This article poses the question of whether biobanking practices and standards are giving rise to the construction of populations from which various biobanking initiatives increasingly draw on for legitimacy? We argue that although recent biobanking policies encourage various forms of engagement with publics to ensure legitimacy, different biobanks conceptualize their engagement strategies very differently. We suggest that biobanks undertake a broad range of different strategies with regard to engagement. We argue that these different approaches to engagement strategies are contributing to (...) the construction of populations, whereby specific nationalities, communities, societies, patient groups and political systems become imbued or bio-objectified with particular characteristics, such as compliant, distant, positive, commercialized or authoritarian. This bio-objectification process is problematic in relation to policy aspirations ascribed to biobanking engagement since it gives rise to reified notions of different populations. (shrink)

Posidonia oceanicais an endemic seagrass from the mediterranean that provides key ecosystem services. A protected species, its presence is regressing due to anthropogenic pressures, some associated to the tourism economy that much of the Mediterranean coast depends on. In 1992, the European Union declared it a priority habitat, and since the early 2000s, it has occupied a central space in marine conservation debates in the Balearic Islands. Popularly known as Posidonia, this seagrass went from being considereddirtthat ruinedvirginBalearic beaches to become (...) an emblematic species. This article takes this U-turn in policy and public perception as a study case to think of knowledge-making practices and restoration initiatives as a form of environmental care. The relational, situated and affective character of care ethics helps to understand the human and ecological labour embedded in knowledge-making and restoration practices and its inevitable engagement with the Balearic tourism industry. Drawing on those engagements, I reflect on environmental care practices of knowledge-making and restoration, arguing that they emerge ambivalently: they challenge management logics based on economic rationales while forced to develop and coexist inside those same rationales. I conclude by arguing that developing care-centric narratives for environmental conservation and restoration is essential to continue promoting more-than-human aquatic relations in which the needs of others are the ethical basis for action. (shrink)

Seminary students remain unstudied in the research literature despite their eminent role in caring for the wellbeing of congregants. This study aimed to conduct baseline analysis of their family of origin health, psychological health, and physiological heath by utilizing the Biobehavioral Family Model as a conceptual framework for understanding the associations between these constructs. Statistical analysis utilizing structural equation modeling provided support that the BBFM was a sound model for assessing the relationships between these constructs within a seminary sample. Additionally, (...) seminarians were found to have higher rates of anxiety and depression when compared to the general population. Together, findings indicate that clinical care for seminarians may be best if implemented from a global systemic perspective. (shrink)

"Canada, like other industrial nations, is undergoing widespread social change at a faster pace than ever before. Many features of our basic institutions are being transformed and some of the values on which they were based are being weakened or swept away to be replaced by others. As this Royal Commission indicated in its first report, Challenges and Choices, the scope and implications of these changes call "into question basic assumptions, values, and institutions at every level of society, from the (...) shop floor to the cabinet room, to the international economic system," but while many values change, others endure."--. (shrink)