Towards the Well-being of All: B.R. Ambedkar, Maitri, and Non-Fraternalist Democratic Solidarity

In Buddhist thought, the cultivation of maitri, often defined as loving-kindness, involves the development of a commitment to the well-being of all. Drawing on the analysis of B.R. Ambedkar’s thought that Luis Cabrera presents in The Humble Cosmopolitan, this article explores Ambedkar’s endorsement of the Buddhist concept of maitri over fraternity as an alternative conceptualization of democratic solidarity.

Are Women Less Likely to Ask than Men Partly Because They Work Fewer Hours? A Commentary on Artz et al. (2018)

A long debate in negotiation research concerns the question of whether gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations, in behaviors shown during negotiations, and in negotiation performance actually exist. Whereas past negotiation research suggested that women are less likely to initiate negotiations than men, a recent study by Artz et al. (2018) seems to suggest that women are as likely as men to “ask” for higher pay. However, this finding by Artz et al. (2018) was obtained once the number of weekly hours worked was added as a covariate in the statistical analysis. Following extant work, we suggest that the number of weekly hours worked could be—and, from a theoretical stand-point, perhaps should be—considered a mediator of gender differences. Conducting a Monte Carlo analysis based on the results and statistics provided by Artz et al. (2018) also yielded empirical evidence suggesting that weekly hours could be a mediator. Thus, women may be less likely than men to ask for higher pay, among other potential reasons, because they work fewer weekly hours. Based on this alternative conceptualization of the role of weekly hours, our commentary has theoretical implications for the understanding of gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations and practical implications for the effective reduction of gender inequalities.

The Affective Dominant: Affective Crisis and Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.

A Novel Algebraic Structure of (α,β)-Complex Fuzzy Subgroups

A complex fuzzy set is a vigorous framework to characterize novel machine learning algorithms. This set is more suitable and flexible compared to fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and bipolar fuzzy sets. On the aspects of complex fuzzy sets, we initiate the abstraction of (α,β)-complex fuzzy sets and then define α,β-complex fuzzy subgroups. Furthermore, we prove that every complex fuzzy subgroup is an (α,β)-complex fuzzy subgroup and define (α,β)-complex fuzzy normal subgroups of given group. We extend this ideology to define (α,β)-complex fuzzy cosets and analyze some of their algebraic characteristics. Furthermore, we prove that (α,β)-complex fuzzy normal subgroup is constant in the conjugate classes of group. We present an alternative conceptualization of (α,β)-complex fuzzy normal subgroup in the sense of the commutator of groups. We establish the (α,β)-complex fuzzy subgroup of the classical quotient group and show that the set of all (α,β)-complex fuzzy cosets of this specific complex fuzzy normal subgroup form a group. Additionally, we expound the index of α,β-complex fuzzy subgroups and investigate the (α,β)-complex fuzzification of Lagrange’s theorem analog to Lagrange’ theorem of classical group theory.

Using Breeding Technologies to Improve Farm Animal Welfare: What is the Ethical Relevance of Telos?

Some breeding technology applications are claimed to improve animal welfare: this includes potential applications of genomics and genome editing to improve animals’ resistance to environmental stress, to genetically alter features which in current practice are changed invasively (e.g. by dehorning), or to reduce animals’ capacity for suffering. Such applications challenge how breeding technologies are evaluated, which paradigmatically proceeds from a welfare perspective. Whether animal welfare will indeed improve may be unanswerable until proposed applications have been developed and tested sufficiently and until agreement is reached on how to conceptualize animal welfare. Moreover, even if breeding technologies do improve animal welfare, they might be objected to on other ethical grounds. Ethical perspectives on earlier animal biotechnologies are relevant for today’s breeding technologies and their proposed applications, but may need reinterpretation. The current paper applies the concept of telos, which previously figured mainly in debates on classical genetic engineering, to genomic selection and genome editing aimed at improving animal welfare. It critiques current (Rollin’s and Hauskeller’s) accounts of telos and offers an alternative conceptualization that applies to recently proposed applications of breeding technologies. This account rejects both removing the desire to pursue characteristic activities and altering animal bodies in ways that compromise their ability to perform such activities, but conditionally allows increasing robustness against environmental stress. Our account of telos enriches ethical debate on these breeding technology applications by insisting on the connection between the good life, an animal’s constitution, and its activities, thus countering reductive conceptions of welfare.

Differentiated Integration: An Alternative Conceptualization of EU–Turkey Relations

This chapter introduces the concept of differentiated integration and discusses its explanatory value in view of the EU–Turkey relationship. The major aim is to elaborate whether variable geometries as a form of differentiation constituting different and sometimes even overlapping forms of association and integration with different member and non-member states can provide a soft-landing from the fallout of Turkey’s EU accession process. The chapter sets out the many faces of differentiation and examines how the conceptual approach is perceived in the European and Turkish debates. The analysis also provides a concise overview on how differentiated integration is embedded in the logics of the main European integration theories. This conceptual discussion is complemented by a detailed outline of the variable geometries that already exist in EU–Turkey relations resulting from the three distinct forms of bilateral dialogue: accession process, functional cooperation, and cooperation in international organizations. The chapter concludes by linking the empirical findings back to the conceptual analysis, thereby discussing the limits of the explanatory value of the concept as well as highlighting the modernization of the Customs Union as a potential starting point for a differentiated future of EU–Turkey relations.

Political Street Stickers in Resistance to Biopower in Poland: The Case of Krakow During the 2020 Polish Presidential Election Campaign

Though largely ignored by scholars of political participation, stickers are an increasingly common means of expressing socio-cultural identities and a staple of contemporary protest movements. In Poland, the “LGBT-Free Zone” stickers sold with the newspaper Gazeta Polska in 2019 provided a clear demonstration of ruling party Law and Justice’s (PiS) hegemonic and exclusionary bio-conservative discourse. A year later, during the 2020 presidential elections, as issues related to LGBT+ rights became a key battleground revealing socio-political divisions in the country, a series of pro-LGBT+ stickers appeared in Krakow. This paper first evaluates the combination of linguistic and visual elements that makes political stickers a unique genre of expression. Multimodal discourse analysis of the pro-LGBT+ stickers posted in Krakow subsequently reveals an alternative conceptualization of “Polishness” that includes the LGBT+ community rather than excluding it on biopolitical grounds.

Suicidism: A new theoretical framework to conceptualize suicide from an anti-oppressive perspective

Anchored in queer and crip perspectives, this essay proposes the neologism "suicidism" as a new theoretical framework to conceptualize the oppressive system in which suicidal people experience forms of injustice and violence. The thesis proposed here is that suicidal people suffer both individually and collectively from suicidist violence, an oppression that remains unproblematized in all current interpretations of suicide, including those taken up by anti-oppressive scholars and activists. I pursue three interrelated objectives: 1) interrogate dominant ideas and perspectives on suicidality; 2) make visible and denounce the power relations between suicidal and non-suicidal people; 3) enrich intersectional analyses by naming and problematizing an oppression that has been neglected. In sum, this essay proposes to analyze suicidality by asking the following epistemological questions: What and who is missing from current conceptualizations of suicide? What can we learn from these absences? How might new understandings of suicide, from queer and crip perspectives, help anti-oppressive scholars and activists avoid reproducing forms of oppression toward suicidal people? This essay is divided into two parts. The first part reviews some of the predominant models of suicide to illustrate how they all arrive at the same conclusion—that suicide is never an option—and how this results in a silencing of suicidal subjects. In so doing, I also demonstrate how suicidism is intertwined in forms of ableism/sanism. I conclude this first part by mobilizing the notion of epistemic injustice to theorize both the testimonial and hermeneutical injustices experienced by suicidal subjects. In the second part, I explore additional interpretations of suicide that contrast with the dominant "negative" conceptualizations that seek to prevent it in all circumstances. I demonstrate how even "positive" perspectives of suicidality (e.g. the libertarian position) are founded in forms of ableism/sanism, and that even though they may critique the marginalization of suicidal subjects, they don't conceptualize their oppression as systemic, nor address it from an anti-oppressive perspective. Critiquing the "positive" conceptualizations of suicide allows me to delineate an alternative conceptualization of suicide rooted in queer and crip perspectives. Mobilizing a queer perspective to study suicide doesn't mean offering only analyses that take queer theories as a starting point or queer communities as the objects of the study. The intention is rather to queer suicide in a more holistic sense, that is, by applying queering and cripping methods, theories, epistemologies and prevention strategies to the topic of suicidality. Based on a harm-reduction and a non-coercive suicide approach, I suggest that assisted suicide should be a possibility for suicidal people, a position that relies on an ethics of living and a responsibility toward suicidal people.