Cris Mayo is a professor and director of the Interdisciplinary Educational Studies master’s degree in the Department of Education at the University of Vermont. Mayo’s publications include Gay-Strai...

In this article, Cris Mayo examines the relationship among anti-LGBTQ policies, gay marriage, and sexuality education. Her concern is that because gay marriage is insufficiently different from heterosexual marriage, adding it as an issue to curriculum or broader culture debate elides rather than addresses sexual difference. In other words, marriage may be an assimilative aspiration that closes down discussions of what sexuality is and can mean, that sidesteps other related social issues such as health care for all, and that (...) reinforces sexuality and gender identity as privatized, not political, concerns. Mayo examines different strands of LGBTQ history that complicate the meanings of sexuality and that critique a variety of antigay or heterosexist policies for their exclusions. She concludes by suggesting that the possibilities of sexuality are not served by advocacy for one gay relationship formation and calling for a sexuality education that is instead directed at sexual diversity. (shrink)

A claim frequently made about European Citizenship is that by decoupling ‘rights’ from ‘identity’ it challenges us to rethink the classical Westphalian model of citizenship. According to some EU scholars and constitutional experts, this beckons a new form of ‘supranational’ citizenship practice based not on emotional attachments to territory and cultural affinities (‘Eros’), but to the rights and values of a civil society – or what Habermas calls ‘constitutional patriotism’. This article uses anthropological insights to critique these arguments and to (...) analyse the EU’s own citizenship-building policies and practices. It concludes that rights cannot be meaningfully divorced from identity and that citizenship devoid of emotion is neither feasible nor desirable. Finally, it considers the idea of ‘post-national democracy’ and what this might entail in a modern European context. (shrink)

This article focuses on the structures of humor and joke telling that require particular kinds of attentiveness and particular relationships between speaker and audience, or more specifically, between classmates. First, I will analyze the pedagogical and relational preconditions that are necessary for humor to work. If humor is to work well, the person engaging in humor needs to gauge their interlocutors carefully. I discuss, too, the kinds of listening necessary for listening for the joke, including attentiveness to complex possibilities for (...) meaning. This attentiveness to complexity is linked to curiosity and a willingness to be startled, two qualities that are central to the risk and pleasure of learning discussed by Socrates and Maria Lugones. Examining the place of risk in Socrates’ teaching and the place of serious play in Maria Lugones’ discussion of difference, I suggest that humor can help to illuminate complicities and invite more robust interactions with difference, creating pleasurable encounters to work through difficult social divisions. (shrink)

Troubled times in education means that philosophers of education, who seem to never stop making defenses of our field, have to do so with more flexibility and a greater understanding of how peripheral we may have become. The only thing worse than a defensive philosopher is a confident and certain philosopher, so it may be that our very marginality will give us renewed energies for problematizing education. Occupying our marginal position carefully and in concert with other marginal inquiries, I think, (...) will do our field good. Because of its attention to what it takes to be willing to learn and to approach theoretical and real world obstacles with open if cautious interest, philosophy of education is about holding concepts and movements in tension, bending the implications of commonplace, commonsensical ideas about education, and carefully examining the all of these maneuvers for the exclusions they wittingly and unwittingly produce. Problematizing the certainties derived from majoritarian positions, be it whiteness, Westernness, or any other dominant perspective, can provide us with a diversity of claims to scrutinize and epistemological positions to be wary of. (shrink)

This review essay takes up challenges posed by Sarah M. Stitzlein's _Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens_ by suggesting Black pragmatists add crucial questions to the pragmatist project of honesty. Pushing us to consider a more critical answer to the questions "Who are we?" and "How does it feel to be a problem?," writers in the Black pragmatist traditions call for a clearer analysis of what civics can and likely cannot yet do.

The aim of this paper is to reconceive safety as a form of relation embedded in particular ways of speaking, listening and thinking. Moving away from safety as a relation that is achieved once and for all and afterwards remains safe avoids some of the disappointments of discourses of safety that seem to promise once a risk is taken or a gap is bridged that thereafter relations among people will be easier and calmer. This bumpier version of safety suggests that (...) humor creates the kind of instabilities in discourse that act, perhaps ironically, as an invitation to enjoy the difficulties of communicating complex and challenging ideas. Humor, then, creates a kind of safe space, not devoid of dramatic shifts or emotional response, but organized around those shifts as experiences that are moments apart from conflict. I explore the use of humor as a form of serious play in social justice classrooms, examining the strategies of indirect teaching, contradictory lessons, and jolting pleasure that more traditional pedagogical approaches are less able to create. I see in humor a complex form of address and interaction that plays on the multiple possibilities within an utterance or concept and by reminding classroom communities of those possibilities. Humor can erupt from shared moments and disjunctive understandings and can as easily be mobilized by teachers as by students. By reopening the possibilities of concepts and relations, humor shatters simplistic readings by literally playing out what might be said and what could be tried but often manages to combine a sense of safety via shared laughter with its disruptions. (shrink)

This review essay takes up challenges posed by Sarah M. Stitzlein’s Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens by suggesting Black pragmatists add crucial questions to the pragmatist project of honesty. Pushing us to consider a more critical answer to the questions “Who are we?” and “How does it feel to be a problem?,” writers in the Black pragmatist traditions call for a clearer analysis of what civics can and likely cannot yet do.

I will argue in what follows, following the insights of James Marshall on busno‐cratic power, that resistance to this new power is already well underway, and that this resistance is potentially problematic and potentially transgressive 1 . The self is not only a chooser in busno‐cratic land, it is also re‐commodifying itself and in so doing, beginning to struggle at the limits of its commodified situation. I will argue that commodified selves, as much as they are constrained, are also potent (...) sites for resistance. Part of that resistance is being waged in the terrain of the high stakes test, where the self that could ‘choose’ runs headlong into a product that definitively limits its range of choice. In order to engage critically with this resistance, I examine the cracks in the monolithic power of testing, cracks that point to the uncertainty of numbers and the ambivalent anxieties of test takers. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Humans, like all organisms, have evolved to survive in specific environments, while some elect or are forced to live and work in extreme environments. Understanding cognition as it relates to environmental conditions, we use 4E cognition as a framework to explore creativity in extreme environments. Our paper examines space arts as a case study through the history, present practices, and future possible arts in the context of humans beyond the Kármán boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere. We develop a proposed taxonomy (...) of space arts, based on prior taxonomies, and provide specific exemplars of space art developed by artists in space or for use by astronauts in space. Using examples of space art since the birth of the space age, we discuss 1) how human survival in extreme environments requires investment in the space arts, driven by consideration of all biopsychosocial factors and 2) how new scientific and engineering discoveries could be consequences or examples of creative thinking driven by artists in the various types of space art. We conclude by discussing possible benefits of space art, future research applications, and advocate that all space actors, government or private, involve artists in all projects beyond the Kármán Boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy passed away last August at the age of 81. In the Netherlands, Nancy became widely known to a broader audience through his short essay The Intruder (2000). In it, he describes the process surrounding the heart transplant he underwent in 1990: the surgery, the trials, the medication to prevent rejection, the cancer that resulted from it, and the chemotherapy required to combat it. -/- Nancy describes how the heart of a stranger—the intruder—penetrated the very core (...) of his being. He writes: "Never before have I been so sharply struck by the strangeness of my own identity, a strangeness that, despite everything, had always been perfectly clear to me (...)." -/- [In Dutch: De Franse filosoof Jean-Luc Nancy overleed vorig jaar augustus op 81-jarige leeftijd. In Nederland is Nancy bij een breder publiek vooral bekend geworden met zijn korte essay De Indringer (2000). Hierin beschrijft hij het proces rondom de harttransplantatie die hij in 1990 onderging: de operatie, de beproevingen, de medicatie om afstoting te voorkomen, de kanker die daar het gevolg van was en die moest worden bestreden met chemokuren. Nancy beschrijft hoe het hart van een vreemde ander – de indringer – tot de kern van zijn hele wezen is doorgedrongen. Zo schrijft hij: ‘Nooit eerder ben ik met een dergelijke scherpte geraakt door de vreemdheid van mijn eigen identiteit, een vreemdheid die me desondanks altijd zonneklaar was (…).’. (shrink)

The authors review Judith Suissa's provocative book, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective, a text that demonstrates the central role of education in anarchist theory. Suissa compellingly argues against the charges that anarchism is overly idealistic and impractical, instead seeing its potential for innovative and liberatory educational change. The authors suggest, however, that an enhanced conversation among critical pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy and anarchist thinking on education can help to show both the continued relevance of radical and creative thinking, and that (...) anarchist thought has been part of the development of oppositional, critical, collaborative, teaching and learning projects. (shrink)

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

This study explores the pivotal role of the body for political recognition and rights claims in child welfare “moral” interventions. I examine how the bodily figures in child welfare assessments, linking these manifestations to the concept of the moral economy of care. A sample of assessment reports from a Swedish municipality, all addressing violations of children’s bodies or integrity, are used as empirical material. I show how the psychosomatically suffering child is being best “heard” as vulnerable. I also argue that (...) such a moral economy of care silences children’s accounts of gendered and racial injustices. Furthermore, racialized moral divides are indicated when assessments of different child bodies are considered. A concluding remark points to a need for a child welfare moral economy of social justice that responds to structural intersecting injustices in childhoods, including to those of a racialized child welfare and its individualized and symptom-oriented services. (shrink)

A migração é um fenômeno global que afeta profundamente a vida das pessoas em todo o mundo, sendo as mulheres um grupo significativo dentro desse contexto. No entanto, elas enfrentam desafios únicos relacionados ao gênero ao longo de suas jornadas migratórias. Dessa forma, este ensaio investiga as experiências dessas mulheres, analisando os obstáculos que enfrentam e as implicações para a sociedade. Consoante a isso, o estudo busca entender como estereótipos, desigualdades e violência de gênero influenciam a decisão de migrar, a (...) experiência durante a migração e o impacto em suas vidas e na sociedade. Nesse sentido, a metodologia inclui uma revisão qualitativa da literatura e a análise de dados quantitativos sobre migração feminina, com foco em raça e gênero. Os resultados mostram que as mulheres migrantes enfrentam desafios específicos, como exploração laboral, tráfico humano, abuso sexual e falta de acesso a serviços básicos. Normas de gênero e estereótipos moldam suas decisões e oportunidades nos países de destino, resultando em empoderamento econômico, mas também em riscos significativos à segurança e ao bem-estar. Ainda assim, a discussão também destaca a importância de políticas que considerem questões de gênero na migração e a criação de ambientes seguros e inclusivos. Além disso, sublinha a contribuição das mulheres migrantes para as sociedades de acolhimento, tanto na força de trabalho quanto na diversidade cultural. Com isso, a migração feminina é, portanto, uma questão complexa que exige uma abordagem sensível ao gênero para melhorar as condições das migrantes e valorizar seu potencial, beneficiando tanto as próprias mulheres quanto as sociedades que as recebem. (shrink)

What is your name, from where, of which caste, what job, how old? One who is free from such questions, his alone is beatitude. In the verdant countryside of south-west India, at the turn of the last century, lived the great poet-seer Narayana Guru. His message was very simple: 'Man is of one caste, one religion and one God / Of one same womb, one same form, with no difference at all.' Grounded in the mystical depths of life, he wandered (...) across the landscape, gently proclaiming justice and equality for all, interacting with the multitudes who came to meet him, electrifying them to be at their best, and galvanizing a peaceful movement to eliminate oppression in all its forms. Stalwarts like Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi sought his counsel. He inspired social reformers such as Sahodaran Ayyappan, Mahatma Ayyankali, Pandit Karuppan, V.T. Bhattathiripad, among others. Along the way, he composed a compact body of writing in prose and verse of exceptional potency. These are stimulating, deep and original explorations, entryways into a profound appreciation of the human condition. (shrink)

A novel Protocol Ethics Tool Kit (‘Ethics Tool Kit’) has been developed by a multi-stakeholder group of the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women9s Hospital and Harvard. The purpose of the Ethics Tool Kit is to facilitate effective recognition, consideration and deliberation of critical ethical issues in clinical trial protocols. The Ethics Tool Kit may be used by investigators and sponsors to develop a dedicated Ethics Section within a protocol to improve the consistency and transparency between clinical trial (...) protocols and research ethics committee reviews. It may also streamline ethics review and may facilitate and expedite the review process by anticipating the concerns of ethics committee reviewers. Specific attention was given to issues arising in multinational settings. With the use of this Tool Kit, researchers have the opportunity to address critical research ethics issues proactively, potentially speeding the time and easing the process to final protocol approval. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

'Who is God?' becomes 'Where is God?' the shift in a question / Christian Duquoc -- 'Where is God?' the cry of the psalmists / Erhard S. Gerstenberger -- Sickness and the silence of God / Gregory Baum -- The presence and revelation of God in the world of the oppressed / Pablo Richard -- Guilty and without access to God / Andres Tornos -- Death, the ultimate form of God's silence / Pierre de Locht -- The metaphor of God (...) / Yves Cattin -- No more temple, no place for the spirit : tests for the institutional church / Isabelle Chareire -- 'We proclaim a crucified messiah' / Jose-Ignacio Gonzalez-Faus -- God sings in the night : ambiguity as invitation to believe / Richard G. Cote. (shrink)

On doit à Vincent Duclert, éminent spécialiste de l’affaire Dreyfus et biographe d’Alfred Dreyfus, cette première édition minutieuse de la correspondance croisée des époux Dreyfus pendant la captivité du capitaine entre 1894 et 1899, à Paris, à l’île de Ré puis à l’île du Diable en Guyane, et enfin à Rennes. L’ouvrage est introduit par Michelle Perrot et par Vincent Duclert qui fournit aussi pour chaque période de très précises introductions sur le déroulement de l’Affaire et les conditions...

‘Teachers expect parents to teach you. Parents expect teachers to teach you. So actually you learn nothing and nobody wants to talk about it’. This quote from this research study is an adolescent girls’ cry for liberation from the silence related to sexuality because of the general reluctance of adults to talk to them about it. Given the growing concerns raised about the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents in South Africa, the aim of this study was to conduct research (...) with adolescent girls as subjects in order for girls’ voices to enhance adult researchers’ understanding of children’s need for support and guidance in the context of sexuality education. The purposively selected sample included 75 participants from three diverse high schools in the Western Cape. The research was conducted using a phenomenological approach that values the lived experiences of participants as significant in contributing to the knowledge on adolescent sexuality. A qualitative interpretative research design was applied to collect the data. This article argues that adults cannot help adolescents in their sexual emancipation – to be free – if they themselves are not free. If they were free, they would have been able and willing to engage with adolescents in every aspect, which includes their sexuality. Including adolescent girls as partners in transforming sexuality education is presented as a core principle for the sexual emancipation of both adolescent girls and adults. (shrink)

Women have for centuries suffered different forms of oppression and arguably continue to suffer in subtle forms in the 21st century. Marion Young points to five types of oppression, namely, violence, exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness and cultural imperialism. For South African black women, all of these types of oppression have manifested three times more as they have suffered triple oppression of race, class and gender to employ the widely used notion of triple jeopardy in the womanist discourses and Black Theology of (...) Liberation. The struggle of women to challenge the patriarchal culture of subordination is still pertinent for our context today. Patriarchy is a reality that has been inscribed in the minds, souls and bodies of these women. It arguably continues to be inscribed in subtle forms. Patriarchy and the oppression of women have been justified and perpetuated by a complex interplay of Christian teachings and practices fused with culture and the use of the Bible. Yet, for these women, church and the Bible continue to be central in their lives. This article looks at the cries of African women in juxtaposition to their prayers, faith and thus spirituality, and to argue that theirs is a pseudo-spirituality. This article is thus a womanist exposition of the pseudo-spirituality of an African woman in a quest for liberation of her spirituality. (shrink)

Crying is a common response to emotional distress that elicits support from the environment. People may regulate another’s crying in several ways, such as by providing socio-affective support (e.g. comforting) or cognitive support (e.g. reappraisal), or by trying to emotionally disengage the other by suppression or distraction. We examined whether people adapt their interpersonal emotion regulation strategies to the situational context, by manipulating the regulatory demand of the situation in which someone is crying. Participants watched a video of a crying (...) man and provided support by recording a video message. We hypothesised that when immediate down-regulation was required (i.e. high regulatory demand), participants would provide lower levels of socio-affective and cognitive support, and instead distract the crying person or encourage them to suppress their emotions, compared to when there is no such urgency (i.e. low regulatory demand). As predicted, both self-reported and behavioural responses indicated that high (as compared to low) regulatory demand led to a reduction in socio-affective support provision, and a strong increase in suppression and distraction. Cognitive support provision, however, was unaffected by regulatory demand. When the context required more immediate down-regulation, participants thus employed more regulation strategies aimed at disengaging from the emotional experience. This study provides a first step in showing that people take the context into account when attempting to regulate others’ emotions. (shrink)

In a world where physicians are experiencing unprecedented burn-out, our communities are progressively losing trust in the medical system, and healthcare costs continually increase to astronomical levels without improving outcomes, it seems clear that we need to make changes in how we care for our patients. Current healthcare conditions can evoke nostalgia for an idealized past, where physicians were valued members of their communities, making house calls, doing all they could to comprehensively support their neighbours in health and life. As (...) a young physician who envisioned such a career where I could apply my years of hard work and studying towards helping those around me in their moments of greatest need, I often feel that the system we have built thwarts this ideal at every turn. Here I share a story from my intern year of training that marked me, demonstrating just how disconnected we are becoming from our patients. My story involves a clinical situation with which I believe many can relate, highlighting the dire need for us clinicians to care with more humanity. (shrink)

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM–5; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013) defines melancholia as “A mental state characterized by very severe depressi...

In this article it is argued that the videogame Far Cry 2 manages to take advantage of the heroic formula so characteristic of the first-person shooter videogame genre in a way that potentially prompts players to reflect on the ethical adequacy of their own decision to immerse themselves in a fictional scenario in which they take the role of a fictional character whose behaviour primarily, if not exclusively, consists in shooting.

Crying is arguably the first emotional expression exhibited by human neonates, yet its theoretical status within affective science remains underspecified. We propose the Emotional Saturation Threshold (EST) model, a mathematical framework that formalizes crying as the universal overflow response---an "unknown state" ($\Omega$) that is activated whenever the intensity of any core emotion exceeds the capacity of its associated behavioral expressions. For each emotion $e_k$ in the set of basic emotions $\mathcal{E} = \{e_1, \dots, e_n\}$, we define an intensity function $I_k(t) (...) \in [0, \infty)$ and a finite set of behavioral expressions $\mathcal{B}_k = \{b_{k,1}, \dots, b_{k,m_k}\}$, each bounded by a maximum expression capacity $C(b_{k,j})$. The saturation threshold is defined as $\tau_k = \max_j C(b_{k,j})$. When $I_k(t) > \tau_k$, the system enters the $\Omega$-state, manifesting as lacrimation (crying). We model the transition probability as $P(\Omega \mid I_k) = 1 - \exp\!\bigl(-\alpha_k \cdot [I_k - \tau_k]^+\bigr)$, where $\alpha_k > 0$ is an emotion-specific sensitivity parameter. This framework unifies the observation that crying occurs across the entire valence spectrum---from extreme joy to profound grief---and explains why neonates, who possess no learned behavioral expressions (i.e., $\tau_k \approx 0$ for all $k$), default to crying as their first and only emotional response. We validate the model via a cross-sectional survey ($N = 7{,}812$) across 14 countries. Non-linear regression yields excellent model fits ($R^2 > 0.92$ for all eight emotions tested). Agreement rates with core EST postulates exceed 74\% across all survey items. The model extends the Russell circumplex by introducing a third, radial "overflow" dimension and provides a principled, falsifiable account of one of humanity's most fundamental yet least understood behaviors. (shrink)

This article contributes to research on emotion expression, attributions, and discrete work emotions by developing an observer-focused model to explain the outcomes of crying at work. Our model is focused on crying as a form of emotion expression because crying may be driven by different felt emotions or be used as a means of manipulation. In addition, the model focuses on observers, who must form perceptions of the emotion expression in order to determine an appropriate response. This model is particularly (...) valuable because it addresses the reality that an observer will develop an impression of another person’s emotion and intention, and that this impression may not always align with the reality of the emotion being experienced by the expresser. (shrink)

Our focus has been on the role of early cry as a commanding source of information about infant pain and distress that requires interpretation by an adult caregiver. Its inherent ambiguity may offer an adaptive advantage, as resolution requires adult presence and scrutiny of other behavioral, physical, and contextual factors.

The first prayer that we find in the Bible is a cry, a cry that rises into the sky by an oppressed people. To have an experience of liberation one must first feel the need to be liberated, and then cry, believing or hoping that there, or up there, is someone to pick up the cry. If we do not feel oppressed by any pharaoh, or if we have lost hope that someone will listen to our cry, we have no (...) reasons to cry out and we will not be freed. Moses begins his public life by killing a man. Moses, the announcer of the law ‘Thou shalt not kill’ becomes a murderer. In these opening words of the story of Moses, one of the most profound laws of the Bible returns in a mysterious and, for us, a bit disconcerting way. The patriarchs and prophets of the Bible are neither heroes nor models of virtue. They show themselves to us as women and men taken from life, so human in their repertoire to include even the murderous act of Cain. It’s on the basis of being so fully human that their immense vocations come, and that is how they embark on and end their great spiritual experiences that are also always human. Only if we take upon ourselves the whole of their humanity may their stories of salvation, their hopes and their liberation become ours, too. (shrink)