This article documents the response of cooperative institutions that were required to adhere to new capital adequacy regulations traditionally geared for profit-maximising organisations. Using data from the Australian credit union industry, we demonstrate that the cooperative philosophy and internal corporate governance structure of cooperatives will lead management to increase capital adequacy ratios through the application of accounting window dressing techniques. This is opposite to the intended purpose of template regulation aimed at efficiently increasing operating margins and lowering risk. Our results (...) raise several debatable issues regarding the ethics of accounting management and the imposition of one-shoe-fits-all external regulation. (shrink)

The body conceived of as a machinic assemblage becomes a body that is multiple. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies. In this paper I draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore what happens to the drug using body when it is rethought as a machinic assemblage. Following an exploration of how the body of the drug user is put together and (...) stratified as a subject, and a careful manoeuvre through the bleak conception of the ‘drugged body’ provided by Deleuze and Guattari, I begin to map out some ethical alternatives. I argue that a body should, ultimately, be valued for what it can do (rather than what is essentially ‘is’), and that assemblages should be assessed in relation to their enabling, or blocking, of a body’s potential to become other. (shrink)

Recent work in clinical nursing ethics has been influenced by two main areas of insight associated with the challenge levelled by the women's movement to traditional thinking about morality and ethics. Broadly speaking these two realms have been distinguished as articulating ‘feminist’ socio‐political and ‘feminine’ ethic of care concerns. Often these two impulses are seen as pulling against each other, or worse, the ‘feminine’ emphasis on the ethics of care is seen as reinforcing the dynamics that elicit the ‘feminist’ concern. (...) In this paper I suggest how an expanded understanding of an ethic of care in clinical settings can provide resources for dealing with both concerns. A discussion of the way institutional relations can ride rough‐shod over the ‘feminist’ insights of ethical care, in the second part of the paper, provides evidence for my conclusion that ethical nursing care depends on recognizing that both areas of insight are imperative for its success. (shrink)

In _Caring_, Peta Bowden extends and challenges recent debates on feminist ethics. She takes issue with accounts of the ethics of care that focus on alleged principles of caring rather than analysing caring in practice. Caring, Bowden argues, must be understood by 'working through examples'. Following this approach, Bowden explores four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. Her analysis of the differences and similarities in these practices - their varying degrees of intimacy and reciprocity, formality and informality, (...) vulnerability and choice - reveals the practical complexity of the ethics of care. _Caring_ recognizes that ethical practices constantly outrun the theories that attempt to explain them, and Bowden's unique approach provides major new insights into the nature of care without resorting to indiscriminate unitary models. It will be essential reading for all those interested in ethics, gender studies, nursing and the caring professions. (shrink)

Recent discussions concerning the ethics of nursing care have gained added impetus from articulations of die so‐called ‘ethic of carersquo; in moral philosophy. This paper addresses the question of recognizing and elaborating the ethics of nursing care by exploring the problems and the possibilities of diese intersecting discourses. In the first part of the paper it is argued that appropriation of ‘the ethic of care’ by nursing theorists as the central value of nursing, in contradistinction to other moral values such (...) as beneficence or justice, runs the risk of reinforcing the conventional approaches to ethics that ‘the ethic of care’ seeks to overturn. Central to ‘the ethic of care’ is the recognition that caring entails a focus on the particularities and context of the relationships in which it is expressed. Accordingly die application of a unitary concept of care to the context of nursing relations may seriously distort dieir diverse and complex‐specific ediical possibilities. The dynamic complexity of nursing ethics may be more adequately understood by working through an array of specific examples of nursing practice highlighting the differences and similarities between them and other ethical practices of care. Experience of a set of examples in this way will draw attention to the multiplicity, ambiguity, and particularity of the ethics of nursing while facilitating the ability to recognize how other practices may or may not be understood as examples of ediical nursing care. In the second part of the paper a beginning is made on this project by addressing the work of several different theorists of care who have examined different practices of nursing from the overlapping perspectives of nurses, patients and the socio‐historical construction of their relationships. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 461-469, December 2021.

This study considers one of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of second language vocabulary in children: The differentiation and sharpening of lexical representations. We propose that sharpening is triggered by an implicit comparison of similar representations, a process we call contrasting. We investigate whether integrating contrasting in a learning method in which children contrast orthographically and semantically similar L2 words facilitates learning of those words by sharpening their new lexical representations. In our study, 48 Dutch-speaking children learned unfamiliar orthographically (...) and semantically similar English words in a multiple-choice learning task. One half of the group learned the similar words by contrasting them, while the other half did not contrast them. Their word knowledge was measured immediately after learning as well as 1 week later. Contrasting was found to facilitate learning by leading to more precise lexical representations. However, only highly skilled readers benefitted from contrasting. Our findings offer novel insights into the development of L2 lexical representations from fuzzy to more precise, and have potential implications for education. (shrink)

As alluded to in the title, the idea for this publication is to build on previous workworkon gendergender politics by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) and Fondation Jean Jaurès, whilst taking inspiration from the works of contemporary progressive feministfeminist thinkers, to apply a notion of feminismfeminism that works for everyone, with particular attention paid to the European UnionEuropean Union (EU) policy context in a way that feminism is actually a project for society which promotes unity—rather than division—between citizens (...) across the EU, regardless of their gender, social or cultural diversitycultural diversity.The aim is, therefore, to gather progressive voices with multidisciplinary backgrounds to launch a comprehensive reflection on how to move away from the “gender backlash” rhetoric by making room to imagine a “new gender contract” for a fairer, more equal Europe. By drawing on solid academic knowledge and concrete policy proposals, this participatory project endeavours to launch a true political reflection towards an inclusive and all-encompassing feminism for policymakers to unite around, across every policy field in the EU. Ultimately, the underlying intention is to offer a set of concrete contributions in the context of the new EU political cycle that started in June 2024. (shrink)

This article argues that political performance reveals the significance of the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood in relation to the censorship of democratic expression. Belarus Free Theatre performers spoke about fear as they gave personal accounts of imprisonment and undertook extreme physical action on aerial ropes, creating performances that evoked both emotionally felt responses and bodily affect. The aesthetic mood effect in these performances shifted from amusing audiences with the absurdity of political censorship to alarming them with the terror (...) of political persecution. Antonio Damasio points out that although aspects of the emotions merge in everyday life, ideas or impressions need to be separated out from the physiology of emotional feeling in their study. While the turn to affect emphasizes convergence and, importantly, recognizes human sensitivity to nonhuman energies, an impersonal energetic field can be distinguished from the personal and the psychological. This analysis of theatrical performance reveals the ways in which it presents social ideas of the emotions and aesthetic moods, as well as elicits the affect of bodily sensation and invites the emotionally felt responses of audience members. Theatrical performance offers a space for expressing emotions in political protest. (shrink)

This paper argues that Pedro Tabenksy's Aristotelean understanding of true happiness overlooks the constitutive significance of the virtues and values of relationships of radical dependency. Tabensky's focus on the rational and contextual aspects of personhood as the locus for our social interdependence results in friendship relationships being taken as paradigmatic for social engagements. Through a sketch of some of the unique dimensions of the asymmetrical relations upon which our bodily functioning and personal identities inevitably depend, I show that this focus (...) risks perpetuating the lack of recognition of the value and significance of caring relations familiar to us in contemporary societies today. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(4) 2004: 394-401. (shrink)

Presenting feminism as a dynamic, multi-faceted and adaptive movement that has evolved in response to the changing practical and theoretical problems faced by women, the authors take a problem-oriented approach that maps the complex strands of feminist thinking in relation to women's struggles for equal recognition and rights, and freedom from oppressive constraints of sex, self-expression and autonomy. Each chapter focuses on a different cluster of concerns, demonstrating key moves in second-wave feminist thought, as well as some of the diversity (...) in response-strategies that encompass both socio-economic and cultural-symbolic concerns. With introductions to the ideas of many important feminists, like Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Betty Friedan (1921-2006), Mary Daly (b. 1928), Sandra Harding (b. 1935), Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), Luce Irigaray (b. 1932), and many others. (shrink)

On Surface and Place is a rich and poetic exploration of surfaces which foregrounds their significance in our understanding and experience of place. Adopting weaving as its overarching metaphor, it departs from Gottfried Semper's discussion of correspondences between architecture and textiles, and emerges from the reading of photographs, a swatch of Harris Tweed and curtain wall façade juxtaposed. In juxtaposing the fabric of the city with the weave of Harris Tweed the book charts an original course across a range of (...) connected ideas and questions, combining many different themes, writers and disciplines. It presents integrated and innovative rethinkings on a number of fundamental relationships, including correlations between body and building, word and image, and between the rural and the metropolitan, and the hand-crafted and the mass-reproduced. In doing so, it seeks to foreground the very interrelationship of surface and place, as it makes a claim for the relational nature of the world in which we live. (shrink)

The Australian moratorium on human clinical trials of xenotransplantation was lifted in December 2009. This decision follows public consultations on whether xenotransplantation should or should not proceed in Australia, which occurred in 2002 and 2004. However, the public consultation, in its design and process, did not facilitate meaningful public engagement and involvement, thus marginalising the public and devaluing their social experiences and diverse knowledges. This brief article questions what constitutes adequate public consultation, and suggests that consensus conferences or citizen juries (...) should be explored as a mechanism for meaningful public engagement for future public consultation exercises in Australia. (shrink)

The question of the transcendent, that which operates above and beyond the material stuff of the world, remains an enduring one for feminism, bound up as it is with the foundations of feminism's corporeal politics and the definition of its political subject. With the specificity of the situated and meaningful body grounding feminist politics, the universal and neutral status of the speaking subject has been diagnosed as masculine, and unable to properly account for sexed differences. On this basis, political community, (...) collectivity forged along the lines of a common identity, is considered important in the realization of feminist political goals, yet is also problematic in view of its reliance upon a universal category of identity through which to motivate for political change. Acknowledging these tensions, this paper revisits Luce Irigaray's essay “Divine Women” to suggest that in her rethinking of the divine as a shared horizon through which women can potentially achieve autonomy, the nature of the transcendent, the universal, and the identity of the feminine are also reconfigured in surprising ways. In a specific address to the dilemma of political community, Irigaray makes available a notion of the divine that is already differently inhabited. (shrink)

This open-access book, supported by FEPS and Fondation Jean-Jaurès, centres on the work of contemporary progressive feminist thinkers and the idea that there is no democracy without gender equality. The authors develop the concept of a feminism that works for everyone – regardless of their gender, social or cultural identity – in the context of EU policy. The book features gender experts with multidisciplinary backgrounds from across Europe, providing a comprehensive exploration of efforts to move away from “gender backlash” rhetoric (...) and towards a new gender contract for a fairer, more equal European Union. (shrink)

The chapter argues for preparing European institutions for the transformation of knowledge production. Firstly, it delineates the current challenges, refocusing attention on the real dangers. The neoliberalisation of knowledge production, research and educational institutions fundamentally weakens the infrastructure and the transformative potential of knowledge produced. It also contributes to the decentralisation of science, which is driven by transnational cooperations outside the national quality assurance institution. Secondly, it discusses three key elements for a new gender contract—access, content and staff—explaining their relevance. (...) Feminists have been struggling to break the hierarchies and exclusionary practices shaped and transmitted by higher education for centuries. This chapter analyses responses to the recent challenges of de-democratisation, by arguing that scholars should take action to start separate institutions, and decentralisation of science, by arguing that the internationalisation of science can be as threatening to the original mission of education as re-nationalisation. Thirdly, it proposes key policy recommendations. In the end, it argues for a policy change in European Union policies, especially due to the influx of refugee scholars for rethinking Europe. This chapter argues that the seemingly paralysed and non-responsive actors contribute to the spreading of illiberal alternatives in Europe. (shrink)