scholarly journals Unnatural Causes

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 256-270
Author(s):  
Patrice D. Douglass

Abstract This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence. By placing the COVID-19 deaths of Black people who are refused hospital treatment in critical conversation with police murders during the pandemic, this essay argues that a focus on social violence helps clarify how the same racial taxonomies are at play in producing these deadly outcomes. As such, the essay concludes with a broadening of the concept of police power to illustrate how, outside of the private and public political spheres, the amorphous nature of the social drives the demand for collective health and safety through the excision of Blackness as a contagion or coercive element.

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl-Heinz Ladeur

SummaryThe last decades have witnessed the appearance of some quite new issues relating to the integration of science into legal decision-making. For a better understanding of the relationship between the normative and cognitive aspects of the decision-making procedure under postmodern conditions of uncertainty, it is necessary to reconstruct the “social epistemology” that consists of the hybrid rules for the management of practical knowledge problems used in the past. In the days of the classical liberal legal system, social knowledge was not a free, spontaneously generated public good, either. It was implied in the practical networks of private production which were the source of “experience”. It was one of the major tasks of the liberal state to systematise, generalise and stabilise this new knowledge base of society, which could be used for both private and public purposes. In a second-order remodelling of this earlier “public-private joint venture”, group-based calculations of probability were integrated into the practice of both private and public types of decision-making, for example, in financial markets or in the construction of public insurances. The emerging paradigm of “social epistemology” in postmodernity is characterised by the requirement to draw upon a more open conception of modelling, designing and experimenting, which makes decision-making more process-oriented, more flexible and more reflexive. This new evolutionary step will again have important consequences for the legal system which has to adapt to more a-centric heterarchical modes of knowledge production. This evolution explains the interest in public-private partnerships and calls for a more proactive public approach to knowledge management.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Zlatyslav Dubniak

Aim. The aim of this study is to analyze and evaluate two versions of the theory of liberalism which emerged within the philosophical tradition of pragmatism: Richard Rorty’s “ironic liberalism” and John Dewey’s “renascent liberalism”. Methods. The study is based on: 1) comparative analysis, which shows the differences and points of contact between Dewey’s classical pragmatism and Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, in particular, between different versions of their liberal theories; 2) critical analysis, which made it possible to identify the shortcomings and advantages in the arguments of the above-mentioned philosophers. Results. The author analyzed Rorty’s and Dewey’s theories of liberalism in relation to their theories of reality, human specificity, and ethics. In this way, the specific liberal views of these American philosophers on such issues as the relationship between private and public, the main goals of politics, and the values of the social order were explicated. It allowed offering a thorough critique of Rorty’s “ironic liberalism”, and supporting of Dewey’s “renascent liberalism”. Conclusion. While Dewey saw the mission of liberalism in enabling individuals to improve their experience, Rorty insisted on the need for a liberal policy of providing the basic conditions for individual self-creation. The main disadvantage of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, and, in particular, “ironic liberalism”, was the exclusion from the philosophy of the modifying tools of human behavior, which were expressed by the concepts of “good” or “virtue”, in Dewey’s “renascent liberalism”. This circumstance necessitates a return from Rorty back to Dewey in the discussions on pragmatic liberalism. Key words: philosophy of pragmatism, Richard Rorty, John Dewey, historicism, naturalism, liberalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Amanda Joyce Denham ◽  
Denise N. Green

Abstract This article discusses the embodiment of making and wearing clothing through a close analysis of the weaving and production practices of a contemporary Maya weaver, Lidia López. The first author lived in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Sacatepéquez, Guatemala where she studied the back strap loom under the instruction of master weaver, Lidia López, while the second author served as an advisor on the research project and assisted with interpretation of fieldwork data. Anthropologist Daniel Miller has encouraged a research approach that thoroughly integrates the practice of making, arguing that 'the things people make, make people'. When a person weaves cloth using centuries-old techniques and tools passed down across generations, the cloth embodies identities that transcend time and materializes networks of social relations. This brings new possibilities to ethnographic research about processes of making. If we are what we make, as Miller argued, then what are we when we make cloth? In this article we explore the production of cloth as embodied practice: weaving on the back strap loom, bringing goods to market, the practice of teaching weaving, and all of the social relationships and realities that contribute to the production of clothing. The title of this article, 'Her eyes, my body', refers to the relationship between the primary ethnographic interlocutor, Lidia Amanda López de López, and the first author as ethnographer and weaving apprentice. By teaching weaving on the back strap loom in the tradition of her antepasados (ancestors), Lidia facilitated ways of knowing ‐ from the kitchen table to the loom, from her home to the market. Entangled and woven together through dialectics of time and space, private and public, past and present. Warp and weft are woven into cloth, culture and identities.


Author(s):  
Alison Pearn

The period around the publication of John Lubbock's Origin of civilisation in 1870 and Charles Darwin's Descent of man and selection in relation to sex the following year is key to a re-evaluation of the relationship between the two men, usually characterized as that of pupil and master. It is in the making of Descent that Lubbock's role as a scientific collaborator is most easily discerned, a role best understood within the social and political context of the time. Lubbock made Darwin—both the man and his science—acceptable and respectable. Less obvious is Darwin's conscious cultivation of Lubbock's patronage in both his private and public life, and Lubbock's equally conscious bestowal, culminating in his role in Darwin's burial in Westminster Abbey.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Devin Bryson

Abstract Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s 2018 novel De purs hommes fictionalizes recent incidents of homophobia in Senegal to interrogate the relationship between queer men and social dynamics in the country. This article demonstrates that the novel deploys multidirectional critical discourse and oblique narrative tactics to highlight the foundational role in Senegalese culture and society of the fraught dichotomy between private and public life. Bryson contends that the novel unearths these queer roots in order to incorporate all normative identities into queer existence, conceptually blurring the social barriers to LGBTQ+ agency in the country.


Author(s):  
Ruha Benjamin

In this response to Terence Keel and John Hartigan’s debate over the social construction of race, I aim to push the discussion beyond the terrain of epistemology and ideology to examine the contested value of racial science in a broader political economy. I build upon Keel’s concern that even science motivated by progressive aims may reproduce racist thinking and Hartigan’s proposition that a critique of racial science cannot rest on the beliefs and intentions of scientists. In examining the value of racial-ethnic classifications in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, I propose that analysts should attend to the relationship between prophets of racial science (those who produce forecasts about inherent group differences) and profits of racial science (the material-semiotic benefits of such forecasts). Throughout, I draw upon the idiom of speculation—as a narrative, predictive, and financial practice—to explain how the fiction of race is made factual, again and again. 


Author(s):  
Solomon A. Keelson ◽  
Thomas Cudjoe ◽  
Manteaw Joy Tenkoran

The present study investigates diffusion and adoption of corruption and factors that influence the rate of adoption of corruption in Ghana. In the current study, the diffusion and adoption of corruption and the factors that influence the speed with which corruption spreads in society is examined within Ghana as a developing economy. Data from public sector workers in Ghana are used to conduct the study. Our findings based on the results from One Sample T-Test suggest that corruption is perceived to be high in Ghana and diffusion and adoption of corruption has witnessed appreciative increases. Social and institutional factors seem to have a larger influence on the rate of corruption adoption than other factors. These findings indicate the need for theoretical underpinning in policy formulation to face corruption by incorporating the relationship between the social values and institutional failure, as represented by the rate of corruption adoption in developing economies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Roshanira Che Mohd Noor ◽  
Nur Atiqah Rochin Demong

Providing a safe and healthy workplace is one of the most effective strategies in for holding down the cost of doing construction business. It was a part of the overall management system to facilitate themanagement of the occupational health and safety risk that are associated with the business of the organization. Factors affected the awareness level inclusive of safety and health conditions, dangerous working area, long wait care and services and lack of emergency communication werethe contributed factors to the awareness level for the operational level. Total of 122 incidents happened at Telekom Malaysia Berhad as compared to year 2015 only 86 cases. Thus, the main objective of this study was to determine the relationship between safety and health factors and the awareness level among operational workers.The determination of this research was to increase the awareness level among the operational level workerswho committing to safety and health environment.


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