourse on government from a cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor, a comparison of medical metaphors in the political writings in late medieval Europe (c. 1250–c. 1450) and Tokugawa Japan (1602–1867) demonstrates that the European notion of medical treatment as the eradication of the causes of diseases magnified the coercive and punitive aspects of government, while the Japanese notion of medical treatment as the art of daily healthcare served to accentuate the government's role of preventing conflicts and maintaining stability. These differing images of medical treatment metaphorically structured contrasting conceptions of government in the two historical worlds.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (suppl_1) ◽  
pp. 710-711
Author(s):  
S Dekhtyar ◽  
D Vetrano ◽  
A Marengoni ◽  
H Wang ◽  
K Pan ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308275X2097407
Author(s):  
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo ◽  
Silvia Posocco

This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and wellbeing, in reality it also brought forward new levels of risk and vulnerability, generating new tensions and frictions in the body politic. As genetic science reaches post-archival horizons through new genetic sequencing technologies, forensic science in post-archival times raises questions concerning the differential impact of the fragmentation of analytical and archival infrastructures and increasingly asynchronous bureaucracies whose role is displaced by the relative autonomy of datasets and computational architectures that elude governance, oversight and citizens’ scrutiny.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Sibylle Baumbach ◽  
Ulla Ratheiser

AbstractThe opening chapter introduces and contextualizes the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces. First, we delineate the increasing interests in both natural and constructed surfaces by taking a closer look at discourses that reflect a growing fascination with surfaces, including (pseudo-)medical treatises on physiognomy. Secondly, we focus on the politics of surface readings by scrutinizing the politics of various visual representations of Queen Victoria and the (self-)fashioning of the body politic at the centre of a growing surface culture. Third, we develop a conceptual framework for the analysis of the poetics of Victorian surfaces by analyzing the attention paid to (or withheld from) surfaces in Victorian literature and culture. By examining the role of surface reading in Victorian texts, we offer an overview of different surface cultures and debates surrounding the challenges attached to surfaces, explore how to do things with surfaces, and thereby outline what can be described as a ‘poetics of surface.’


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 419-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioana van Deurzen ◽  
Bram Vanhoutte

Are challenging life courses associated with more wear and tear on the biological level? This study investigates this question from a life-course perspective by examining the influence of life-course risk accumulation on allostatic load (AL), considering the role of sex and birth cohorts. Using biomarker data collected over three waves (2004, 2008, and 2012) of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing ( N = 3,824) in a growth curve framework, AL trajectories over a period of 8 years are investigated. Our results illustrate that AL increases substantially in later life. Men have higher AL than women, but increases are similar for both sexes. Older cohorts have both higher levels and a steeper increase of AL over time. Higher risk accumulation over the life course goes hand in hand with higher AL levels and steeper trajectories, contributing to the body of evidence on cumulative (dis)advantage processes in later life.


2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Douglass

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the imaginations of his readers. I elucidate the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. I thus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon his attempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as imaginary.


Author(s):  
John Dombrink

This chapter concludes the book by looking at his re-election four years later, on November 6, 2012. I present data on the impact of the millennial generation and the rise of the progressive “ascendant majority” (and issues such as contraception); the suggestion of strategic plans and “rebranding” of the Republican Party, and the internecine struggles that has produced; an analysis of the role of polarization in the body politic; and the conclusion, which analyzes these elements and predicts the complications of populism (including “libertarian populism”), the reduced salience and role of social conservatives, and the end, finally, of the potency and relevance of “Reagan Democrats.”


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