Human Rights

Debates about human rights in many ways represent one of the original sites of law and the humanities. This chapter canvasses the different ways that humanistically minded thinkers have understood rights, both today and over history. On the one hand, human rights have been the target of sustained critique, as scholars have probed their many errors and limits. But on the other, different humanists have instead affirmed rights, seeing them as enabled by the same openings and indeterminacies that are broadly constitutive of democracy. Attention to the limits of rights has also brokered that embrace. By exploring these competing responses to human rights, this chapter construes those disputes as a referendum on larger ideas about law and legality that inform law and the humanities. Analyzing human rights has therefore often seemed to fulfill an almost autobiographical function for thinkers across a number of humanities disciplines, meaning that the status of human rights can tell us a lot about received accounts of the value of the humanities.

Constructing Gender: Old Wine in New Media(skins)

The purpose of this essay is to assess how the preached word — at least the ways in which certain Christian teachings, doctrines, theologies, and moral ideologies are often framed for us through the preaching moment — has much to do with the ways in which gender roles are imagined, constructed, and lived out and even the ways in which gender-based violence and violation can be reinforced. By engaging the teachings of several prominent Pentecostal preachers as posted on YouTube, and the multiple/competing responses of the comments sections therein, I seek to demonstrated how new media tools can serve as catalysts for the production and/or reproduction of problematic understandings of gender roles, and how these mediums reinforce sexual ethics that ultimately result in human violation.

Can supervising self-harm be part of ethical nursing practice?

It was reported in 2006 that a regime of ‘supervised self harm’ had been implemented at St George’s Hospital, Stafford. This involves patients with a history of self-harming behaviour being offered both emotional and practical support to enable them to do so. This support can extend to the provision of knives or razors to enable them to self-harm while they are being supervised by a nurse. This article discusses, and evaluates from an ethical perspective, three competing responses to self-harming behaviours: to prevent it; to allow it; and to make provision for supervised self-harm. It is argued that of these three options the prevention strategy is the least plausible. A tentative conclusion is offered in support of supervised self-harm.

Item Retrieval and Competition in Noun and Verb Generation: An fMRI Study

Selection between competing responses and stimulus-response association strength is thought to affect performance during verb generation. However, the specific contribution of these two processes remains unclear. Here we used fMRI to investigate the role of selection and association within frontal and BG circuits that are known to be involved in verb production. Subjects were asked to generate verbs from nouns in conditions requiring either high or low selection, but with constant association strength, and in conditions of weak or strong association strength, now with constant selection demands. Furthermore, we examined the role of selection and association during noun generation from noun stimuli. We found that the midpart of the left inferior frontal gyrus was more active in conditions requiring high compared with low selection, with matched association strength. The same left inferior frontal region activated irrespective of verb or noun generation. Results of ROI analyses showed effects of association strength only for verb generation and specifically in the anterior/ventral part of the left inferior frontal gyrus. Moreover, the BG were more active when weakly associated verbs had to be produced relative to weakly associated nouns. These results highlight a functional segregation within the left inferior frontal gyrus for verb generation. More generally, the findings suggest that both factors of selection between competing responses and association strength are important during single-word production with the latter factor becoming particularly critical when task-irrelevant stimuli interfere with the current task (here nouns during verb production), triggering additional activation of the BG.

A bilingual advantage in task switching

This study investigated the possibility that lifelong bilingualism may lead to enhanced efficiency in the ability to shift between mental sets. We compared the performance of monolingual and fluent bilingual college students in a task-switching paradigm. Bilinguals incurred reduced switching costs in the task-switching paradigm when compared with monolinguals, suggesting that lifelong experience in switching between languages may contribute to increased efficiency in the ability to shift flexibly between mental sets. On the other hand, bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals in the differential cost of performing mixed-task as opposed to single-task blocks. Together, these results indicate that bilingual advantages in executive function most likely extend beyond inhibition of competing responses, and encompass flexible mental shifting as well.