This article, taking a social semiotic approach, analyses two pieces of music written, shared and exalted by two pre-1945 European fascist movements – the German NSDAP and the British Union of Fascists. These movements, both political and cultural, employed mythologies of unity, common identity and purpose in order to elide the realities of social distinction and political–economic inequalities between bourgeois and proletarian groups in capitalist societies. Visually and inter-personally, the fascist cultural project communicated a machine-like certainty about a vision for (...) a new society based on discipline, conformity and the might of the nation. In this article, we are interested in the ways that these very same discourses are also communicated through sound and music in two songs: The Horst Wessel Lied and the BUF marching song, two songs that used the same melody. We analyse the discourses communicated by the semiotic choices made in melody, arrangements, sound qualities, rhythms as well as in lyrics. The article first identifies some of the underlying semiotic resources for meaning making in sound and then shows how these are used in order to communicate specific ideas, values and attitudes. (shrink)

This paper provides a series of reflections on making the case to senior leaders for the introduction of clinical ethics support services within a UK hospital Trust at a time when clinical ethics committees are dwindling in the UK. The paper provides key considerations for those building a case for clinical ethics support within hospitals by drawing upon published academic literature, and key reports from governmental and professional bodies. We also include extracts from documents relating to, and annual reports of, (...) existing clinical ethics support within UK hospitals, as well as extracts from our own proposal submitted to the Trust Board. We aim for this paper to support other ethicists and/or health care staff contemplating introducing clinical ethics support into hospitals, to facilitate the process of making the case for clinical ethics support, and to contribute to the key debates in the literature around clinical ethics support. We conclude that there is a real need for investment in clinical ethics in the UK in order to build the evidence base required to support the wider introduction of clinical ethics support into UK hospitals. Furthermore, our perceptions of the purpose of, and perceived needs met through, clinical ethics support needs to shift to one of hospitals investing in their staff. Finally, we raise concerns over the optional nature of clinical ethics support available to practitioners within UK hospitals. (shrink)

The diagnosis of a new geological epoch, The ‘Anthropocene’, has implications far beyond geological science. If human activity has disrupted the planet, then this diagnosis potentially disrupts socio-political conventions. This article assesses the implications the Anthropocene has for democratic politics, by delineating three challenges: challenges of knowledge, time and boundary. In contrast to the claim that democratic institutions are unable to adequately respond to these challenges, I suggest that they might be strengthened through an engagement with them. Following an ‘agonistic’ (...) understanding of politics, I argue that the contestation instigated by the challenges of the Anthropocene is key to democratic renewal. Just as democracy in the Anthropocene can be enhanced through an agonistic approach, agonistic theory can be enriched through an engagement with the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The ability of very wealthy individuals (or, as I will call them, the ‘super-rich’) to turn their economic power into political power has been—and remains—an important cause of political inequality. In response, this paper advocates an original solution. Rather than solving the problem through implementing a comprehensive conception of political equality, or through enforcing complex rules about financial disclosure etc., I argue that we should impose a choice on the super-rich. The super-rich must choose between (i) forfeiting the things that (...) make them super-rich, i.e., pay a 100 % tax on their wealth above a certain level, or, (ii) they must forfeit some of their political rights. These rights include entitlements to fund political parties; to stand for office; and to work or volunteer for political parties. The right to vote, though, is not limited. I defend my proposal against non-consequentialist and consequentialist objections. I also argue that it avoids two problems that many attempts to reduce political inequality face; these are the political egalitarian’s dilemma and the problem of political equality’s relative moral importance. (shrink)

We are currently witnessing what we refer to in this Critical Exchange as ‘a turn to the imagination’. Across the academy and beyond, the concept of ‘imaginaries’is increasingly used to examine how the imagination is provoked, harnessed and dispersed to encourage or inhibit social, political, economic, technological and cultural transformation. Highlighting the need for critical reflection not only on the possibilities but also the limits of this turn, we explore the role of the imagination and imaginaries in contemporary political theory, (...) analysis and practice. The contributions discuss the mutation of dominant far-right imaginaries; the promise of anti-colonial, postgrowth, ecosocialist, and ecofeminist imaginaries; and the potential for new political means, such as theatre, to expand our imagination and create imaginaries that ‘stick’. The contributions do not offer a single framework for understanding and engaging with the turn to the imagination, but rather provide possible starting points for a diverse, critical and political account of this ‘turn’ and its implications. (shrink)

This book explores that question in unprecedented detail, drawing on empirical evidence from an impressive array of sources.

Where are all the bodies? Political institutions are populated by living, breathing human beings, who eat, sleep, gesture, desire and suffer. And yet participants of the political realm are often depicted as disembodied minds, detached and distinct from their corporeal existence. Amanda Machin considers six embodied modes of democratic politics: representation, deliberation, disagreement, protest, occupation and counsel. Drawing on diverse thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, Simone de Beauvoir, Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, she offers an absorbing illustration of (...) the ways human bodies are not only the disciplined objects of politics, but the generative subjects of democracy. (shrink)

In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of a sample from a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the Romanian (...) Press to represent the French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s need to gloss over its failure to comply with the Schengen accession requirements and acquire full European Union membership. (shrink)

There has been criticism of how Fair-Trade products represent workers in remote parts of the world where packaging offers an encounter with distant others which romanticizes and homogenizes them as a pre-modern form of ethnicity. Such workers are shown as always engaged in authentic, simple, honest decontextualized manual labor. And they are depicted as highly appreciative of, and empowered by, the act of ethical shopping. This paper shows that a close social semiotic analysis of Fair-Trade packaging reveals a different set (...) of meanings which sit alongside the decontextualized ones. Designs integrate these workers into more contemporary kinds of modernist, rational, design chic, which communicates its own kind of honesty and authenticity. We consider how this, too, shapes how such consumers encounter distant others and its consequence for the meaning of the act of ethical shopping, where consumers can buy into moral alignment offered by products. (shrink)

Democracy can be a means to independently valuable ends and/or it can be intrinsically (or non-instrumentally) valuable. One powerful non-instrumental defence of democracy is based on the idea that only it can publicly justify political authority. I contend that this is an argument about the reasonable acceptability of political authority and about the requirements of publicity and that satisfying these requirements has nothing to do with whether a society is democratic or not. Democracy, then, plays no role in publicly justifying (...) political authority. I also show that any non-instrumental defence of democracy must make claims about what justice requires and make several further claims that require substantial justification. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Black Notebooks, Heidegger ascribes in 1938/9 to the Jewish race an “empty rationality and calculative ability,” in his view the cause of its “worldlessness.” To assess this characterisation, I present Heidegger’s theories of history as a decline in Being and Time and in his later history of Being. For this purpose, I discuss his notions of Rechnen, Machenschaft, and Geviert, several existentialia from Being and Time, and Heidegger’s identification of modern machination and modern technology. Furthermore, I examine (...) Heidegger’s attitude toward the Jews and the Holocaust. I present his alignment of the unconcealment of modernity and the Jewish race, and compare his theory of machination with the texts “Positionality” and “The Question concerning Technology”. Heidegger’s notes about the Jews in the Black Notebooks after 1944 confirm that he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently,” as I already argued in a paper from 1995. (shrink)

While there has been extensive work on the textual realizations of climate change in the media, there has been little on the way such discourses are realized and promoted visually. This article addresses this using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to examine a new collection of images from the globally operating Getty Images intended for use in promotions, advertisements and editorials. Getty is promoting this collection in terms of Green Issues being a `marketing opportunity'. In this article we consider the results (...) of these issues being recontextualized through this process, where they are shaped to fit the culture of branding. Analysis is of the images and the search terms where Getty lay out what can be said with the images. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

Although they often go unnoticed, the statues that stand in town squares and city parks around the world remain significant in contemporary societies. Statues are highly political artefacts that reflect and reproduce dominant sociopolitical narratives of the past and urban imaginaries of the present and can become the focus of celebration or controversy. This article argues that a statue forms part of an ‘urban assemblage’, comprised of a heterogeneous multiplicity of material objects, inscribed text, historical narratives, living bodies and emotional (...) performances, that emerges through processes of depoliticisation and re-politicisation. Urban assemblages are stabilised to entrench particular social relations but can always be destabilised. Illustrating my arguments with the examples of the Emmeline Pankhurst statue in Manchester and the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, I discuss the movements around urban assemblages and the possibilities of democratic interventions in the city. (shrink)

While the psychiatric perspective on pathologising vital cycles and processes, sexual diversity, and the stages of childhood life receives more and more rejection of their positions, the trend toward depathologisation as drifts in social movements and sociological, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives still does not offer practical solutions to mental illness and psychological suffering. The depathologising gaze, promoted not only by social movements or emerging disciplines—such as Mad Studies and child-centered philosophy—but also recently by traditional disciplines, has the harmful effect (...) of abandoning many suffering people, whose expectations in “Psy” professionals are vital to solving your real problems.How can one find a middle ground between these two tendencies?There’s not a simple answer to that problem. So, authors in this chapter propose a revision of the term pathos as a cultural object and its human implication. The question is linked with some of the foundational conceptions about the human being (Vygotski, Pensamiento y lenguaje. Editora Revolucionaria, 1926; Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1963; Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique. PUF, 1966) and its expressions (Deleuze, Las cartas del mal (13/1/1981) en Gilles Deleuze: En medio de Spinoza. Cactus, 1981).Culture, time, aesthetics, consciousness; continuity body-mind; instinct-pulsion, virtualisation, networks, and so on are some of the concepts revisited in this chapter to reframe the de question.Pathos, psychopathology, pathologisation, depathologisation, and mental health and illness are presented in this chapter as differentiated concepts with particular effects in each cultural context and referential frame, but particularly in each singular case (Forrester, Thinking in cases. Polity, 2017) as an empirical level for analysing the human nature (Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).Thus, a reframe of pathology and mental health is proposed, as a result of a new set of particular relationships, according to the formula opportunely analysed on Spinoza by Vygotski (Pensamiento y lenguaje. Editora Revolucionaria, 1926) and Deleuze (Las cartas del mal (13/1/1981) en Gilles Deleuze: En medio de Spinoza. Cactus, 1981), respectively. (shrink)

Deemed consent legislation for deceased organ donation was introduced in England in 2020, and is considered a vital part of the new UK NHS Blood and Transplant’s 10-year strategy to increase consent for organ donation. Despite the legislation containing safeguards to protect the public, the introduction of deemed consent creates ethical, psychological and social un/certainties for healthcare professionals in their practice. In this paper, we offer insights into healthcare professionals’ perspectives on deemed consent, drawn from interview data with 24 healthcare (...) professionals in an NHS Trust in England, prior to the introduction of the legislation. Whilst participants supported deemed consent in principle, they were concerned that it would present a threat to the nature of donation as a ‘gift’; the notion of informed consent (or non-consent); and the autonomy of donors, their relatives, and their own roles as health professionals, posing dilemmas for practice. We argue that healthcare professionals present themselves as guardians of potential (non)donors and thus as having ethics and integrity in their own practice. We draw conclusions around the values and principles that matter to healthcare professionals when contemplating consent in deceased donation which will be useful for organ donation committees and ethics forums. (shrink)

The location of the living human being in the animal world is a long-standing discussion, with recurrences from time to time. Perhaps one of the most significant for contemporary Western thought was the course that Kojeve gave between 1935 and 1939 on the phenomenology of Hegel’s spirit, not so much not only because of the teaching itself but because of the resonances on the rest of French thought and in a certain sense European in general. Bataille, Lacan, Levy-Srauss, Foucault, and (...) Agamben, among others, refer to the turn this course represented for human interpretation.Based on this interpretation, several unavoidable concepts can be identified, without which this discussion would be meaningless: the concept of homo has been indistinctly associated with sapiens, faber, zoon politikón, ludens, conscious, or drive. The first has had a clear expression in the anthropological tradition or non-pragmatic sociology, leaving the last two reserved for psychology and psychoanalysis.In an approximation to the Freudian text of 1915 Drive and destinations of drive, which J. Lacan made in his Seminar 11, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”; specifically, in the class of May 6, 1964 “Disassembly of the Drive,” he reminds us how essential one of the concepts of psychoanalysis is for the analytic experience: the drive (Trieb). This term, with a long history of clarifications and ambiguities in Freud’s work, is found throughout the entire corpus of his metapsychology, basting together the rest of the concepts and giving the body to a theory of the human psyche. Thus, the drive, rooted in psychoanalytic interpretations, which “every analyst (is) knows by existence” (Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Le séminaire, livre XI. Éditions du Seuil, 1964, p. 60); however, it has been “used” at will, according to what each theoretician needed for what he had to address.At the very core of this discussion is the relationship with Pathos. The recognition or not of the living human and its type variants, pathology as a result of the non-pathological or pathos as indissoluble from the cultural essence have been some of the central questions. However, autism has appeared as an uncomfortable stone, whether one enters via “normality” toward the “pathological” or vice versa. It has even had a problematic history in the psychoanalytic tradition as well.In this way, since the notion of autism began to be legitimised in the psychoanalytic tradition to name certain subjects—particularly infants—a diverse and challenging use was made of the Freudian notion of drive in its interpretation.Then, to ask: how could “drive theory” explain what psychoanalysis considers “autism”? What are the difficulties in the dialogue between these two signifiers? Are these difficulties due to the misunderstanding of the word autism, as some hypothesise? Or to the different meanings of the drive in Freud, as others think? Or perhaps, are there other epistemic reasons that block these two concepts in the psychoanalytic theoretical gear?We hypothesise that the appearance of autism came to shake up all this tradition for which the human subject was a fracture in the animal evolutionary continuity, both that of consciousness/unconscious—which exceeds the possibility of discussion in this space—and the “drive thesis,” which is the one that concerns us. In this sense, the opposition continuism-discontinuism would now be, for the phylogenetic, put into question, to be eventually replaced by an asymptotic continuism, more assimilable to the Spinozian bet.This chapter explores the references to Sigmund Freud’s theory of drives in the interpretative approaches to child autism. Notably, it analyses the psychoanalytic thesis that proposes a constitutive failure in primordial times to understand the genesis of autism. The work explicitly presents a revelation of drive theory’s importance for the approach to autism. It also drives the exploration of the modes of appropriation and the use of said theorisation to explain the autistic phenomenon. Finally, the chapter discusses the analysis of the difficulties presented to the psychoanalytic authors when trying to accept autistic functioning and their theoretical choices to interpret it according to drive’s theory. (shrink)

As has been widely documented, the human being is the result of his ties. The existence of a human being without networks is not possible. In turn, the network is a result, a human construction. From this reciprocal dynamic, the human being extracts what is necessary both for the configuration of his existence, and his well-being, as well as to evaluate it. In this sense, getting sick or being “healthy” psychologically is inseparable from insertion in networks. The network builds a (...) healthy or sick living being, and provides what gives personal development and what makes sick. At the same time, it evaluates what is healthy or sick and makes the subject feel healthy or sick.In this sense, networks are an increasingly growing space for studies of mental pathologies and human suffering, as well as mental health alternatives and support. Not only in the sense of their own pathologies generated by the networks, but in the generation in networks of concepts and meanings for what should or should not be understood and perceived as pathological and under the protection of connection to exist with a sensation of well-being.The chapter documents some of the discussions on these problems, establishes some conceptual and theoretical references for the study of mental health in networks, and, at the same time, proposes alternative methodologies for approaches to the issue of the relationship between pathos and networks. It is illustrated with some of the results and projects coordinated by the authors in research in this field. (shrink)

Clinical ethics can be viewed as a practical discipline that provides a structured approach to assist healthcare practitioners in identifying, analysing and resolving ethical issues that arise in practice. Clinical ethics can therefore promote ethically sound clinical and organisational practices and decision-making, thereby contributing to health organisation and system quality improvement. In order to develop students’ decision-making skills, as well as prepare them for practice, we decided to introduce a clinical ethics strand within an undergraduate medical curriculum. We designed a (...) programme of clinical ethics activities for teaching and assessment purposes that involved using ethical frameworks to analyse hypothetical and real-life cases in uni- and inter- professional groups. In this paper, we draw on medical student feedback collected over 6 years to illustrate the appeal to students of learning clinical ethics. We also outline the range of benefits for students, healthcare organisations, and the field of clinical ethics arising from tomorrow’s doctors experiencing clinical ethics early in their training. We conclude by briefly reflecting on how including clinical ethics within tomorrow’s doctors curricular can secure and continue future engagement in clinical ethics support services in the UK, alongside the dangers of preparing students for organisational cultures that might not exist. We anticipate the findings presented in the paper will contribute to wider debates examining the impact of ethics teaching, and its ability to inform future doctors’ practice. (shrink)

Are there paths of the aesthetic that, just as they lead to subjectivization, lead to psychic pathology?This chapter is structured with this question. Through a tour of the various connections between the aesthetic and mental pathologies in Western culture and “Psy” scientific thought, the subject is reviewed to discuss the mental pathologies that appear today about the aesthetic.It could be enunciated that the aesthetic leads to psychic pathology through the subject’s clash with his existence and the contrasted evaluation between his (...) body, his representation of himself, and the representations others give him. On the other hand, the aesthetic leads to psychic pathology due to the relationship between these routes and the cultural representations of the aesthetic. In particular, these ways are combined when the subject has to contrast his representations about himself, about his body and the representations of his body emanating from the other with the cultural representations about the aesthetics of the body.In the same way, there are cultic representations of psychic pathology, psychic pathology as a culture of the aesthetic. For the Romans, the human was the nascitorum, and this had, as a primary condition, to be so in terms of human figuration, which among other implications, was primarily aesthetic.Thus, there are connecting bridges between the ways of pathos to subjectivization as a process and the cultural construction of psychic pathos. There are connecting bridges and new ways of evaluating psychic pathology.These, as have been indirectly illustrated at various times in this book, acquire a concrete cultural-historical expression in each place and time for each subject.The growing relationship with cosmetic surgery in its various variants; anorexia and bulimia; the dependencies to the visual representations and their acceptance in the networks—“like dependence”—bullying are contemporary manifestations of these paths open from the aesthetic to pathos, which question the role of the psi sciences and their denominations on mental health. The chapter will also show some evidence of empirical research by the authors on these issues in the clinic and various social contexts. (shrink)

It has become common to find diagrams and flow-charts used in our organizations to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, or to show how parts of the organization interrelate to each other and work together. Such diagrams are used as they are thought to help visualization and simplify things in order to represent the essence of a particular situation, the core features. In this paper, using a social semiotic approach, we show that we need (...) to develop a much more critical sense of how these diagrams and flowcharts can easily abstract, conceal and substitute actual causalities, work roles and relationships. We demonstrate this using the example of a series of interrelated flows-charts used to implement a new system of target-based learning in preschool/kindergartens in Sweden – a system which works highly in favor of a rapidly privatizing education sector. Here, the flow charts shape how school processes and learning are presented to devalue the former system and value the new. (shrink)

The United Nations ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ lays out 17 Sustainable Development Goals to address a range of global issues related to the future of the planet and human well-being. Critics, however, argue that the Agenda, a complex product of multi-stakeholder governance, in its drive to accommodate many competing voices, is overloaded with weakly defined, overlapping and contradictory issues, concepts and buzzwords. These serve to gloss over actual concrete global problems and forces, concealing an underlying (...) free-trade ideology. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we draw attention to the nature of the documents used to communicate the Agenda. These documents comprise an edifice of self-referential texts that rely heavily on infographics, bullet points, charts and tables. Such formats appear to helpfully simplify, distil information and break things down into workable components. But, we show, through the affordances of these formats, the the vagueness of buzzwords, contradictions and lack of clear causalities can be glossed over, presenting the Agenda as a highly technical, engaging, and above all moral process. These formats are important, therefore, for the legitimization and rhetorical power of the Agenda, necessary for its take-up by governments and organizations around the world. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 197 Seiten: 119-140.

This article argues against the claim that democracy is a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Instead, I propose a weaker set of conditions. First, I explain the case for the necessity of democracy. This is that only democracy can address the ‘egalitarian challenge’, i.e. ‘if we are all equal, why should only some of us wield political power?’. I show that if democracy really is a necessary condition of political legitimacy, then (what I label) the problems of domestic justice and (...) of international legitimacy become intractable. I then argue that the egalitarian challenge is addressed where the requirements of (1) horizontal equality, (2) acceptable vertical inequality, and (3) publicity, are met and where (4) citizens have some institutionalized opportunity for a voice in decisions. I show that these conditions can be realized in non-democratic form and conclude by explaining how the four conditions can be employed to make the problems of domestic justice and of international legitimacy more tractable. Overall, my ambitions are limited. I do not offer an all-things-considered case against democracy but I do show that (some) forms of non-democratic government are permissible. (shrink)

Researchers engaged in studies about ‘hidden social groups’ are likely to face several ethical challenges. Using a study with undocumented Chinese migrants in the UK, challenges involved in obtaining approval by a university research ethics committee are explored. General guidance about how to resolve potential research ethics issues, with particular reference to ‘hidden social groups’, prior to submission to a research ethics committee is presented.

Researchers engaged in studies about ‘hidden social groups’ are likely to face several ethical challenges. Using a study with undocumented Chinese migrants in the UK, challenges involved in obtaining approval by a university research ethics committee are explored. General guidance about how to resolve potential research ethics issues, with particular reference to ‘hidden social groups’, prior to submission to a research ethics committee is presented.

ABSTRACTIn Critical Discourse Studies and in other linguistics oriented scholarly journals we now see more research which draws upon multimodality as part of carrying out analyses of how text...

In _Contributions to Philosophy_, Heidegger approaches the Gigantic merely “being-historically”, but what if we could break with Heidegger’s narrative and reveal a real lesson about capital about our present from his conception of the Gigantic? For the Gigantic presupposes a break with the limits of nature that we can only truly understand if we trace it back to a form of laboring activity, which by not "forging" anything "in its boundaries" anymore breaks with any boundary, and in constantly one-upping its (...) means cannot find any "end" and thus becomes truly unbounded. The paper shows that capital and the Gigantic are conditioned by each other and that we cannot overcome one without considering the other. It provides some insight into why Marx was wrong to expect the overcoming of capital by overbidding the productivity of labor, but also why Heidegger’s privileging of the boundary in a full negligence of capital ends up in the seduction by the fantasy of the original site, which seems to be reflected in a terrible mixture today: The boundlessness of capital mixed with today’s identitarian zeal of saving "borders" from a figure fear, namely “the migrant”. (shrink)

StyleLikeU is a hugely successful online social media platform that presents itself as a social justice movement related to body acceptance. Presenting moving personal stories, it offers a site for what it calls ‘diverse individuals’ to share their experiences as part of promoting individual self-acceptance in the face of a world that prioritizes one kind of body over another, which take the form of ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, sizeism and prejudice against disfigurement. Drawing out the discursive script carried (...) across the platform, we show how, beneath the rhetoric of progressiveness, social justice becomes a kind of personal therapy, related to empowerment and transformation, which erases actual differences in personal circumstances and the very forces of injustice. We place StyleLikeU into broader scholarly concerns about the neoliberal colonization of identity politics, diversity and intersectionality in institutions and in branding, drawing attention to how this can form one part of what are now presented as social justice movements. (shrink)

In critical discourse analysis, we have learned much about the nature of the marketized language that now dominates public institutions such as universities, playing a role in changing their identities. But less is known about the processes whereby this language enters the everyday practices of these institutions through documents that are used to manage teaching and research. What is the role of language in the shift to the way these activities are internally organized, managed, run and evaluated in terms of (...) productivity and market-based principles? In this paper we analyse a chain of documents taken from a wider corpus of management documents in Swedish universities to show how this language recontextualizes the practices of teaching and research. Our focus is on the important role played by lists, bullet points and tables and how these are central to decoupling language from work processes and so legitimizing this marketized discourse. The affordances of these multimodal structures allow complex processes and social relations to be abstracted, fragmented and treated as things. They are also important in allowing documents to form a complex self-referential information infrastructure. (shrink)

We are very grateful for the responses given to our article and for the editor of this journal for inviting us to have this kind of interaction. We simply need to have this kind of open discussion...

Clinical laboratories face ethical challenges on a daily basis. The ethics training provided for clinical laboratory staff is variable, with some receiving no training. We aimed to explore the perceived benefits of ethics education for laboratory professionals. Ethics training was provided to approximately 60 laboratory professionals in a UK not-for-profit blood cancer organisation, with group discussions incorporated into the session. The session covered dominant ethical theories and principles, the defining moments in medical research ethics and the ethical aspects of laboratory (...) practices. At the end of the session a short optional paper survey was distributed to the participants to obtain feedback on the training. The feedback was anonymous and thematically coded. Attendees reported to be more aware of the existence and importance of ‘everyday’ ethics in their workplace. Responses also showed that the training session had provided participants with an opportunity for ethical reflection in themselves and in discussion with their colleagues. Despite clinical laboratory professionals being faced with ethical challenges daily, there is comparatively little ethics education provided. Ethics training is believed to improve the ethical attitude of laboratory staff and help them when making decisions in their work. We have shown that ethics education is important for laboratory professionals to develop and retain ethical awareness, and ethical reflection. By gaining insight into the ethical aspects of their practices, laboratory professionals can apply this understanding when faced with making challenging decisions in their workplace, in order to act in the best interests of their patients. (shrink)