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1

Kübler, Knut. "German Industry's Declaration on Climate Protection: A Voluntary Commitment or a Congratulatory Self-Assurance?" Energy & Environment 9, no. 5 (August 1998): 499–507. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0958305x9800900504.

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In many industrial countries voluntary commitments are emerging as a new instrument for energy policy to reduce greenhouse gases. This paper examines the latest version of the German Industry's Declaration on Climate Protection from 1996. The statistical analysis shows that the largest part of the German Industry's commitments for 2005 were already reached in 1994 and 1995, thus prior to signing the Declaration. This result corresponds to economic theory that in an open competition-based economy, companies cannot do more for the environment than the market allows.
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Gilbert, Bruce. "Socio-environmental rights and the riddle of history." Revista da Faculdade de Direito da UFG 42, no. 1 (June 20, 2018): 145–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.5216/rfd.v42i1.53334.

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Abstract: Broadly speaking, this paper is about the relationship of the human rights tradition to substantive issues of social justice, including class exploitation and environmental destruction. These themes I take to be of global concern, but I will examine them today as they arise from conflicts and struggles situated in Brazil. The key to the argument is to show that the human rights tradition recognizes necessary features of self-determination, and that claims for socio-environmental rights in Brazil and elsewhere derive their legitimacy from the same kind of argument that justifies individual rights, such as the 1948 United Nations Declaration, and collective rights, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007. That is, I will try to show that individual, collective and socio-environmental rights are each necessary conditions but, on their own, insufficient conditions for the possibility of self-determination. The need for such rights emerges in the history of the struggle for justice. This this paper will also defend the claim that the universality of rights necessarily emerges from the historicity of social life and solves what Marx calls the “riddle of history.” Keywords : Socio-enviromental rights; riddle of history. Resumo: De um modo geral, este artigo trata da relação da tradição dos direitos humanos com questões substantivas de justiça social, incluindo a exploração de classes e a destruição ambiental. Esses temas são de interesse global, mas vou examiná-los hoje, pois eles surgem de conflitos e lutas no Brasil. A chave do argumento é mostrar que a tradição dos direitos humanos reconhece as características necessárias à autodeterminação, e que as reivindicações por direitos socioambientais no Brasil e em outros lugares derivam sua legitimidade do mesmo tipo de argumento que justifica os direitos individuais, como o Declaração das Nações Unidas de 1948, e direitos coletivos, como o Pacto Internacional sobre Direitos Econômicos, Sociais e Culturais de 1966 e a Declaração dos Direitos dos Povos Indígenas das Nações Unidas de 2007. Ou seja, tentarei mostrar que os direitos individuais, coletivos e Direitos socioambientais são, cada um, condições necessárias, mas, por si só, condições insuficientes para a possibilidade de autodeterminação. A necessidade de tais direitos surge na história da luta pela justiça. Este artigo também defenderá a afirmação de que a universalidade dos direitos surge necessariamente da historicidade da vida social e resolve o que Marx chama de "enigma da história".
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Fanasch, Patrizia, and Bernd Frick. "The value of signals: Do self-declaration and certification generate price premiums for organic and biodynamic wines?" Journal of Cleaner Production 249 (March 2020): 119415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.119415.

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Mackie, Peter, Alison Brown, Kate Dickenson, Eid Ahmed, Saeed Ahmed Hassan, and Mohamed A. Mohamoud Barawani. "Informal economies, conflict recovery and absent aid." Environment and Urbanization 29, no. 2 (September 8, 2017): 365–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956247817719868.

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This paper addresses the issue of what happens in the aftermath of conflict when humanitarian response is absent, to see how “self-help” recovery can inform development assistance paradigms and practice. We explore livelihoods strategies and community-led recovery processes in the context of conflict in Somaliland, a region that experienced an acutely disruptive conflict and an absence of humanitarian aid, to evaluate the economic recovery that emerged. The conflict is tracked through perceptions and recollections of those who lived through the disaster: the bombing of Hargeisa in 1988 that flattened the city, the declaration of a semi-autonomous nation in 1991, and its subsequent development over the last 25 years. This critical case study aims to inform the humanitarian assistance agenda in relation to livelihoods as a self-help process in post-conflict recovery.
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Kassoti, Eva, and Mihail Vatsov. "A Missed Opportunity? Unilateral Declarations by the European Union and the European Court of Justice’s Venezuelan Fisheries Judgment." International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 35, no. 1 (March 18, 2019): 55–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15718085-23343071.

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Abstract The EU has entered into many binding undertakings (international agreements) with third States on access to fisheries resources. In the Venezuelan Fisheries case, the ECJ was, for the first time, confronted with an EU unilateral declaration granting fishing opportunities in EU waters to Venezuela-flagged vessels. We argue, contrary to ECJ’s conclusion, that the declaration is a binding unilateral act and not an international agreement. This case is important for the burgeoning debate on the ECJ’s approach to international law. It represents a missed opportunity for the ECJ to clarify its previous case-law on the broad concept of ‘international agreement’ and align it with relevant international jurisprudence and doctrine. More fundamentally, it is a missed opportunity for the ECJ to truly develop and shape international law practice and doctrine on unilateral acts by international organisations – an omission that does not comport with the EU’s self-projection as an internationally engaged polity.
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Starobin, Shana, and Erika Weinthal. "The Search for Credible Information in Social and Environmental Global Governance: The Kosher Label." Business and Politics 12, no. 3 (October 2010): 1–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.2202/1469-3569.1322.

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Hundreds of “eco-labels” and “social labels” exist for consumer products. These labels claim to provide information about characteristics of these products, which consumers cannot directly observe but which many of them consider desirable, such as low environmental impact, good treatment of workers during production, and relatively high prices paid to the local producers of ingredients from developing countries. Third-party certifiers are supposed to solve the well-known problem that a producer's unilateral declarations lack credibility, given the producer's conflict of interest and the information asymmetries between producer and consumer. Much of the literature on global private regulation—through standards for environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility, among others—assumes that third-party certification works (i.e., overcomes the problems of producer self-declaration). But closer inspection shows that many third-party certifiers lack credibility. This article examines why some third party certifiers are more credible than others. In doing so, we elucidate the ways in which social capital and trust bolster third party certifiers' credibility. The empirical analysis focuses primarily on Kosher food labels within the global food supply chain. We then explore the consequences of the credibility paradox for other third party certified labels that promote social and environmental values.
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7

Malbon, Justin. "The Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement: Trade Trumps Indigenous Interests." Media International Australia 111, no. 1 (May 2004): 34–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0411100106.

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This article argues that the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) selectively recognises and affirms international conventions and agreements that promote the narrow economic self-interests of powerful groups. It does this whilst disregarding those international instruments — including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity — that seek to recognise and promote the cultural and intellectual property rights of Indigenous people. Although AUSFTA does make some concessions for Indigenous interests by providing negative exemptions from the chapters dealing with trade in services, government procurement and investment, these concessions are relatively weak in the face of the Agreement's pursuit of free trade. Using the model of Chapter 19, which imposes positive obligations on the United States and Australia to promote environmental interests, it is proposed that future Australian FTAs should enunciate positive obligations for Australia's Indigenous people.
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Giuliani, M., R. Gregori Grigc, R. M. Martoni, M. C. Cavallini, S. A. Crespi, and C. de'Sperati. "Who did it? Exploring gaze agency in obsessive-compulsive (OC) checkers." European Psychiatry 41, S1 (April 2017): S322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.02.244.

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IntroductionClinically, OC-checkers often report staring compulsions and “lack of action completion” sensations, which have been linked to self-agency alterations. Belayachi and Van der Linden (2009) theoretically proposed that “abnormal” checkers self-agency could be due to an over-reliability on environmental cues and to a tendency to specify actions in a procedural and inflexible way, conceiving them as “low-level” agents. Currently, no studies have experimentally address this issue.ObjectivesTo investigate self-agency in OC-checkers subtype, measuring gaze agency (the ability to understand that we can cause events through our eye movements) and taking into account both agency beliefs and agency feelings.Methods13 OC-checkers and 13 healthy controls underwent two tasks. “Discovery” task, a completely novel task used to examine causal learning abilities. Subjects watched bouncing balls on a computer screen with the aim of discovering the cause of concurrently presented acoustical beeps. “Detection” task, a two-alternative forced choice task that required subjects to tell whether or not the beeps were generated by their own eye movements.ResultsCheckers exhibit:– lower performance scores and confidence ratings when they have to self-attribute the beep cause, but not eye behavioral differences, during discovery task;– lower confidence ratings, but a level of accuracy similar to that of controls, during detection task.ConclusionsCheckers do not show an altered self-agency per se, but what we have called a “doubtful” self-agency: indeed, we argue that agency beliefs alterations found during Discovery task can be due to pathological doubt, rather than to altered agency feelings.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Rossini Gajsak, L., M. Celic Ruzic, A. Koricancic Makar, and M. Rojnic Kuzman. "Impact of Environmental Influence and Vulnerability to Stress in the Development of First Psychotic Episode." European Psychiatry 41, S1 (April 2017): S277—S278. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.02.118.

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IntroductionSome findings in patients with first psychotic episode (FEP) could be related to alterations of stress responses. Alterations of stress response are reflected in the alterations of the HPA axis.ObjectiveTo assess the difference in stress response in FEP patients and healthy controls as well as implications of environment to vulnerability to psychosis.AimTo assess endocrine and autonomic responses to acute psychosocial stress, their associations with onset of the first psychotic episode as well as the influence of the environmental factors.MethodsWe have assessed clinical status through clinical psychiatric interviews, standardized psychiatric scales and validated psychological scales, (LEQ, WHOQOL-BREF, PBI, Rosenberg) in 45 subjects with FEP and 50 age and gender matched controls. All participants were then exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSTT).ResultsOur preliminary findings on a sample of 95 participants indicate a differences between patients and controls in salivatory cortisol measured in 5 time points during the TSST. Patients with FEP experience more levels of baseline cortisole, and less changes during the stress test then controls. Baseline stress levels indicated in the salivatory cortisole levels correlate with perceived self-esteem, psychological and social quality of life.ConclusionOur findings support the alterations of stress response, possibly indicating vulnerability to stress in persons with FEP.FundingThis work was funded by the grant of the Croatian Science Foundation No UIP-2014-09-1245 Biomarkers in schizophrenia – integration of complementary methods in longitudinal follow up of first episode psychosis patients.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Severance, E. "Gastroenterology issues in schizophrenia: Why the gut matters." European Psychiatry 33, S1 (March 2016): S25—S26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.841.

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Numerous risk factors for schizophrenia can be reconciled through a common enteric source. These risk factors include systemic and localized inflammation, compromised endothelial barriers, IgG sensitivities to food antigens, exposure to viral and parasitic pathogens, and autoimmunity. The gut in a homeostatic state equates with a functional digestive system, cellular barrier stability and properly regulated recognition of self and non-self antigens, as managed by a complex community of resident microbes. Our studies address how environmental and genetic factors relate to GI dysfunction, impact the resident gut microbiota and result in dysregulation of processes in the host central nervous system. We hypothesize that disturbance to GI equilibria activates peripheral immune factors including complement pathway components that function in synaptic pruning. We evaluate these issues with peripheral immune biomarkers and deep sequencing in a number of case-control psychiatric cohorts that include antipsychotic-naïve individuals. Although certain medications and lifestyle factors might affect GI functioning, our findings support a GI pathology inherent to the schizophrenia disease process and a role for the gut-brain axis in complex brain disorders. The identification of those individuals affected by GI-related risk factors will enable appropriate and individualized treatments to be designed and tested for efficacy of both gut and brain-related symptoms.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.
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Suzuki, Naho, Tetsuya Yamamoto, Chigusa Uchiumi, and Nagisa Sugaya. "Effects of Interoceptive Sensibility on Mental Health during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 9 (April 27, 2021): 4616. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094616.

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The current coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has been reported to influence interoceptive sensibility. This study focused on adaptive and maladaptive aspects of interoceptive sensibility and examined how each aspect of interoceptive sensibility affects depression, anxiety, and somatization symptoms under the mild lockdown in Japan, which was not enforceable and a non-punitive lockdown. We used data from 10,672 participants who lived in prefectures where the emergency declaration was first applied in Japan. Interoceptive sensibility was measured by the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). The findings show that Noticing, a subscale of the MAIA, significantly contributed to the worsening of psychological and somatic symptoms (all ps < 0.001). Conversely, Not-Distracting, Not-Worrying, Self-Regulation, and Trusting significantly contributed to the decrease of these symptoms (all ps < 0.05). The findings suggest that two aspects of interoceptive sensibility affected mental health in different ways during the mild lockdown. Mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions would be effective in terms of enhancing adaptive aspects of interoceptive sensibility.
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Cheung, Tsz-Ki, and Willem AJ Meintjes. "The usefulness of the RSTC medical questionnaire in pre-participation health risk assessment of recreational scuba divers in Hong Kong." Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine Journal 51, no. 2 (June 30, 2021): 173–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.28920/dhm51.2.173-181.

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Introduction: The current practice in Hong Kong is to have potential recreational divers complete a Recreational Scuba Training Council self-declared medical statement (RSTC form) prior to participation in diving. There are no reports in the literature on the usefulness of the Chinese version of the form. Methods: The Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) RSTC form (Chinese version) was completed by 117 research participants who were then individually interviewed (without examination) to establish whether relevant information was not captured by the form. Any discrepancies or problems identified were recorded for further analysis. Results: Among participants, 15.4% expressed difficulty in completing the RSTC form. Less than one-third (28.2%) replied ‘all negative’ to the questions. Some health conditions that could impose diving risks were not elicited by the questionnaire alone. Nevertheless, there was good sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value with the exception of a few questions. However, significant discrepancies were identified when comparing the English and Chinese versions. There was also uncertainty with aspects of implementation, including attitudes of the user and provider, reliability of self-declaration answers and the handling of completed questionnaires. Conclusions: Health screening with a questionnaire for recreational divers remains practical and acceptable. Full revision of the RSTC form in Chinese is recommended in view of problems with the construct validity and translation. People should be informed about the non-prescriptive approach of health assessment for recreational divers. Further research on the implementation of the form may help to improve the screening strategy in the future.
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Jamieson-Craig, T. "Social psychiatry in a global perspective." European Psychiatry 33, S1 (March 2016): S11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.800.

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Social psychiatry starts from the position that as social animals, the cause, course and response to treatment of mental health problems are powerfully determined by the social environment. For example, childhood trauma within the home and bullying at school is associated with both internalizing and externalizing disorders and exerts its influence through life-long impacts on the individual's ability to form supportive relationships with others, their self-esteem and their resilience in the face of future adversity. Difficulties forming and sustaining personal relationships are intensified by the emergence of illness, consequent social exclusion and discrimination that in turn intensifies damaging beliefs of low self-worth and rejection. In contrast, we have considerable evidence for the “therapeutic” value of good relationships, notably the role of family and social support in the remarkable resilience shown by those who have come through the most appalling environmental and personal crises. It is therefore surprising that the balance of psychiatric therapeutic effort is stubbornly focused on the individual patient as the problem with less attention paid to developing and implementing social interventions targeted at the family and wider social network to prevent and alleviate mental illness. In this presentation I will argue that psychiatrists should be more active in developing and leading interventions that focus on the social and interpersonal networks of their patients with illustrations from past and ongoing efforts to this end.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.
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Dzhambov, Angel M., Peter Lercher, Drozdstoy Stoyanov, Nadezhda Petrova, Stoyan Novakov, and Donka D. Dimitrova. "University Students’ Self-Rated Health in Relation to Perceived Acoustic Environment during the COVID-19 Home Quarantine." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 5 (March 4, 2021): 2538. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18052538.

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Background: Online education became mandatory for many students during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and blurred the distinction between settings where processes of stress and restoration used to take place. The lockdown also likely changed perceptions of the indoor acoustic environment (i.e., soundscape) and raised its importance. In the present study, we seek to understand how indoor soundscape related to university students’ self-rated health in Bulgaria around the time that the country was under a state of emergency declaration caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Between 17 May and 10 June 2020, we conducted a cross-sectional online survey among 323 students (median age 21 years; 31% male) from two universities in the city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Self-rated health (SRH) was measured with a single-item. Participants were asked how frequently they heard different types of sounds while at home and how pleasant they considered each of those sounds to be. Restorative quality of the home (the “being away” dimension of the Perceived Restorativeness Scale) was measured with a single-item. A priori confounders and effect modifiers included sociodemographics, house-related characteristics, general sensitivity to environmental influences, and mental health. Our analysis strategy involved sequential exploratory factor analysis (EFA), multivariate linear and ordinal regressions, effect modification tests, and structural equation modeling (SEM). Results: EFA supported grouping perceived sounds into three distinct factors—mechanical, human, and nature sounds. Regression analyses revealed that greater exposure to mechanical sounds was consistently associated with worse SRH, whereas no significant associations were found for human and nature sounds. In SEM, exposure to mechanical sounds related to lower restorative quality of the home, and then to poorer SRH, whereas nature sounds correlated with higher restorative quality, and in turn with better SRH. Conclusions: These findings suggest a role of positive indoor soundscape and restorative quality for promoting self-rated health in times of social distancing.
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Aranguren, P. "Resilience, pain and quality of life in people with physical disabilities: A systematic review." European Psychiatry 41, S1 (April 2017): S733. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.01.1341.

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IntroductionMore than a thousand million people live with a certain type of disability over the world (more than a 15% of the population worldwide). In Spain, 2.5 millions of people suffer from a physical disability. Disability can be understood as an interaction of the individual's health condition (disease, illness…) and his/her environmental and personal factors. Resilience could be included as a powerful personal factor, which would play a major role in the individual's quality of life. Resilience can be defined as a universal basic capacity to prevent, minimize or overcome life's adversities, even reaching a change in the life of the individual.AimTo determine the association among resilience, pain and quality of life in people with physical disabilities.Materials and methodsAn electronic search of several databases (Psycinfo, Medline, Pubmed…) was performed using the terms resilience, physical disability, and physical illness among others.Results– Pain and resilience show an important relationship. Factors as acceptance, pain beliefs and self-efficacy are directly related with a lower pain interference.– Resilience and quality of life show a strong positive relationship.ConclusionSeveral factors are related to resilience in people with physical disabilities. Resilience seems to be an important capacity that helps individual with physical disabilities overcome adversities. Further analyses are required.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.
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Ji, Mengmeng, Ruopeng An, Yingjie Qiu, and Chenghua Guan. "The Impact of Natural Disasters on Dietary Intake." American Journal of Health Behavior 44, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 26–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.5993/ajhb.44.1.4.

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Objectives: In this study, we explored the potential impact of disasters on individuals' fruit and vegetable consumption. Methods: Individual-level data (N = 351,229) from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) 2011 survey were merged with county-level disaster declaration data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) based on disaster duration, interview month and residential county. Multilevel mixed-effects generalized linear models were conducted to examine the impact of different types of disasters on self-reported daily fruit, 100% pure fruit juice, beans, green vegetables, orange vegetables, other vegetables and overall vegetables consumption frequencies, adjusting for individual covariates. Results: No associations between disasters and daily fruit and overall vegetable consumption frequency were identified at either national or state levels. Only floods were consistently associated with reduced consumption of orange vegetables. Conclusions: This study did not identify an association between natural disasters and daily overall fruit/vegetable consumption frequency at national or state levels, whereas disasters were found to alter the consumption of certain vegetable subgroup (orange vegetables) slightly. Longitudinal studies with validated and detailed measures on diet and disaster are warranted to advance research in this field.
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Schellekens, A. "Translational perspectives in addiction psychiatry." European Psychiatry 33, S1 (March 2016): S60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.946.

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BackgroundHeritable factors account for approximately 50–60% of the risk for alcohol dependence. However, which genes confer this risk remains to elucidate. Moreover, genetic association studies are hampered by non-replication. Several strategies can be applied to approach this issue. One option is the application of intermediate phenotypes. Neurobiological measures that are closely related to the addiction phenotype may be more directly related to genetic variation. Intermediate phenotypes related to dopamine function seem particularly suitable, given the strong dopamine hypothesis in addiction. Another strategy is to include environmental factors, such as childhood adverse experience, in genetic association studies. We tested the effect of COMT Val158Met and DRD2 Taq1A genotypes, as modulators of brain dopamine function in the context of self-reported environmental factors, like childhood adverse experience.MethodsAlcohol-dependent patients (n = 110) and healthy controls (n = 99) were genotyped for the COMT Val158Met and DRD2 Taq1A genotypes. Childhood adversity was measured using self-report questionnaires. Dopamine sensitivity was assessed using an apomorphine challenge with cognitive performance and plasma growth hormone levels as main outcome measures.ResultsCOMT genotype modulated the effect of apomorphine on cognitive performance, but was not directly associated with alcohol dependence. Yet, the interaction between childhood adversity and COMT genotype did predict alcohol dependence. DRD2 genotype modulated the effect of apomorphine on plasma growth hormone levels and was also not directly associated with alcohol dependence. Yet, the interaction between parental rule setting and DRD2 genotype did predict alcohol use in a separate population-based sample of adolescents.ConclusionThis study provides evidence for a role of COMT and DRD2 genotypes in alcohol dependence using both the GxE and intermediate phenotype approach. This confirms that both an intermediate phenotype approach and GxE interaction analyses can be useful tools in understanding mechanisms mediating addiction vulnerability. The clinical relevance of dopamine genes and intermediate phenotypes for staging and profiling of alcohol use disorders remains to be investigated.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.
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D’Agostino, A., A. Aportone, M. Rossi Monti, and V. Starcevic. "The Situational Dysphoria Scale (SITDS): Development and Validation of a Self-report Questionnaire for Assessing Situational Dysphoria in Borderline Patients." European Psychiatry 41, S1 (April 2017): S256. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.02.053.

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IntroductionAccording to contemporary phenomenological literature, dysphoria is the background mood characterizing patients with borderline personality disorders (BPD). In particular circumstances, it can take the form of a state of pressure, urge to act, and quasi-explosion, which is very dependent on situational triggers. There are currently no instruments able to measure this situational form of dysphoria.ObjectivesTo develop and analyze psychometric properties of the Situational Dysphoria Scale (SITDS), a self-report questionnaire that measures situational dysphoria.AimsTo validate the SITDS for a future use in routine clinical practice and, more generally, to assess different forms of dysphoria in BPD in a more precise way.MethodsThe preliminary 58-item SITDS was administered to 105 BPD patients, along with other conceptually similar (Nepean Dysphoria Scale) and conceptually distinct (Cynical Distrust Scale, Inventory of Interpersonal Problems-47, empathy quotient, and borderline personality severity Index-IV) instruments. The psychometric characteristics (reliability, internal structure, convergent and divergent validity) of the SITDS were then examined.ResultsThe final 24-item SITDS (with each item rated on three subscales: internal pressure, urge to act, and quasi-explosion) demonstrated excellent internal consistency (alpha = .91). A three-cluster solution was found, with clusters pertaining to personal events, interpersonal events, and environmental events. There were medium to strong correlations with NDS, and weaker but still significant correlations with CynDis, IIP-47, EQ, and BPDSI-IV.ConclusionsThe SITDS is a useful and easy-to-handle instrument for measuring situational dysphoria. Further research in clinical samples is needed.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Di Giacomo, E., and M. Clerici. "Intergenerational transmission of antisocial personality disorder: Maternal role and its declination." European Psychiatry 41, S1 (April 2017): S586. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.01.887.

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Antisocial personality disorder is a well-established disease which features space from cruelty to lack of empathy and remorse. Its etiology has been deeply analyzed both for genetic and environmental implications. The role of family context has been underlined throughout the whole psychopathology as an explanation to the etiological conflict between nature and nurture. Even if this conflict seems to be apparently solved, it is still possible to ponder about family implications in terms of causes and consequences. In the antisocial field, maternal role may offer interesting and surprising food for thought. Even if it is commonly believed an intergenerational transmission of aberrant behaviors, particularly in terms of learning behaviors and lack of empathy assimilation, it exists a side part of maternal pathological expression that may play a role in the intergenerational transmission and it is extremely difficult to be detected. Female declination of this disorder may be expressed also through somatic implications and complaints, leading to the hypothesis of a self-reflection of the lack of consideration for other's needs, which is distinctive. It is of extreme importance, particularly in terms of prevention, to consider and identify these connotations of the disorder to be able to try to interrupt the cycle of transmission through generations.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Ando, Mizuho, Toshinobu Takeda, and Keiko Kumagai. "A Qualitative Study of Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Lives in Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder in Japan." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 4 (February 21, 2021): 2090. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18042090.

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(1) Background: COVID-19 may deteriorate some aspects among individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Although some positive aspects were reported during the pandemic, it remains unclear how COVID-19 qualitatively influences their living context; (2) Methods: this study employed interviews with four participants with ADHD during the declaration of emergency issued in Japan. The study was a part of ongoing coaching as a psychosocial intervention for ADHD, which was initiated long before the pandemic. The data were the answers to the question: “how are things going with participants during this pandemic?”. In a qualitative analysis, the researchers coded the data to identify different themes and sub-themes; (3) Results and Discussion: the qualitative data analysis yielded five themes: (1) Terrible feeling caused by frustration, stress, and anger; (2) Closeness due to the internal difficulties and conflict; (3) Deteriorating ADHD symptoms and executive function related matters; (4) Condition is the same as usual; and (5) Positive aspects associated with the self-lockdown. As a whole, these results show that the COVID-19 pandemic could be a factor in inducing psychological distress in the participants who adjust relatively better at work/school but did not do well at home before the pandemic; (4) Conclusions: this study indicates the need for special support for individuals with ADHD, especially those who originally had difficulties at home.
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Myin-Germeys, I., and G. Merge. "Sex differences in emotional reactivity to daily life stress in psychosis." European Psychiatry 33, S1 (March 2016): S46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.904.

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BackgroundA recent study did not find clear-cut sex differences in psychotic symptoms. Studies investigating altered stress reactivity more consistently report differences between the sexes, although the results are contradicting in suggesting either men or women to be more stress-sensitive. We assessed self-reported experiences in the context of real-life to more fully understand the nature of sex differences in psychosis.MethodsWe employed the Experience Sampling Method, a structured diary technique, to investigate in real-life:– symptoms;– behavior in context;– underlying mechanisms in 283 healthy controls, 268 subjects at risk for psychosis and 232 patients with psychotic disorder.ResultsMultilevel regression analyses revealed no differences in symptom expression between the sexes. Similarly, men and women did not differ in their level of social interaction and overall activity. However, men at increased risk of psychosis were more often alone and were less involved in goal-directed activities compared to women. Finally, women reported more emotional reactivity to daily life stress then men but women also reported more positive affect when pleasant events had happened.DiscussionThe data thus suggest only minor differences between men and women in psychotic symptoms and actual behavior. However, whenever differences were apparent, they consistently pointed towards more severe symptoms and more deficiencies in men compared to women. In contrast, increased environmental reactivity in women (to both negative and positive environments) in addition to more social contacts may constitute a protective factor for the development of more severe psychopathology.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Vaccaro, A., M. J. Brito Broche, M. I. Capote, C. B. Borrego Calzadilla, and C. Mencacci. "Residential facilities project in Cuba: An original working model." European Psychiatry 41, S1 (April 2017): S519. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.01.686.

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Psychiatry must have among its main aims to reintegrate in their own environment of life people with psychotic disorders, personality disorders and other serious disorder of the psychic sphere. We must be able to operate in places built ad hoc, that is, where time, space and procedures are marked with certainty and, as much as possible, managed firsthand. The environment must be constructed or modified in such a way as to make it unlikely the failure or discomfort. Patients also need to be strengthened in their ability to integrate in their environment and in the ability to cope with various life events. The goal is to transfer a first group of patients from large psychiatric hospital of La Habana to the territory, specifically in 2–3 already identified communities, to realize the rehabilitation projects that in 3–4 years can bring patients selected at their home or, alternatively, at self-managed apartments. The reference model of rehabilitative interventions is multimodal. The model explains the onset, course, prognosis and social functioning of the major mental disorders as a complex and mutually conditioning relation between biological, environmental and behavioural. The results will be evaluated over the next three years and will be the subject of future publications. A good practice cannot disengage from safe theoretical and methodological references. To show clearly and verifiably their work, operators must be trained before and during all phases of work, a job training, continuing education, which has as its primary objective the descriptive clarity and verifiability of results.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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del Río-Casanova, Lucía, Milagrosa Sánchez-Martín, Ana García-Dantas, Anabel González-Vázquez, and Ania Justo. "Psychological Responses According to Gender during the Early Stage of COVID-19 in Spain." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 7 (April 2, 2021): 3731. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18073731.

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Background: Current research has pointed out an increased risk of mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic in women compared to men, however the reason for this difference remains unclear. The aim of this research is to study early psychological responses to the pandemic in the Spanish general population, focusing on gender differences. Methods: Nine to 14 days after the declaration of a state of emergency an online survey was conducted assessing sociodemographic, health, behavioral and COVID-19-related variables. Mental health status was evaluated by the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21), the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), and the Self-Care Scale (SCS). Results: The study included 3520 respondents: 2611 women and 909 men. Women scored significantly higher in DASS-21 and IES-R (p < 0.05) and were more likely to somatize, suffer from hypochondriasis, sleeping disturbances and claustrophobia (p < 0.05). Being a woman can be considered a risk factor for intrusive thoughts, avoidance mechanisms, stress and anxiety (Odd Ratio = 2.7/2.3/2.3/1.6). The risk of presenting posttraumatic symptoms and emotional distress was greater in women (Odd Ratio = 6.77/4.59). General linear models to predict IES-R and DASS-21 scores clarified which variables were gender specific, such as main concerns. Conclusions: This study provides evidence that at early stages of the pandemic, women mental health was more impacted and that both genders show different concerns. Gender perspective in secondary and tertiary prevention strategies must be taken into account when facing the distress associated with the pandemic.
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Erkoreka, L., M. I. Macías, A. Arrue, N. Basterreche, A. Arnaiz, E. Gordo, O. Olivas, et al. "Correlation between attachment and personality dimensions and their association to the catechol-O-methyltransferase Val158Met polimorphism." European Psychiatry 33, S1 (March 2016): S91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.055.

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IntroductionBoth attachment style and personality traits are closely related to individual's interpersonal patterns. Association between these constructs has been widely studied, but variability in results makes it difficult to reach definite conclusions. Similarly, dopaminergic pathways are considered to underlie some personality traits and to be related to attachment styles, but evidence, hitherto, remain inconclusive.AimsTo assess the correlation between personality and attachment dimensions and to study whether a common association to the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val158Met polymorphism exists.MethodsOne hundred and three Caucasian controls (mean age 39.6 ± 6.4; 65% women) were recruited in the province of Biscay, Spain. DAPP-BQ and ECR-Spanish scales were administered to assess personality and attachment dimensions respectively. DNA was obtained from saliva and the COMT Val158Met polymorphism was determined. Pearson's correlation coefficient and ANOVA were calculated using R statistical software.ResultsHigh positive correlation is observed between inhibition personality dimension and attachment avoidance (r = 0.75). Besides, both inhibition and avoidance dimensions’ scores are significantly higher in the COMT ValMet genotype than in the other genotypes. MetMet: 63.1 ± 13.6; ValMet: 71.0 ± 13.9; ValVal: 63.0 ± 16.7 (ANOVA F = 3.75, P = 0.027) for inhibition and MetMet: 3.44 ± 0.17; ValMet: 3.82 ± 0.2; ValVal: 3.33 ± 0.23 (ANOVA F = 3.83, P = 0.025) for avoidance.ConclusionsAttachment patterns are rooted in early interactions with parental figures, and according to our results they could be linked to self-perceived personality traits in adulthood. Our study also suggests that genetics may predispose individuals to certain interaction styles. Our findings, linking ValMet individuals to avoidant attachment, are similar to Luijk's (2011) results, and would support a genetic-environmental model of both attachment and personality.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Hastings, Gerard. "Remembering who owns the river." Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 46, no. 22_suppl (June 2018): 5–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1403494818765688.

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We have discovered the elixir of life. For the first time in human existence we now know how we can avoid disease, make our lives healthier and more fulfilled, and even fend off the grim reaper himself (at least for a while). We may not have joined the immortals – many traps and snares continue to prey on us – but we are beginning to learn some of their secrets. Why then are we failing to grasp these heady opportunities? WHO data show that nine out of ten of we Europeans are dying of lifestyle diseases; that is diseases caused by our own choices – self-inflicted diseases. Despite the all too familiar consequences for our bodies, we continue to smoke the tobacco, swallow the junk food and binge on the alcohol that is killing us. Yes, there are systemic drivers at work – commercial marketing, corporate power, inequalities, addiction – but we don’t have to collaborate. No one holds a gun to our heads and commands us to eat burgers or get drunk and incapable. This paper argues that public health progress – and human progress more widely – depends on us solving the conundrum of this self-inflicted harm. The urgency of this task increases when we consider our irresponsible consumption behaviour more widely, and that it is not just harming our own health but everyone else’s too. Most egregiously anthropomorphic climate change is being caused by the free choices we in the wealthy global north make to drive SUVs, go on intercontinental holidays and accumulate a foolish excess of stuff. It need not be so. Historical experience and two millennia of thinking show we are capable of better. We have moral agency and we can make the right choice even when it is the difficult one. Indeed, it is this capacity and desire ‘ to follow after wisdom and virtue’, to rebel against injustice and malignancy, that makes us human and cements our collective identity. In the last century this realisation was focused by the terrible events of the Second World War and resulted in the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Importantly these rights do not just protect us from oppression but enshrine in international law our entitlement to be an active participant in the process of progressive social change.
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Rossi, Carla, and Francesca Rivetti. "Assessing Young Consumers’ Responses to Sustainable Labels: Insights from a Factorial Experiment in Italy." Sustainability 12, no. 23 (December 3, 2020): 10115. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su122310115.

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This study provides insights into young consumers’ responses to sustainable labels. Drawing on signaling theory, the article studies how third-party labels (TPLs) act and interact with company-level claims, trying to better understand their impact on young consumers’ perceptions and willingness to buy (pay for) a chocolate bar. A between-subjects factorial experiment—conducted by manipulating third-party sustainable labels (presence/absence of the labels) and self-declared claims (absence of the claim, formal claim, and friendly claim)—was used to test: (a) the effect of TPLs and self-declared claims on consumers’ perceptions, purchase intention, and willingness to pay, (b) whether this effect was mediated through the perceived credibility of the sustainability message, and (c) what kind of tone-of-voice adopted in the company’s claim was more effective. Data were collected via an online survey among a sample of 315 consumers (age range: 18–39 years) in South Italy. We found that third-party labels, “alone” were not effective in influencing consumers’ perceptions and willingness to buy/pay, while a self-declared claim, especially if characterized by a formal tone of voice, had a much more relevant impact. The combination of TPLs and self-declaration affected most consumers’ willingness to pay when the copy claim was informal. The perceived credibility of the sustainability message mediated the relationships between self-declared claims and the majority of the dependent variables, while, with reference to the relationship between TPLs and dependent variables, it did not act as a mediator.
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Cabezas Sánchez, D., A. Ramírez Macías, and J. Sáiz Galdós. "Impact on personal growth and environment conservation self-perception in a volunteering program with adults with severe mental illness (SMI)." European Psychiatry 33, S1 (March 2016): s280—s281. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.752.

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Introduction“Viaje del Parnaso” is a volunteering project developed at the Day Center Aranjuez2 (CD2) for helping adults with SMI to get a satisfactory and responsible occupation through their implication in a volunteering work in the community, while involved in the maintenance of a green area in the city of Aranjuez.Objectives/aimsThe aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of the project on the volunteers’ lives in terms of personal growth and environment conservation and compare its results with non-volunteers also attended at the CD2.MethodsThe project was carried once a week during 45 weeks. 11 volunteers participated on the project, plus 5 non-volunteers were considered as cuasi-control group. The instruments applied were an item on “environment conservation” and 2 subscale items of “Personal Growth” from the Ryff Scales of psychological well-being. Measures were applied at baseline, 6 and 12 months after.ResultsSignificant differences were found on the environment conservation item between volunteers at baseline and 6 months after (P < 0.05). Results also revealed a significant difference (P < 0.05) between volunteers and non-volunteers at both variables (“environment conservation” and “Personal Growth”) in baseline and 6 months after treatment.ConclusionsThe data from this study suggest that a volunteering program seems to be an effective intervention for bringing about improvements in well-being of people with SMI, and also for increasing their environmental awareness. These improvements may also help to change the stigma of SMI reinforcing mental health patient's contributions to society.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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Богдан Миколайович Головкін. "Current and future criminology." Problems of Legality, no. 149 (June 10, 2020): 168–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.21564/2414-990x.149.200724.

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The article is devoted to the research of the current state of criminological science and to determine the prospects for its development in the future. The achievements of the national criminology are reviewed, the integration of knowledge about crime and combating it is emphasized, and the coherence and synergy of scientific concepts, the introduction of a systematic method of knowledge of crime and the development of measures of preventive influence on its causes and conditions are substantiated. Criminology examines crime, its causes, criminals and victims of crime, prevention measures. Crime is a kind of objectively dangerous behavior that poses a threat to the individual, the state, business and society. Nowadays, the newest types of objectively dangerous behavior are most often encountered in cyberspace, in the sphere of electronic money circulation, use of artificial intelligence, provision of services, use of natural and labor resources. As an open social system, crime interacts externally with similar phenomena and processes, constantly changing under their influence and spreading in space and time. In addition, being an integral part of social life, crime has the property of self-reproduction and development, linked to the development of society, of changing the living conditions of people.It is concluded that the guidelines for the further development of criminology will be the international goals of global human development set out in the Millennium Declaration UN 2015 year and The Agenda of Sustainable Development by 2030 year.It is considered, key problems for criminological research by 2030 will be survival of people in the fierce struggle for access to economic and natural resources; counteracting various forms and manifestations of violence and other violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms; ensuring personal and collective security in the system of social interaction; environmental protection; the use of information technology for criminal purposes; counteracting transnational crime and terrorism; drug crime and arms trafficking, etc. In addition, the scientific potential of criminological institutions will be directed to the development of tools and tools to reduce the impact on crime and the social life of such negative social phenomena as poverty, social injustice and inequality, abuse of power, abuse of power by both the authorities and the general population.There is no doubt that, now and in the future, the development of crime will depend on social being, collective thinking and people behavior. In the workings of philosophers, political scientists and sociologists, the state of modern society is characterized by insane dynamism and instability, an increase in entropy, an increase in actual and potential risks, which is difficult to recognize and predict. This means that the existing concepts of explanation for the causes of crime will soon prove to be inoperative, as they were created in the last century on the basis of materialistic dialectics, linear thinking, contemporary ideas about the world of people, a hierarchy of values, rules and norms of people behavior in a stable society.In the long term, applied criminology will evolve by implementing the results of the fourth industrial revolution, in particular Big Data and Analytics, Simulation, Horizontal and Vertical system Integration, Piece Intellect, artificial neural networks.A breakthrough in the development of applied criminology will be made by artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology. The use of innovative developments will ensure quick and correct management decisions, will form public opinion, influence the views and moods of a large number of people, correct the negative elements of public consciousness, quickly communicate to the general public the provisions of the current legislation and monitor its compliance. Among other things, digital technologies make it possible to build a system of total control and a mechanism for managing people's behavior in society. Soon by means of artificial intelligence, as well as genetic engineering, it will be possible to diagnose mental disorders, a tendency to misbehavior and criminal behavior, to classify people by degree of trustworthiness, to correct human psychophysiological defects, as well as to negative character traits that influence the choice of wrongdoing. and interests.Conclusions. On the basis of the above, I believe that in the future the value of criminology in solving human problems will increase, and the scope of the results of criminological research - will expand. On the basis of criminology will be a synthesis of industry knowledge about crime, forms and methods of combating it. New tools and instruments will be elaborated to prevent crime, as well as to protect people and property from criminal assault.
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Tur-Porcar, Ana M., Noemí Cuartero-Monteagudo, and Julio Fernández-Garrido. "Learning Environments in Health and Medical Studies: The Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence." Sustainability 11, no. 15 (July 24, 2019): 4011. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su11154011.

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The conventional approach to sustainability is being extended through approaches such as the psychology of sustainability and sustainable development. Under such approaches, the analysis of sustainability also involves understanding improvements in people’s quality of life in environments such as education and learning. Based on this theoretical approach, this study explored the relationships between anxiety, emotional intelligence, and mechanisms for coping with stressful situations. The mediating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between anxiety and coping mechanisms was also assessed. The anxiety, emotional intelligence, and coping variables were measured using standardized tests administered to students. This cross-sectional study was based on self-reports by health students at universities in Valencia (Spain). The study conformed to the ethical standards established by the Declaration of Helsinki. In total, 434 students participated in the study. The students were aged between 17 and 54 years (M = 21; SD = 0.320). From the perspective of the psychology of sustainability, the results indicate that avoidance coping strategies are positively related to anxiety and are negatively related to emotional intelligence. However, the results also show that approach coping strategies are positively related to emotional intelligence. In addition, the analysis shows the mediating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between anxiety and coping. This study shows the need to encourage the sustainable development of emotional intelligence among health professionals and to consider this sustainable development when designing education programs for health-related fields.
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Chiasson, R., I. Aboulhouda, G. Roy, A. Boucher, M.-P. Gagnon, S. Boutin, B. Kankindi, and M. Ouellet. "E-health, community housing and nursing interprofessional clinic for equity." European Journal of Public Health 30, Supplement_5 (September 1, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckaa166.025.

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Abstract Problem From a focus on transmittable diseases, attention to prevention and promotion has become a priority since 2011. Influenced by the Political Declaration of the High-level Meeting on the Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases and The Rio Declaration on Social Determinants of Health, many countries across the world have identified targets aiming at chronic diseases prevention, preventable death and reduced morbidity. Individual behavior changes remain a challenge for health practitioners. Shanghai Declaration suggests that health literacy is a critical determinant for healthy choices and decisions. Description A healthy living program has been developed and offered in partnership between local public health and university Laval. We present the case of the community housing Mimosa du Quartier and its preventative nursing clinic. Eight-week Preventative circles and e-prevention interventions from kinesiologist, nutritionist and nurses are explored. IPads were provided to families and we used REACT technology. Results Discussion on e-health relevance, feasibility and impact is proposed. Program description, personalised action plan using SMART goals, health literacy and prevention gains are revealed. Relevance, feasibility and perceived impact are discussed. Learning about the user's experience, we can improve the telehealth program in support of continuity of care within the homes of families. This strategy is key to self-management and empowerment Lessons. Health promotion with e-prevention is strategic for sustainable family health. Combining strategies can improve outcomes. This pilot research shows promising results and practical considerations are given to the importance of the relational and alliance aspect of the care relationship even through technology use, to digital literacy capabilities, to family's motivation and engagement and finally to the advantages provided by the technology use. Key messages E-health prevention is an innovative avenue to fight chronic disease. Increased engagement in self-management leads to equity and less adverse outcomes for vulnerable families.
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DePuy, Walker, Jacob Weger, Katie Foster, Anya M. Bonanno, Suneel Kumar, Kristen Lear, Raul Basilio, and Laura German. "Environmental governance: Broadening ontological spaces for a more livable world." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, May 24, 2021, 251484862110185. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/25148486211018565.

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This paper contributes to global debates on environmental governance by drawing on recent ontological scholarship to ask: What would it mean to ontologically engage the concept of environmental governance? By examining the ontological underpinnings of three environmental governance domains (land, water, biodiversity), we find that dominant contemporary environmental governance concepts and policy instruments are grounded in a modernist ontology which actively shapes the world, making certain aspects and relationships visible while invisibilizing others. We then survey ethnographic and other literature to highlight how such categories and their relations have been conceived otherwise and the implications of breaking out of a modernist ontology for environmental governance. Lastly, we argue that answering our opening question requires confronting the coloniality woven into the environmental governance project and consider how to instead embrace ontological pluralism in practice. In particular, we examine what taking seriously the right to self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) could mean for acknowledging Indigenous ontologies as systems of governance in their own right; what challenges and opportunities exist for recognizing and translating ontologies across socio-legal regimes; and how embracing the dynamism and hybridity of ontologies might complicate or advance struggles for material and cognitive justice.
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Magnusson, M., C. Bertolino, M. Hallmyr, R. Landmér, and J. Neselrot. "Public Health and Communication: closing the health gap depending on each other." European Journal of Public Health 29, Supplement_4 (November 1, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckz186.010.

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Abstract Issue At the center of the concept “Health” is self efficacy. Communication has potential to increase or decrease individuals/groups conception of themselves as valuable beings. In communities haunted by territorial stigmatization this aspect is crucial. Respectful communication, building on a true belief that competencies and resources dwell in every human being, evoke trust which is an important aspect of public health. Angered Hospital is situated in an area with high prevalence of illness. To allow for residents to exert influence over interventions and programs, the Public Health Unit of the hospital need access to skills not only in the area of public health but also in communication design. Description of the problem The aim was to develop a trusting cooperation between the Public Health and Communication Units in a hospital, building on adherence to the Declaration on Human Rights and on expert knowledge. Focus is on increased health equity. Given barriers of spoken language and different perspectives, how can we set the scene for merging lay and expert knowledge on conditions for healthy habits and prerequisites for change, on individual and structural levels? How can residents be encouraged to seek help when needed? During two years, collaboration developed by intertwining theory and practice in continous discussions on planned and produced objects. Knowledge in communication design and in determinants of health equity, respectively, enriched both parties. Changes A trusting relationship developed, resulting in the objects “Heroes of Awngaryd”. The Heroes appear in many contexts; transfering knowledge, encouraging residents to use their competencies, inviting them to participate, and guiding to adequate care. Lessons Sharing of the vision of health equity, active embracing of the Declaration of Human Rights and mutual respect for each others expert knowledge form the base for a successful and transparent cooperation between Public Health and Communication. Key messages In this setting, expert knowledge in both communication design and public health are needed to contribute to increased health equity. Common values, trust and specific skills optimize the work.
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Lavoie, Josée G., Jon Petter Stoor, Elizabeth Rink, Katie Cueva, Elena Gladun, Christina Viskum Lytken Larsen, Gwen Healey Akearok, and Nicole Kanayurak. "Historical foundations and contemporary expressions of a right to health care in Circumpolar Indigenous contexts." Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 9, no. 1 (2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2019.00079.

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Although numerous comparative Indigenous health policy analyses exist in the literature, to date, little attention has been paid to comparative analyses of Circumpolar health policy and the impact these policies may have on Indigenous peoples’ rights to health. In this article, we ground our discussion of Indigenous peoples’ right to access culturally appropriate and responsive health care within the context of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Under UNDRIP, signatory states are obligated to guarantee that Indigenous peoples have access to the same services accessible to all citizens without discrimination. Signatory states must also guarantee access to services that are grounded in Indigenous cultures, medicines, and practices and must address Indigenous peoples’ determinants of health at least to the same extent as their national counterparts. Our analysis finds that the implementation of this declaration varies across the Circumpolar north. The United States recognizes an obligation to provide health care for American Indian and Alaska Native people in exchange for the land that was taken from them. Other countries provide Indigenous citizens access to care in the same health care systems as other citizens. Intercultural models of care exist in Alaska and to some extent across the Canadian territories. However, aside from Sámi Norwegian National Advisory Unit on Mental Health and Substance Use in northern Norway, intercultural models are absent in Nordic countries and in Greenland. While Russia has not ratified UNDRIP, Russian policy guarantees access to health care to all citizens, although access is particularly limited in rural and remote environments, including the Russian Arctic. We conclude that Circumpolar nations should begin and/or expand commitments to culturally appropriate, self-determined, access to health care in Circumpolar contexts to reduce health inequities and adhere to obligations outlined in UNDRIP.
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Galiatsatos, Panagis, Alexandria Soybel, Mandeep Jassal, Sergio Axel Perez Cruz, Caroline Spartin, Katie Shaw, Jodi Cunningham, and Norma Fox Kanarek. "Tobacco treatment clinics in urban public housing: feasibility and outcomes of a hands-on tobacco dependence service in the community." BMC Public Health 21, no. 1 (August 5, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-11561-7.

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Abstract Background As a further extension of smoke-free laws in indoor public places and workplaces, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s declaration to propose a regulation that would make housing units smoke-free was inevitable. Of note is the challenge this regulation poses to current tenants of housing units who are active smokers. We aimed to assess the efficacy of a tobacco treatment clinic in public housing. The utilization of the clinic by tenants and tenants’ respective outcomes regarding smoking status were used to determine the intervention’s effectiveness. Methods Tobacco treatment clinics were held in two urban-based housing units for 1-year. The clinics provided on-site motivational interviewing and prescriptions for pharmacological agents if warranted. Outcomes collected include the tenants’ clinic attendance and 3- and 6-month self-reported smoking status. Results Twenty-nine tobacco treatment clinic sessions were implemented, recruiting 47 tenants to participate in smoking cessation. The mean age of the cohort was 53 ± 12.3 years old. Of the 47 tenants who participated, 21 (44.7%) attended three or more clinic sessions. At the 3-month mark, five (10.6%) tenants were identified to have quit smoking; at 6-months, 13 (27.7%) tenants had quit smoking. All 13 of the tenants who quit smoking at the end of 6-months attended three or more sessions. Conclusion An on-site tobacco treatment clinic to provide strategies on smoking cessation was feasible. Efforts are warranted to ensure more frequent follow-ups for tenants aiming to quit smoking. While further resources should be allocated to help tenants comply with smoke-free housing units’ regulations, we believe an on-site tobacco treatment clinic is impactful.
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Waller, M., L. Lissner, D. Hange, V. Sundh, A. Blomstrand, and C. Björkelund. "Well-being and mental stress in the population study of women in Gothenburg, Sweden: cohort comparisons from 1980 to 2016 of 36-year trends and socioeconomic disparities in 38-and 50-year old women." BMC Public Health 21, no. 1 (May 17, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10937-z.

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Abstract Background Women’s lives have dramatically changed in recent decades as evidenced by trends in educational attainment, employment outside the home, income, and other socioeconomic factors. Self-reported health in 18–70 year old women has been reported to be significantly lower than in men. In Sweden, the 2005 National Public Health Report showed that stressful work environments have become more common, especially for women. The purpose of the study was to monitor trends in well-being and perceived mental stress in the populations of 38- and 50-year-old women and to examine associations with socioeconomic position (SEP). Subjects In 1980, 2004, and 2017, population-based samples of 38- and 50-year old women were recruited into the Prospective Population Study of Women in Gothenburg (PPSWG), Sweden. This population-based study included participants from selected birth cohorts to participate in health examinations, at similar ages and with similar protocols on each occasion. Methods Birth cohort comparisons between three representative samples of 38- and 50-year-old women. Well-being (scale 1–7) and perceived mental stress (scale 1–6) based on questionnaires were the main outcomes studied in relation to time. Socioeconomic position (SEP) based on socio-occupational group, i.e. occupational and educational level combined, were examined as correlates of well-being and mental stress at different points in time. Results Perception of good well-being increased in generations of 50-year-old women between 1980 to 2016, but no significant time trends were seen in 38-year-old women. Perception of high mental stress increased between 1980 and 2016, for both 38-and 50-year-old women. Belonging to a low socio-occupational group was associated with lower perceived well-being in 1980 but not in 2016. Belonging to a low socio-occupational group was not associated with perceived mental stress at any examination. Conclusions Contemporary women of today have generally higher perceptions of well-being but also higher mental stress regardless of belonging to low or high socio-occupational group. Associations between poor well-being and belonging to a low socio-occupational group that were observed in 1980 and 2004 were not observed in 2016. The Prospective Population Study of Women in Gothenburg, Sweden was approved by the ethics committee of University of Gothenburg (Dnr 65–80; Ö564–03; 258–16). The studies comply with the Declaration of Helsinki and informed consent has been obtained from the subjects.
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Duncan-Horner, Erika Miyuri, Megan Anne Farrelly, and Briony C. Rogers. "Understanding the social entrepreneur: a new intentions model for advancing equity, social justice and sustainability." Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies ahead-of-print, ahead-of-print (June 22, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jeee-10-2020-0359.

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Purpose Social entrepreneurship (SE) is an emerging social phenomenon gaining tangible traction for its ability to tackle complex social and environmental problems against a backdrop of global sustainability challenges. This paper aims to unpack SE intentions, mindset and motivations to elucidate “why” and “how” social entrepreneurs (SE) initiate, perpetuate and sustain pro-social entrepreneurship activity. It specifically asks why SE do what they do, how they develop and sustain pro-social entrepreneurship action and how these normative drivers affect the social change process. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative research adopts an exploratory multiple case design approach in examining the tacit experience of eight SE tackling complex water, sanitation and environmental challenges in Indonesia, and combines this with scholarly insights from multiple bodies of knowledge. Case studies include six SE recognised by the Ashoka Foundation and two lesser-known “social enterprises” to enable finding patterns across the cases and compare key differences between pro-social and conventional entrepreneurship. Triangulating semi-structured interviews with secondary data analysis and semi-ethnographic fieldwork observations, this paper provides a rich theoretical and empirical basis to understand the emerging transformative potential of SE in tackling a range of sustainability issues. Findings Interviews with eight SE highlighted their intentions to advance inter and intra-generational equity, social justice and sustainability, bringing socially embedded empathetic values and a growth mindset to overcome challenges associated with disrupting existing social order. Direct engagement with the SE revealed 10 critical enabling factors to foster future SE potential, namely, individual background and experience, unmet social needs, empathy, sense of belonging, willingness/passion to alleviate other’s suffering, growth mindset, internal/external catalysts, intrinsic and extrinsic needs, beliefs and goals and declaration of a social mission to ensure consistency in behaviour and action. This demonstrates that while SE are motivated by a variety of self and other-oriented mechanisms, it is ultimately the process of developing empathy, a growth mindset and declaring a social mission that drives and sustains pro-social entrepreneurship action. Practical implications The output of this research is a new intentions model, which outlines the 5 phases of enterprise development and 10 critical enabling factors to foster future SE potential. These insights are critical to leveraging the emerging transformative potential of SE in tackling the world’s most urgent sustainability issues. Social implications The paper presents a deep analysis of data on individual background, experience and characteristics in developing a new SE intentions model. Originality/value The distinct focus on inputs over processes and outcomes answers to a highly elusive topic while offering an alternative approach to understand how SE create remarkably different strategies, processes and outcomes to conventional developmental approaches.
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37

"Facing Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic Situation in Pharmaceutical Companies: Challenges and Solutions." Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal, August 18, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.32592/ircmj.2021.23.8.776.

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The first report of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was presented in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, in December 2019 (1). COVID-19 is an infectious virus with a high level of spread. According to its fast pandemic condition in the world, it has been announced as an emergency of public health by the World Health Organization (WHO) related to its fast pandemic condition (1-3). Movements of population, communication among humans, and environmental factors cause the transfer of this virus. The most prevalent clinical symptoms include fever, cough, headache, muscle cramps, and fatigue (4). Different industries in different countries have faced many problems and even there were many days off in the world after the COVID-19 pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry, among all industries, has a unique and exclusive sensitivity according to the necessity in the production of pharmaceutical products. The pharmaceutical industry has been important since the past years as a complementary part of the primary process in the treatment of the patients that shows the significance of development in this industry. In the COVID-19 pandemic situation, pharmaceutical companies try to respond to the challenges in the supply chain, change the business process, and protect the health of the staff. If the epidemic of COVID-19 continues for a medium/long time, this will affect active supplies, necessary materials, and medication export/import. Moreover, it causes adverse effects on research and development (R&D) activities, production, and developmental projects related to improving the industry. Although the effect of global expansion has not been apparent yet, pharmaceutical companies should respond, improve, and develop. Therefore, during the COVID-19 pandemic situation, pharmaceutical companies should continue their activities and even develop it while facing many challenges. Moreover, it will help them detect the challenges and approaches of development in safety and health in pharmaceutical companies during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Challenges of pharmaceutical companies in the COVID-19 pandemic situation include: 1) Hiding or lack of reports in COVID-19 affection; 2) Lack of appropriate monitoring of distribution vehicles in the prevention of infection; 3) Continual contacts with documents and internal permissions of products leading to the lack of supervision of health principles; 4) Production in closed and limited space; 5) Continual production line and necessity of team working; 6) Commotion of the personnel with public transportation and lack of knowledge in family health; 7) The physical presence of staff in administrative positions (R&D, marketing, IT, and planning); 8) Serving food in the restaurant of the company (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack); 9) Closing of air conditioning system in departments; 10) Lack of correct extrusion of produced wastes; 11) Lack of the attention of personnel on their health; and 12) The entrance of infected products and raw materials to the COVID-19. Solutions in safety and health improvement of pharmaceutical company in facing COVID-19 pandemic include: 1) Disinfection of the external surface of the vehicles which contain materials and raw materials barrels at the entrance; 2) Use of electronic forms for documentation, product permissions, other production processes, quality control, and Health and Safety Executive ; 3) Use of distancing between the personnel with separator and fresh air injection into the rooms with building management system equipment; 4) Supply of mask and shield for all staff in sufficient number, and control of the use, extirpation, and protection of documents; 5) Use of masks with cartridge and N95 pad in administrative departments in exposure to chemical materials and changing them according to standard; 6) Assignment of the dedicated vehicles to the staff communication and their disinfection; 7) The necessity of using masks by the staff during transportation; 8) Provision of the opportunity for administrative staff to work from long distance; 9) Installation of the bags and buckets for sanitary wastes (mask, gloves, and tissue); 10) Disinfection of air conditioning system based on WHO rules; 11) Disinfection of all spaces and surfaces per hour or after use; 12) Installation of automatic disinfection equipment at the entrance of all buildings and busy places; 13) Introduction of COVID-19 as a job sickness to fast identification and self-declaration of the staff and elimination of transferring chain; 14) Assignment of subvention to treatment and leave of absence with salary for COVID-19 patients; 15) Psychological consultation and call contact with COVID-19 patients; 16) Online monitoring of the personnel and their families with an online questionnaire; 17) Transfer and management of waste by mechanizing systems and trained executive team with personal protection equipment; 18) Arrangement of all internal and external meetings online; 19) Presentation of all training courses in online classes (sky-room webinar); 20) Risk assessment in facing COVID-19 patients based on age, background illness, facing jobs, and a team of colleagues; 21) Non-public quarantine of the staff according to the importance of medicine production; 22) Specialization in COVID-19 tests for a suspicious person; 23) Distribution of self-protect equipment and disinfectants among the staff’s families; 24) Quarantine of suffering, suspicious people or those who were in contact with suffering patients; 25) Quarantine of the products in the warehouse to eliminate the transporting chain of the infected products. Conclusion The pharmaceutical stability of industry and permanent presence is an inseparable part of treatment teams in the world. Therefore, the necessity of continual observation of environmental health in pharmaceutical companies and the staff health could develop the efficiency, health protection of the personnel, and consumers in the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Controlling the challenges, as the next step, helps the presence of pharmaceutical companies in the current condition. Therefore, international, national, and local organizations should emphasize the revision of health and safety standards in the workplace. In addition, the self-declaration of industries and physical observation is necessary to conduct the suggested solutions for the personnel health as a staff in the health area.
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Pulé, Paul Mark. "Where Are All the Ecomasculinists in Mining?" M/C Journal 16, no. 2 (April 2, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.633.

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Explorations of the intersecting terrain between the resources (or mining) sector and gendered socialisation are gaining currency (Laplonge and Albury; Lahiri-Dutt). Some argue that mine workers and their families are particularly vulnerable to divorce, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, injury, violence and worksite conflict, mental health struggles, financial over-extension, isolation, and loss of familial and community connection (Ashby; Paddenburg 14). Others contradict anecdotal evidence to support these concerns (Clifford 58; BHP Billiton 11-5). Substantive research on the emotional cost of mining remains sparse and contested (Windsor 4). Of concern to some, however, is that mining companies may be placing pressure on employees to generate a profit (Brough 10), while failing to acknowledge the cost of “hypermasculinised” mechanisms of domination that characterise mining cultures (Laplonge, Roadshow). I refer to these characteristic mechanisms of domination throughout this paper as “malestream norms” (O’Brien 62). In this paper, I argue that mining cultures have become prime examples of unsustainable practices. They forfeit relationally and ecologically sensitive modes of production that would otherwise celebrate and indeed prioritise a holistic level of care for the Earth, mining cultures, work colleagues and the self. Here, the term “sustainable” refers to a broader spectrum of social, cultural, psychological and ecological needs of mine workers, mining culture, and the environment upon which mining profits depend. I posit that mining communities that tend to the psycho-social needs of mine workers beyond malestream norms are more likely to implement sustainable mining practices that are not only considerate of the broader needs of mine workers, not only profitable for mining companies, but care for the Earth as well. Granted, employee assistance mechanisms do include substantial support services (such as health and wellness programmes, on-site counselling and therapy, mining family support networks, shorter rosters, improved access to family contact from site, etc.). However, these support services—as they may be offered by individual mining companies—do not adequately address the broader psycho-social impact of mining on mine site communities, the relational integrity of mine workers with their families, or how mine workers are faring within themselves in light of the pressures that abound both on-swing and off (Lahiri-Dutt 201). Discussions of a “softer” approach to mining fail to critically analyse malestream norms (Laplonge, Roadshow). In other words, attempts to make mining more sustainable have at-best been superficial by, for example, seeking to increase numbers of women on-site but then “jamming” these new women into cultures of hypermasculinism in hopes that a “trickle-down affect” of softening mining communities of practice will ensue (Laplonge, "You Can't Rely"). A comprehensive approach to sustainable mining practices must begin with deeper psycho-social care for mine workers (both women and men), and shift mining culture towards environmental care as well—an approach to mining that reflects a holistic and integrated model for pursuing profitable company development that is more caring than is currently the norm throughout the corporate world (Anderson). To accomplish this, we must specifically challenge malestream norms as they manifest in mining (Laplonge, Roadshow). In response, I introduce ecological masculinism as a relational approach to softening the malestream norms that pervade mining. To begin, it is recognised that mining masculinities—like all practices of masculinity—are pluralised social constructions that are not fixed but learned (Connell). Ecological masculinism is explored as a path towards fresh systemic practices that can steer men in mining towards masculine identities that are relationally attuned, emotionally articulate, and environmentally aware. It is argued that the approach to mining masculinities introduced here can help the resources sector become more sustainable for men, more conducive to greater numbers of women, more profitable for mining companies over longer periods of time, and gentler on the Earth. Where Are All the Ecomasculinists in Mining? Ecology as a science of relationships can serve as a guide towards the order that emerges among complex systems such as those that pervade mining (Capra). I suggest that Ecology can assist us to better understand and redefine the intricacies of gender dynamics in mining. It would be easy to presume that Ecology is oppositional to mining. I argue that to the contrary, the relational focus of Ecology has much to teach us about how we might reconfigure malestream norms to make it possible for mining cultures to demonstrate deeper care for others and the self at work and at home. An ecological analysis of malestream norms (and their impacts on Earth, community, others and the self) is not new. Richard Twine initiated some of the earliest explorations of the intersecting terrain between men, masculinities and the Earth. This discourse on the need for an “ecologisation” of masculinities grew out of the “broad church” of ecological feminism that explored so called Logics of Dualism that malestream norms construct and maintain (Plumwood 55-59). For more than 40 years, ecological feminism has served as a specialised discourse interrogating the mutual oppression of women and Nature by the male-dominated world. In his contribution to the Essex Ecofem Listerv, Twine posted the following provocative statement: Where are all the ecomasculinists? … there does not seem to be any literature on how the environmental and feminist movements together form a strong critique of the dominant Western masculine tradition. Does anyone know of any critical examinations … of this position, particularly one that addresses masculinity rather than patriarchy? (Twine et al. 1) Twine highlighted the need for a new discourse about men and masculinities that built on the term “ecomasculinity.” This term was originally coined by Shepherd Bliss in his seminal paper Revisioning Masculinity: A Report on the Growing Men's Movement (1987). I suggest that this intersecting terrain between Ecology and masculinities can guide us beyond the constraints of malestream norms that are entrenched in mining and offer us alternatives to mining cultural practices that oppress women and men as well as the environment upon which mining depends. However, these early investigations into the need for more nurturing masculinities were conceptual more so than practical and failed to take hold in scholarly discourses on gender or the pluralised praxes of modern masculinities. Coupled with this, the dominating aspects of malestream norms have continued to characterise mining cultures resulting in, for example, higher than average injury rates that are indicators of some negative consequences of a hypermasculinised workplace (Department of Health, WA 18; Laplonge, Roadshow). Further, the homophobic elements of malestream norms can give many men cause to hesitate seeking out emotional support if and where needed for fear of peer-group ridicule. These are some of the ways that men are subject to “men’s oppression” (Smith; Irwin et al.; Jackins; Whyte; Rohr), a term used here not to posit men as victims but rather as individuals who suffer as a result of their own internalised sense of superiority that drives them to behave inequitably towards other men, women and the Earth. Men’s Oppression Men’s oppression is a term used to illuminate the impact of malestream norms on men’s lives. Richard Rohr noted that: Part of our oppression as men ... is that we are taught to oppress others who have less status than we do. It creates a pecking order and a sense of superiority. We especially oppress racial minorities, homosexuals, the poor and women. (28) Men’s oppression is harmful to men, women and the ways that we mine the Earth. It is consequently of great importance that we explore the impacts of men’s oppression on mining masculinities with an emphasis on deconstructing the ways that it shapes and maintains malestream norms in mining culture. Men’s oppression pressures men to behave in ways that can constrain the spectrum of permissible behaviours that they adopt. Men’s oppression is ego-driven, based in comparing and competing against each other and pressure them to work tirelessly towards being better, higher, stronger, more virile, smarter, richer, more powerful, outwardly composed and more adored by others through status and material wealth often acquired at the expense of others and indeed the compromising of their own capacities to care for others and the self. These products of malestream norms validate an inner sense of feeling good about oneself at the expense of relational connection with others, including the Earth. As mentioned previously, malestream norms enable men to acquire socioeconomic and political advantages. But this has occurred at what has proven to be a terrible cost for all others as well as men themselves. Many men, especially those most strongly immersed in malestream norms, don’t even know that they are subject to this internalise superiority nor do they recognise it as an oppression that afflicts them at the same time and through the same mechanisms that assures their primacy in a world.. Notably, the symptoms of men’s oppression are not unique to mining. However, this form of oppression is intensely experienced by miners precisely because of the isolated and hypermasculine nature of minthat men (and increasing numbers of women) find themselves immersed in when on-site. Unfortunately, perceiving and then countering men’s oppression can undermine men’s primacy (Smith 51-52). As a consequence many men have little reason to want to take a stand against malestream norms that can come to dominate their lives at work and home. But to refuse to do so can erode their health and well-being and set them on a path of perpetration of oppressive thoughts, words and deeds towards others. Pathways to Ecological Masculinism The conceptual core of ecological masculinism is constructed on five precepts (that I refer to as the ADAMN model). These precepts help guide modern Western men towards greater care for others and the self in tangible ways (Pulé). Accompanying these precepts is the need for a plurality of caring behavioural possibilities for men to emerge. Men are encouraged to pursue inner congruency (aligning head with heart and intuition) as a pathway to their fuller humanness so that more integrated and mature masculinities can emerge. In this sense, ecological masculinism can be adapted to any work or home situation, providing a robust and versatile model that redresses gendered norms amongst mining men despite the diversity of individuals and resistances that might characterise some mining cultures. The ADAMN model draws on the vernacular encouragement for men to “give a damn” about all others and themselves. The five key instructions of masculine ecologisation are: A: Accept the central premise that you were born good and have an infinite capacity to care and be caring D: Don’t separate yourself from others; instead strengthen and rebuild your sense of connection with others and yourself A: Amend your own past hurts and any you have caused to others M: Model mature modern masculinity. Construct your masculine identity on caring thoughts, words and actions that nurture the relational space between yourself and others by seeking a life of service for the common good N: Normalise men’s care; support all men to show their care as central features of being a mature modern man Collectively, these key instructions of the ADAMN model are designed to raise men’s capacities to care for others and the self. They are aspects of ecological masculinism that are introduced to men through large group presentations, working with teams and at the level of one-on-one coaching in order to facilitate the recovering of the fuller human self that emerges through masculine ecologisation. This aspect of ecological masculinism offers tangible alternatives to malestream norms that dominate mining cultures by subverting the oppressive aspects of malestream norms in mining with more integrated levels of care for all others and the self. The ADAMN model is drawn as a nested diagram where each layer of this work forms the foundations of and is imbedded within the next, taking an individual man on a step-by-step journey that charts a course towards a heightened relational self and in so doing shifts the culture of masculinities within which he is immersed (see Figure 1). Trials of the ADAMN model over the past three years have applied ecological masculinism to groups of miners, at first in larger groups where hypermasculinised men can remain anonymous. From there masculine ecologisation drills down into the personal stories of individual men’s lives to uncover the sources of individual adherence to malestream norms—interrogating the pressures at play for them to have donned the “armour” that malestream norms demand of them. Stepping further towards the self, we then explore group and team dynamics for examples of hypermasculinism in the context of its benefits and costs to individual men’s lives in a support group type setting, and finally refine the transformational elements of this exploratory in one-on-one coaching of men across the spectrum from natural leaders to those in crises. At this final level of intensive personal reflection, an individual man is coached towards integrative alignment of his head, heart and intuition so that he can discover fresh perspectives for accessing his caring self. The project’s hope is that from this place of heightened “inner congruency” the ecologised man can more easily awaken and engage his care for others and himself not only as a man, but as an active and engaged citizen whose life of service to his employer, community, family, friends, and himself, becomes a central fixture of the ways he interacts with others at work and at home. Effectively, ecological masculinism reaches beyond the constraints of hypermasculinism as it commonly pervades mining by “peeling the onion” of malestream norms in a step-wise manner. It is hoped that, if the ADAMN model is successful, that the emerging “ecomen” become more sensitive to the needs, wants and intrinsic rights of others, develop rich emotional vocabularies, embrace the value of abstract thinking and a strong and engaged intuition concurrently, engage with others compassionately, educate themselves about their world at work and home, willingly assume leadership on the job, within their families and throughout their communities and grow proactively through the process. Such men embody a humanistic worldview towards all of life. They are flexible, responsive, and attentive to the value of others and themselves. Such is the ecoman I suggest might best benefit resource companies, mining cultures, mining families and miners.Figure 1 Conclusion Central to a more gender-aware future for men in mining is hope—hope that we will adapt to the challenges of mining culture swiftly by reaching beyond engineered solutions to the problems that many mine workers face; hope that our responses will be humanistic, creative and transgress malestream norms; hope that those responses are inclusive of softer and more caring approaches mining masculinities. This hope hinges on the willingness of resource companies to support such a shift in mining culture towards greater care for all others and the self. One path towards this fresh future for mining is through ecological masculinism as I have introduced it here. This new conversation for mining men and masculinities gives priority to the ending of men’s oppression for the benefit of individual mining men as well as all those with whom they share their lives at work and at home. In this paper, my intention has been to emphasise a more caring approach to mining. It is my earnest belief that through such work, mining will become more sustainable for men, women and the Earth. The ecologised mining man will have an important role to play in such a transformation.ReferencesAnderson, Ray. Our Sustainability Journey – Mission Zero. 2008. 29 April 2013 ‹http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Interface-Story.aspx›. Ashby, Nicole. The Need for FIFO Families. Personal Interview. 11 Dec 2012. BHP Billiton. Global Workplace, Unique Opportunities. 2013. 22 April 2013 ‹http://www.bhpbilliton.com/home/people/workplace/Pages/default.aspx› Bliss, Shepherd. “Revisioning Masculinity: A Report on the Growing Men's Movement.” In Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture Spring (1987): 21. [First Published in Yoga Journal (Nov./Dec. 1986).] Brough, Paula. “FIFO Work Hits Families Hardest.” The Morning Bulletin [Rockhampton, Queensland] 12 Apr. 2013: 10. Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Connell, Raewyn. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Clifford, Susan. The Effects of Fly-in/Fly-out Commute Arrangements and Extended Working Hours on the Stress, Lifestyle, Relationship and Health Characteristics of Western Australian Mining Employees and Their Partners (Research Report). School of Anatomy and Human Biology: University of Western Australia, 2009. Department of Health, WA. The Epidemiology of Injury in Western Australia, 2000-2008. Epidemiology Branch Public Health Division: Department of Health WA, 2011. Gent, Vanessa. "The Impact of Fly-In/Fly-Out Work on Well-Being and Work-Life Satisfaction." Honours thesis. School of Psychology: Murdoch University, 2004. Irwin, John, Harvey Jackins, and Charlie Kreiner. The Liberation of Men. Seattle: Rational Island Publishers, 2006. Jackins, Harvey. The Human Male: A Men's Liberation Draft Policy. Seattle: Rational Island Publishers, 1999. Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala. “Digging Women: Towards a New Agenda for Feminist Critiques of Mining.” Gender, Place and Culture 19.2 (2012): 193-212. Laplonge, Dean. Roadshow Report: Toughness in the Workplace. Department of Mines and Petroleum, 2011. ———. “You Can’t Rely on Women to Tame Men.” 2012. 3 May 2013 ‹http://www.factive.com.au/›. ———, and Kath Albury. “Practices of Gender in Mining.” AUSIMM (Feb. 2012): 80-84. News Limited. “Brutal Hours, Drug Issues and Family Pressures Force Miners to Abandon Industry in Droves, Inquiry Told.” The Sunday Times 14 Apr. 2012. O'Brien, Mary. The Politics of Reproduction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Paddenburg, Trevor. "Alcohol, Drugs, Poor Nutrition and a Dirt Floor: Life within Sight of the Boom Time." The Sunday Times [Perth, WA] 17 Mar. 2013: 14. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pulé, Paul. A Declaration of Caring: Towards Ecological Masculinism. Doctoral Dissertation. Murdoch University, 2013. Rohr, Richard. From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005 [1990]. Smith, M.S.W. “Men's Liberation: The Oppression of Masculine Instincts in Western Society.” Canadian Family Physician 18.3 (1972): 51-52. Slote, Michael. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. London: Routledge, 2007. Twine, Richard, et al. “Ecofem Listserv: Where Are All the Ecomasculinists?” The Essex Ecofem Listserv, 10-21 Nov. 1995. 12 Dec. 2010 ‹http://www.mail-archive.com/ecofem@csf.colorado.edu/msg00852.html›. Windsor, Tony. “Fly-In Fly-Out Needs an Overhaul: Windsor MP.” The Morning Bulletin [Rockhampton, Queensland] 26 Mar. 2013: 4. Whyte, Paul. Introduction: The Human Male. 1998. 7 July 2010 ‹http://www.peerleadership.com.au/MENDOCUM.NSF/504ca249c786e20f85256284006da7ab/2d899401b7ee3708ca2566d8007c2960!OpenDocument›.
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Simpson, Catherine. "Communicating Uncertainty about Climate Change: The Scientists’ Dilemma." M/C Journal 14, no. 1 (January 26, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.348.

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Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)We need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination … so we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts … each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest (Hulme 347). Acclaimed climate scientist, the late Stephen Schneider, made this comment in 1988. Later he regretted it and said that there are ways of using metaphors that can “convey both urgency and uncertainty” (Hulme 347). What Schneider encapsulates here is the great conundrum for those attempting to communicate climate change to the everyday public. How do scientists capture the public’s imagination and convey the desperation they feel about climate change, but do it ethically? If scientific findings are presented carefully, in boring technical jargon that few can understand, then they are unlikely to attract audiences or provide an impetus for behavioural change. “What can move someone to act?” asks communication theorists Susan Moser and Lisa Dilling (37). “If a red light blinks on in a cockpit” asks Donella Meadows, “should the pilot ignore it until in speaks in an unexcited tone? … Is there any way to say [it] sweetly? Patiently? If one did, would anyone pay attention?” (Moser and Dilling 37). In 2010 Tim Flannery was appointed Panasonic Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University. His main teaching role remains within the new science communication programme. One of the first things Flannery was emphatic about was acquainting students with Karl Popper and the origin of the scientific method. “There is no truth in science”, he proclaimed in his first lecture to students “only theories, hypotheses and falsifiabilities”. In other words, science’s epistemological limits are framed such that, as Michael Lemonick argues, “a statement that cannot be proven false is generally not considered to be scientific” (n.p., my emphasis). The impetus for the following paper emanates precisely from this issue of scientific uncertainty — more specifically from teaching a course with Tim Flannery called Communicating climate change to a highly motivated group of undergraduate science communication students. I attempt to illuminate how uncertainty is constructed differently by different groups and that the “public” does not necessarily interpret uncertainty in the same way the sciences do. This paper also analyses how doubt has been politicised and operates polemically in media coverage of climate change. As Andrew Gorman-Murray and Gordon Waitt highlight in an earlier issue of M/C Journal that focused on the climate-culture nexus, an understanding of the science alone is not adequate to deal with the cultural change necessary to address the challenges climate change brings (n.p). Far from being redundant in debates around climate change, the humanities have much to offer. Erosion of Trust in Science The objectives of Macquarie’s science communication program are far more ambitious than it can ever hope to achieve. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The initiative is a response to declining student numbers in maths and science programmes around the country and is designed to address the perceived lack of communication skills in science graduates that the Australian Council of Deans of Science identified in their 2001 report. According to Macquarie Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz’s blog, a broader, and much more ambitious aim of the program is to “restore public trust in science and scientists in the face of widespread cynicism” (n.p.). In recent times the erosion of public trust in science was exacerbated through the theft of e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit and the so-called “climategate scandal” which ensued. With the illegal publication of the e-mails came claims against the Research Unit that climate experts had been manipulating scientific data to suit a pro-global warming agenda. Three inquiries later, all the scientists involved were cleared of any wrongdoing, however the damage had already been done. To the public, what this scandal revealed was a certain level of scientific hubris around the uncertainties of the science and an unwillingness to explain the nature of these uncertainties. The prevailing notion remained that the experts were keeping information from public scrutiny and not being totally honest with them, which at least in the short term, damaged the scientists’s credibility. Many argued that this signalled a shift in public opinion and media portrayal on the issue of climate change in late 2009. University of Sydney academic, Rod Tiffen, claimed in the Sydney Morning Herald that the climategate scandal was “one of the pivotal moments in changing the politics of climate change” (n.p). In Australia this had profound implications and meant that the bipartisan agreement on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that had almost been reached, subsequently collapsed with (climate sceptic) Tony Abbott's defeat of (ETS advocate) Malcolm Turnbull to become opposition leader (Tiffen). Not long after the reputation of science received this almighty blow, albeit unfairly, the federal government released a report in February 2010, Inspiring Australia – A national strategy for engagement with the sciences as part of the country’s innovation agenda. The report outlines a commitment from the Australian government and universities around the country to address the challenges of not only communicating science to the broader community but, in the process, renewing public trust and engagement in science. The report states that: in order to achieve a scientifically engaged Australia, it will be necessary to develop a culture where the sciences are recognized as relevant to everyday life … Our science institutions will be expected to share their knowledge and to help realize full social, economic, health and environmental benefits of scientific research and in return win ongoing public support. (xiv-xv) After launching the report, Innovation Minister Kim Carr went so far as to conflate “hope” with “science” and in the process elevate a discourse of technological determinism: “it’s time for all true friends of science to step up and defend its values and achievements” adding that, "when you denigrate science, you destroy hope” (n.p.). Forever gone is our naïve post-war world when scientists were held in such high esteem that they could virtually use humans as guinea pigs to test out new wonder chemicals; such as organochlorines, of which DDT is the most widely known (Carson). Thanks to government-sponsored nuclear testing programs, if you were born in the 1950s, 1960s or early 1970s, your brain carries a permanent nuclear legacy (Flannery, Here On Earth 158). So surely, for the most part, questioning the authority and hubristic tendencies of science is a good thing. And I might add, it’s not just scientists who bear this critical burden, the same scepticism is directed towards journalists, politicians and academics alike – something that many cultural theorists have noted is characteristic of our contemporary postmodern world (Lyotard). So far from destroying hope, as the former Innovation Minister Kim Carr (now Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) suggests, surely we need to use the criticisms of science as a vehicle upon which to initiate hope and humility. Different Ways of Knowing: Bayesian Beliefs and Matters of Concern At best, [science] produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. (Oreskes 370) In an attempt to capitalise on the Macquarie Science Faculty’s expertise in climate science, I convened a course in second semester 2010 called SCOM201 Science, Media, Community: Communicating Climate Change, with invaluable assistance from Penny Wilson, Elaine Kelly and Liz Morgan. Mike Hulme’s provocative text, Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity provided an invaluable framework for the course. Hulme’s book brings other types of knowledge, beyond the scientific, to bear on our attitudes towards climate change. Climate change, he claims, has moved from being just a physical, scientific, and measurable phenomenon to becoming a social and cultural phenomenon. In order to understand the contested nature of climate change we need to acknowledge the dynamic and varied meanings climate has played in different cultures throughout history as well as the role that our own subjective attitudes and judgements play. Climate change has become a battleground between different ways of knowing, alternative visions of the future, competing ideas about what’s ethical and what’s not. Hulme makes the point that one of the reasons that we disagree about climate change is because we disagree about the role of science in today’s society. He encourages readers to use climate change as a tool to rigorously question the basis of our beliefs, assumptions and prejudices. Since uncertainty was the course’s raison d’etre, I was fortunate to have an extraordinary cohort of students who readily engaged with a course that forced them to confront their own epistemological limits — both personally and in a disciplinary sense. (See their blog: https://scom201.wordpress.com/). Science is often associated with objective realities. It thus tends to distinguish itself from the post-structuralist vein of critique that dominates much of the contemporary humanities. At the core of post-structuralism is scepticism about everyday, commonly accepted “truths” or what some call “meta-narratives” as well as an acknowledgement of the role that subjectivity plays in the pursuit of knowledge (Lyotard). However if we can’t rely on objective truths or impartial facts then where does this leave us when it comes to generating policy or encouraging behavioural change around the issue of climate change? Controversial philosophy of science scholar Bruno Latour sits squarely in the post-structuralist camp. In his 2004 article, “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern”, he laments the way the right wing has managed to gain ground in the climate change debate through arguing that uncertainty and lack of proof is reason enough to deny demands for action. Or to use his turn-of-phrase, “dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (Latour n.p). Through co-opting (the Left’s dearly held notion of) scepticism and even calling themselves “climate sceptics”, they exploited doubt as a rationale for why we should do nothing about climate change. Uncertainty is not only an important part of science, but also of the human condition. However, as sociologist Sheila Jasanoff explains in her Nature article, “Technologies of Humility”, uncertainty has become like a disease: Uncertainty has become a threat to collective action, the disease that knowledge must cure. It is the condition that poses cruel dilemmas for decision makers; that must be reduced at all costs; that is tamed with scenarios and assessments; and that feeds the frenzy for new knowledge, much of it scientific. (Jasanoff 33) If we move from talking about climate change as “a matter of fact” to “a matter of concern”, argues Bruno Latour, then we can start talking about useful ways to combat it, rather than talking about whether the science is “in” or not. Facts certainly matter, claims Latour, but they can’t give us the whole story, rather “they assemble with other ingredients to produce a matter of concern” (Potter and Oster 123). Emily Potter and Candice Oster suggest that climate change can’t be understood through either natural or cultural frames alone and, “unlike a matter of fact, matters of concern cannot be explained through a single point of view or discursive frame” (123). This makes a lot of what Hulme argues far more useful because it enables the debate to be taken to another level. Those of us with non-scientific expertise can centre debates around the kinds of societies we want, rather than being caught up in the scientific (un)certainties. If we translate Latour’s concept of climate change being “a matter of concern” into the discourse of environmental management then what we come up with, I think, is the “precautionary principle”. In the YouTube clip, “Stephen Schneider vs Skeptics”, Schneider argues that when in doubt about the potential environmental impacts of climate change, we should always apply the precautionary principle. This principle emerged from the UN conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and concerns the management of scientific risk. However its origins are evident much earlier in documents such as the “Use of Pesticides” from US President’s Science Advisory Committee in 1962. Unlike in criminal and other types of law where the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to show that the person charged is guilty of a particular offence, in environmental law the onus of proof is on the manufacturers to demonstrate the safety of their product. For instance, a pesticide should be restricted or disproved for use if there is “reasonable doubt” about its safety (Oreskes 374). Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 has its foundations in the precautionary principle: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation” (n.p). According to Environmental Law Online, the Rio declaration suggests that, “The precautionary principle applies where there is a ‘lack of full scientific certainty’ – that is, when science cannot say what consequences to expect, how grave they are, or how likely they are to occur” (n.p.). In order to make predictions about the likelihood of an event occurring, scientists employ a level of subjectivity, or need to “reveal their degree of belief that a prediction will turn out to be correct … [S]omething has to substitute for this lack of certainty” otherwise “the only alternative is to admit that absolutely nothing is known” (Hulme 85). These statements of “subjective probabilities or beliefs” are called Bayesian, after eighteenth century English mathematician Sir Thomas Bayes who developed the theory of evidential probability. These “probabilities” are estimates, or in other words, subjective, informed judgements that draw upon evidence and experience about the likelihood of event occurring. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses Bayesian beliefs to determine the risk or likelihood of an event occurring. The IPCC provides the largest international scientific assessment of climate change and often adopts a consensus model where viewpoint reached by the majority of scientists is used to establish knowledge amongst an interdisciplinary community of scientists and then communicate it to the public (Hulme 88). According to the IPCC, this consensus is reached amongst more than more than 450 lead authors, more than 800 contributing authors, and 2500 scientific reviewers. While it is an advisory body and is not policy-prescriptive, the IPCC adopts particular linguistic conventions to indicate the probability of a statement being correct. Stephen Schneider convinced the IPCC to use this approach to systemise uncertainty (Lemonick). So for instance, in the IPCC reports, the term “likely” denotes a chance of 66%-90% of the statement being correct, while “very likely” denotes more than a 90% chance. Note the change from the Third Assessment Report (2001), indicating that “most of the observed warming in over the last fifty years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions” to the Fourth Assessment (February 2007) which more strongly states: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (Hulme 51, my italics). A fiery attack on Tim Flannery by Andrew Bolt on Steve Price’s talkback radio show in June 2010 illustrates just how misunderstood scientific uncertainty is in the broader community. When Price introduces Flannery as former Australian of the Year, Bolt intercedes, claiming Flannery is “Alarmist of the Year”, then goes on to chastise Flannery for making various forecasts which didn’t eventuate, such as that Perth and Brisbane might run out of water by 2009. “How much are you to blame for the swing in sentiment, the retreat from global warming policy and rise of scepticism?” demands Bolt. In the context of the events of late 2009 and early 2010, the fact that these events didn’t materialise made Flannery, and others, seem unreliable. And what Bolt had to say on talkback radio, I suspect, resonated with a good proportion of its audience. What Bolt was trying to do was discredit Flannery’s scientific credentials and in the process erode trust in the expert. Flannery’s response was to claim that, what he said was that these events might eventuate. In much the same way that the climate sceptics have managed to co-opt scepticism and use it as a rationale for inaction on climate change, Andrew Bolt here either misunderstands basic scientific method or quite consciously misleads and manipulates the public. As Naomi Oreskes argues, “proof does not play the role in science that most people think it does (or should), and therefore it cannot play the role in policy that skeptics demand it should” (Oreskes 370). Doubt and ‘Situated’ Hope Uncertainty and ambiguity then emerge here as resources because they force us to confront those things we really want–not safety in some distant, contested future but justice and self-understanding now. (Sheila Jasanoff, cited in Hulme, back cover) In his last published book before his death in mid-2010, Science as a contact sport, Stephen Schneider’s advice to aspiring science communicators is that they should engage with the media “not at all, or a lot”. Climate scientist Ann Henderson-Sellers adds that there are very few scientists “who have the natural ability, and learn or cultivate the talents, of effective communication with and through the media” (430). In order to attract the public’s attention, it was once commonplace for scientists to write editorials and exploit fear-provoking measures by including a “useful catastrophe or two” (Moser and Dilling 37). But are these tactics effective? Susanne Moser thinks not. She argues that “numerous studies show that … fear may change attitudes … but not necessarily increase active engagement or behaviour change” (Moser 70). Furthermore, risk psychologists argue that danger is always context specific (Hulme 196). If the risk or danger is “situated” and “tangible” (such as lead toxicity levels in children in Mt Isa from the Xstrata mine) then the public will engage with it. However if it is “un-situated” (distant, intangible and diffuse) like climate change, the audience is less likely to. In my SCOM201 class we examined the impact of two climate change-related campaigns. The first one was a short film used to promote the 2010 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit (“Scary”) and the second was the State Government of Victoria’s “You have the power: Save Energy” public awareness campaign (“You”). Using Moser’s article to guide them, students evaluated each campaign’s effectiveness. Their conclusions were that the “You have the power” campaign had far more impact because it a) had very clear objectives (to cut domestic power consumption) b) provided a very clear visualisation of carbon dioxide through the metaphor of black balloons wafting up into the atmosphere, c) gave viewers a sense of empowerment and hope through describing simple measures to cut power consumption and, d) used simple but effective metaphors to convey a world progressed beyond human control, such as household appliances robotically operating themselves in the absence of humans. Despite its high production values, in comparison, the Copenhagen Summit promotion was more than ineffective and bordered on propaganda. It actually turned viewers off with its whining, righteous appeal of, “please help the world”. Its message and objectives were ambiguous, it conveyed environmental catastrophe through hackneyed images, exploited children through a narrative based on fear and gave no real sense of hope or empowerment. In contrast the Victorian Government’s campaign focused on just one aspect of climate change that was made both tangible and situated. Doubt and uncertainty are productive tools in the pursuit of knowledge. Whether it is scientific or otherwise, uncertainty will always be the motivation that “feeds the frenzy for new knowledge” (Jasanoff 33). Articulating the importance of Hulme’s book, Sheila Jasanoff indicates we should make doubt our friend, “Without downplaying its seriousness, Hulme demotes climate change from ultimate threat to constant companion, whose murmurs unlock in us the instinct for justice and equality” (Hulme back cover). The “murmurs” that Jasanoff gestures to here, I think, can also be articulated as hope. And it is in this discussion of climate change that doubt and hope sit side-by-side as bedfellows, mutually entangled. Since the “failed” Copenhagen Summit, there has been a distinct shift in climate change discourse from “experts”. We have moved away from doom and gloom discourses and into the realm of what I shall call “situated” hope. “Situated” hope is not based on blind faith alone, but rather hope grounded in evidence, informed judgements and experience. For instance, in distinct contrast to his cautionary tale The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery’s latest book, Here on Earth is a biography of our Earth; a planet that throughout its history has oscillated between Gaian and Medean impulses. However Flannery’s wonder about the natural world and our potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change is not founded on empty rhetoric but rather tempered by evidence; he presents a series of case studies where humanity has managed to come together for a global good. Whether it’s the 1987 Montreal ban on CFCs (chlorinated fluorocarbons) or the lesser-known 2001 Stockholm Convention on POP (Persistent Organic Pollutants), what Flannery envisions is an emerging global civilisation, a giant, intelligent super-organism glued together through social bonds. He says: If that is ever achieved, the greatest transformation in the history of our planet would have occurred, for Earth would then be able to act as if it were as Francis Bacon put it all those centuries ago, ‘one entire, perfect living creature’. (Here on Earth, 279) While science might give us “our most reliable understanding of the natural world” (Oreskes 370), “situated” hope is the only productive and ethical currency we have. ReferencesAustralian Council of Deans of Science. What Did You Do with Your Science Degree? A National Study of Employment Outcomes for Science Degree Holders 1990-2000. Melbourne: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, 2001. Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Inspiring Australia – A National Strategy for Engagement with the Sciences. Executive summary. Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 24 May 2010 ‹http://www.innovation.gov.au/SCIENCE/INSPIRINGAUSTRALIA/Documents/InspiringAustraliaSummary.pdf›. “Andrew Bolt with Tim Flannery.” Steve Price. Hosted by Steve Price. Melbourne: Melbourne Talkback Radio, 2010. 9 June 2010 ‹http://www.mtr1377.com.au/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=6209›. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. London: Penguin, 1962 (2000). Carr, Kim. “Celebrating Nobel Laureate Professor Elizabeth Blackburn.” Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 19 Feb. 2010 ‹http://minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr/Pages/CELEBRATINGNOBELLAUREATEPROFESSORELIZABETHBLACKBURN.aspx›. Environmental Law Online. “The Precautionary Principle.” N.d. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.envirolaw.org.au/articles/precautionary_principle›. Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005. ———. Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Gordon Waitt. “Climate and Culture.” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/184/0›. Harrison, Karey. “How ‘Inconvenient’ Is Al Gore’s Climate Change Message?” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/175›. Henderson-Sellers, Ann. “Climate Whispers: Media Communication about Climate Change.” Climatic Change 40 (1998): 421–456. Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding, Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A Picture of Climate Change: The Current State of Understanding. 2007. 11 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press-ar4/ipcc-flyer-low.pdf›. Jasanoff, Sheila. “Technologies of Humility.” Nature 450 (2007): 33. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004). 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html›. Lemonick, Michael D. “Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues.” Nature News 1 Nov. 2010. 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101101/full/news.2010.577.html›. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Moser, Susanne, and Lisa Dilling. “Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and Challenge of Global Climate Change.” Environment 46.10 (2004): 32-46. Moser, Susie. “More Bad News: The Risk of Neglecting Emotional Responses to Climate Change Information.” In Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (eds.), Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 64-81. Oreskes, Naomi. “Science and Public Policy: What’s Proof Got to Do with It?” Environmental Science and Policy 7 (2004): 369-383. Potter, Emily, and Candice Oster. “Communicating Climate Change: Public Responsiveness and Matters of Concern.” Media International Australia 127 (2008): 116-126. President’s Science Advisory Committee. “Use of Pesticides”. Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1963. United Nations Declaration on Environment and Development. Rio de Janeiro, 1992. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163›. “Scary Global Warming Propaganda Video Shown at the Copenhagen Climate Meeting – 7 Dec. 2009.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzSuP_TMFtk&feature=related›. Schneider, Stephen. Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate. National Geographic Society, 2010. ———. “Stephen Schneider vs. the Sceptics”. YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rj1QcdEqU0›. Schwartz, Steven. “Science in Search of a New Formula.” 2010. 20 May 2010 ‹http://www.vc.mq.edu.au/blog/2010/03/11/science-in-search-of-a-new-formula/›. Tiffen, Rodney. "You Wouldn't Read about It: Climate Scientists Right." Sydney Morning Herald 26 July 2010. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/you-wouldnt-read-about-it-climate-scientists-right-20100727-10t5i.html›. “You Have the Power: Save Energy.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCiS5k_uPbQ›.
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Wong, Rita. "Past and Present Acts of Exclusion." M/C Journal 4, no. 1 (February 1, 2001). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1893.

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In the summer of 1999, four ships carrying 599 Fujianese people arrived on the west coast of Canada. They survived a desperate and dangerous journey only for the Canadian Government to put them in prison. After numerous deportations, there are still about 40 of these people in Canadian prisons as of January 2001. They have been in jail for over a year and a half under mere suspicion of flight risk. About 24 people have been granted refugee status. Most people deported to China have been placed in Chinese prisons and fined. It is worth remembering that these migrants may have been undocumented but they are not "illegal" in that they have mobility rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes everyone's right to leave any country and to seek asylum. It can be argued that it is not the migrants who are illegal, but the unjust laws that criminalize their freedom of movement. In considering people's rights, we need to keep in mind not only the civil and political rights that the West tends to privilege, but equally important social and economic rights as well. As a local response to a global phenomenon, Direct Action Against Refugee Exploitation (DAARE) formed in Vancouver to support the rights of the Fujianese women, eleven of whom at the time of writing are still being held in the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women (BCCW). In DAARE’s view, Immigration Canada's decision to detain all these people is based on a racialized group-profiling policy which violates basic human rights and ignores Canadian responsibility in the creation of the global economic and societal conditions which give rise to widespread migration. In light of the Canadian government's plans to implement even more punitive immigration legislation, DAARE endorses the Coalition for a Just Immigration and Refugee Policy's "Position Paper on Bill C31." They call for humanitarian review and release for the remaining Fujianese people. This review would include a few released refugee claimants who are still in Canada, children, women who were past victims of family planning, people facing religious persecution and, of course, those who are still in prison after 18 months and who have never been charged with any crime. Suspicion of flight risk is not a valid reason to incarcerate people for such a long time. Who Is a Migrant? The lines between "voluntary" and "forced" migration are no longer adequate to explain the complexities of population movements today. Motives for forced displacement include political, economic, social and environmental factors. This spectrum runs from the immediate threats to life, safety and freedom due to war or persecution, to situations where economic conditions make the prospects of survival marginal and non-existent. (Moussa 2000). Terms like "economic migrant" and "bogus refugee" have been used in the media to discredit migrants such as the Fujianese and to foster hostility against them. This scapegoating process oversimplifies the situation, for all refugees and all migrants are entitled to the basic respect due all human beings as enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. There can be multiple reasons for an individual to migrate—ranging from family reunification to economic pressures to personal survival; to fear of government corruption and of political persecution, to name just a few. The reduction of everything to merely the economic does not allow one to understand why migration is occurring and likely to increase in the future. Most immigrants to Canada could also be described as economic migrants. Conrad Black is an economic migrant. The privileging of rich migrants over poor ones romanticizes globalization as corporate progress and ignores the immense human suffering it entails for the majority of the world's population as the gap between the wealthy and the poor rapidly increases. Hundreds of years ago, when migrants came to this aboriginal territory we now call Canada, they came in order to survive—in short, they too were "economic migrants." Many of those migrants who came from Europe would not qualify to enter Canada today under its current immigration admissions guidelines. Indeed, over 50% of Canadians would not be able to independently immigrate to Canada given its current elitist restrictions. One of the major reasons for an increase in migration is the destruction of rural economies in Asia and elsewhere in the world. Millions of people have been displaced by changes in agriculture that separate people from the land. These waves of internal migration also result in the movement of peoples across national borders in order to survive. Chinese provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong, whose people have a long history of overseas travel, are particularly common sources of out-migration. In discussing migration, we need to be wary of how we can inadvertently reinforce the colonization of First Nations people unless we consciously work against that by actively supporting aboriginal self-determination. For example, some First Nations people have been accused of "smuggling" people across borders—this subjects them to the same process of criminalization which the migrants have experienced, and ignores the sovereign rights of First Nations people. We need ways of relating to one another which do not reenact domination, but which work in solidarity with First Nations' struggles. This requires an understanding of the ways in which racism, colonialism, classism, and other tactics through which "dividing and conquering" take place. For those of us who are first, second, third, fourth, fifth generation migrants to this land, our survival and liberation are intimately connected to that of aboriginal people. History Repeating Itself? The arrival of the Fujianese people met with a racist media hysteria reminiscent of earlier episodes of Canadian history. Front page newspaper headlines such as "Go Home" increased hostility against these people. In Victoria, people were offering to adopt the dog on one of the ships at the same time that they were calling to deport the Chinese. From the corporate media accounts of the situation, one would think that most Canadians did not care about the dangerous voyage these people had endured, a voyage during which two people from the second ship died. Accusations that people were trying to enter the country "illegally" overlooked how historically, the Chinese, like other people of colour, have had to find ways to compensate for racist and classist biases in Canada's immigration system. For example, from 1960 to 1973, Canada granted amnesty to over 12,000 "paper sons," that is, people who had immigrated under names other than their own. The granting of "legal" status to the "paper sons" who arrived before 1960 finally recognized that Canada's legislation had unfairly excluded Chinese people for decades. From 1923 to 1947, Canada's Chinese Exclusion Act had basically prevented Chinese people from entering this country. The xenophobic attitudes that gave rise to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the head tax occurred within a colonial context that privileged British migrants. Today, colonialism may no longer be as rhetorically attached to the British empire, but its patterns—particularly the globally inequitable distribution of wealth and resources—continue to accelerate through the mechanism of transnational corporations, for example. As Helene Moussa has pointed out, "the interconnections of globalisation with racist and colonialist ideology are only too clear when all evidence shows that globalisation '¼ legitimise[s] and sustain[s] an international system that tolerates an unbelievable divide not only between the North and the South but also inside them'" (2000). Moreover, according to the United Nations Development Programme, the income gap between people in the world's wealthiest nations and the poorest nations has shifted from 30:1 in 1960 to 60:1 in 1990 and to 74:1 in 1997. (Moussa 2000) As capital or electronic money moves across borders faster than ever before in what some have called the casino economy (Mander and Goldsmith), change and instability are rapidly increasing for the majority of the world's population. People are justifiably anxious about their well-being in the face of growing transnational corporate power; however, "protecting" national borders through enforcement and detention of displaced people is a form of reactive, violent, and often racist, nationalism which scapegoats the vulnerable without truly addressing the root causes of instability and migration. In short, reactive nationalism is ineffective in safe-guarding people's survival. Asserting solidarity with those who are most immediately displaced and impoverished by globalization is strategically a better way to work towards our common survival. Substantive freedom requires equitable economic relations; that is, fairly shared wealth. Canadian Response Abilities The Canadian government should take responsibility for its role in creating the conditions that displace people and force them to migrate within their countries and across borders. As a major sponsor of efforts to privatize economies and undertake environmentally devastating projects such as hydro-electric dams, Canada has played a significant role in the creation of an unemployed "floating population" in China which is estimated to reach 200 million people this year. Punitive tactics will not stop the movement of people, who migrate to survive. According to Peter Kwong, "The well-publicized Chinese government's market reforms have practically eliminated all labor laws, labour benefits and protections. In the "free enterprise zones" workers live virtually on the factory floor, laboring fourteen hours a day for a mere two dollars—that is, about 20 cents an hour" (136). As Sunera Thobani has phrased it, "What makes it alright for us to buy a t-shirt on the streets of Vancouver for $3, which was made in China, then stand up all outraged as Canadian citizens when the woman who made that t-shirt tries to come here and live with us on a basis of equality?" Canada should respond to the urgent situations which cause people to move—not only on the grounds upon which Convention refugees were defined in 1949 (race, religion, nationality, social group, political opinion) which continue to be valid—but also to strengthen Canada's system to include a contemporary understanding that all people have basic economic and environmental survival rights. Some migrants have lives that fit into the narrow definition of a UN Convention refugee and some may not. Those who do not fit this definition have nonetheless urgent needs that deserve attention. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pointed out that there are at least 18 million people working in 124 export zones in China. A living wage in China is estimated to be 87 cents per hour. Canadians benefit from these conditions of cheap labour, yet when the producers of these goods come to our shores, we hypocritically disavow any relationship with them. Responsibility in this context need not refer so much to some stern sense of duty, obligation or altruism as to a full "response"—intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual—that such a situation provokes in relations between those who "benefit"—materially at least—from such a system and those who do not. References Anderson, Sarah, et al. Field Guide to the Global Economy. New York: New Press, 2000. Canadian Council of Refugees. "Migrant Smuggling and Trafficking in Persons." February 20, 2000. Canadian Woman Studies: Immigrant and Refugee Women. 19.3 (Fall 1999). Chin, Ko-lin. Smuggled Chinese. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Coalition for a Just Immigration and Refugee Policy. "Position Paper on Bill C31." 2000. Davis, Angela. The Angela Davis Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, Foundation Against Trafficking in Women, and International Human Rights Law Group. "Human Rights Standards for the Treatment of Trafficked Persons." January 1999. Henry, Frances and Tator, Carol. Racist Discourses in Canada's English Print Media. Toronto: Canadian Foundation for Race Relations, 2000. Jameson, Fredric and Miyoshi, Masao, Eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Kwong, Peter. Forbidden Workers. New York: New Press, 1997. Mander, Jerry and Goldsmith, Edward, Eds. The Case Against the Global Economy. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. Moussa, Helene. "The Interconnections of Globalisation and Migration with Racism and Colonialism: Tracing Complicity." 2000. ---. "Violence against Refugee Women: Gender Oppression, Canadian Policy, and the International Struggle for Human Rights." Resources for Feminist Research 26 (3-4). 1998 Migrant Forum statement (from Asia Pacific People's Assembly on APEC) 'Occasional Paper Migration: an economic and social analysis.' Pizarro, Gabriela Rodriguez. "Human Rights of Migrants." United Nations Report. Seabrook, Jeremy. "The Migrant in the Mirror." New Internationalist 327 (September 2000): 34-5. Sharma, Nandita. "The Real Snakeheads: Canadian government and corporations." Kinesis. October/November (1999): 11. Spivak, Gayatri. "Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World." Class Issues. Ed. Amitava Kumar. New York: New York University Press, 1997. States of Disarray: The Social Effects of Globalization. London: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UN RISD), 1995. Thobani, Sunera. "The Creation of a ‘Crisis’." Kinesis October/November (1999): 12-13. Whores, Maids and Wives: Making Links. Proceedings of the North American Regional Consultative Forum on Trafficking in Women, 1997.
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Cushing, Nancy. "To Eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo: Bargaining over Food Choice in the Anthropocene." M/C Journal 22, no. 2 (April 24, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1508.

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Kangatarianism is the rather inelegant word coined in the first decade of the twenty-first century to describe an omnivorous diet in which the only meat consumed is that of the kangaroo. First published in the media in 2010 (Barone; Zukerman), the term circulated in Australian environmental and academic circles including the Global Animal conference at the University of Wollongong in July 2011 where I first heard it from members of the Think Tank for Kangaroos (THINKK) group. By June 2017, it had gained enough attention to be named the Oxford English Dictionary’s Australian word of the month (following on from May’s “smashed avo,” another Australian food innovation), but it took the Nine Network reality television series Love Island Australia to raise kangatarian to trending status on social media (Oxford UP). During the first episode, aired in late May 2018, Justin, a concreter and fashion model from Melbourne, declared himself to have previously been a kangatarian as he chatted with fellow contestant, Millie. Vet nurse and animal lover Millie appeared to be shocked by his revelation but was tentatively accepting when Justin explained what kangatarian meant, and justified his choice on the grounds that kangaroo are not farmed. In the social media response, it was clear that eating only the meat of kangaroos as an ethical choice was an entirely new concept to many viewers, with one tweet stating “Kangatarian isn’t a thing”, while others variously labelled the diet brutal, intriguing, or quintessentially Australian (see #kangatarian on Twitter).There is a well developed literature around the arguments for and against eating kangaroo, and why settler Australians tend to be so reluctant to do so (see for example, Probyn; Cawthorn and Hoffman). Here, I will concentrate on the role that ethics play in this food choice by examining how the adoption of kangatarianism can be understood as a bargain struck to help to manage grief in the Anthropocene, and the limitations of that bargain. As Lesley Head has argued, we are living in a time of loss and of grieving, when much that has been taken for granted is becoming unstable, and “we must imagine that drastic changes to everyday life are in the offing” (313). Applying the classic (and contested) model of five stages of grief, first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying in 1969, much of the population of the western world seems to be now experiencing denial, her first stage of loss, while those in the most vulnerable environments have moved on to anger with developed countries for destructive actions in the past and inaction in the present. The next stages (or states) of grieving—bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are likely to be manifested, although not in any predictable sequence, as the grief over current and future losses continues (Haslam).The great expansion of food restrictive diets in the Anthropocene can be interpreted as part of this bargaining state of grieving as individuals attempt to respond to the imperative to reduce their environmental impact but also to limit the degree of change to their own diet required to do so. Meat has long been identified as a key component of an individual’s environmental footprint. From Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 Diet for a Small Planet through the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation’s 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow to the 2019 report of the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, the advice has been consistent: meat consumption should be minimised in, if not eradicated from, the human diet. The EAT–Lancet Commission Report quantified this to less than 28 grams (just under one ounce) of beef, lamb or pork per day (12, 25). For many this would be keenly felt, in terms of how meals are constructed, the sensory experiences associated with eating meat and perceptions of well-being but meat is offered up as a sacrifice to bring about the return of the beloved healthy planet.Rather than accept the advice to cut out meat entirely, those seeking to bargain with the Anthropocene also find other options. This has given rise to a suite of foodways based around restricting meat intake in volume or type. Reducing the amount of commercially produced beef, lamb and pork eaten is one approach, while substituting a meat the production of which has a smaller environmental footprint, most commonly chicken or fish, is another. For those willing to make deeper changes, the meat of free living animals, especially those which are killed accidentally on the roads or for deliberately for environmental management purposes, is another option. Further along this spectrum are the novel protein sources suggested in the Lancet report, including insects, blue-green algae and laboratory-cultured meats.Kangatarianism is another form of this bargain, and is backed by at least half a century of advocacy. The Australian Conservation Foundation made calls to reduce the numbers of other livestock and begin a sustainable harvest of kangaroo for food in 1970 when the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption was still illegal across the country (Conservation of Kangaroos). The idea was repeated by biologist Gordon Grigg in the late 1980s (Jackson and Vernes 173), and again in the Garnaut Climate Change Review in 2008 (547–48). Kangaroo meat is high in protein and iron, low in fat, and high in healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, and, as these authors showed, has a smaller environmental footprint than beef, lamb, or pork. Kangaroo require less water than cattle, sheep or pigs, and no land is cleared to grow feed for them or give them space to graze. Their paws cause less erosion and compaction of soil than do the hooves of common livestock. They eat less fodder than ruminants and their digestive processes result in lower emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane and less solid waste.As Justin of Love Island was aware, kangaroo are not farmed in the sense of being deliberately bred, fed, confined, or treated with hormones, drugs or chemicals, which also adds to their lighter impact on the environment. However, some pastoralists argue that because they cannot prevent kangaroos from accessing the food, water, shelter, and protection from predators they provide for their livestock, they do effectively farm them, although they receive no income from sales of kangaroo meat. This type of light touch farming of kangaroos has a very long history in Australia going back to the continent’s first peopling some 60,000 years ago. Kangaroos were so important to Aboriginal people that a wide range of environments were manipulated to produce their favoured habitats of open grasslands edged by sheltering trees. As Bill Gammage demonstrated, fire was used as a tool to preserve and extend grassy areas, to encourage regrowth which would attract kangaroos and to drive the animals from one patch to another or towards hunters waiting with spears (passim, for example, 58, 72, 76, 93). Gammage and Bruce Pascoe agree that this was a form of animal husbandry in which the kangaroos were drawn to the areas prepared for them for the young grass or, more forcefully, physically directed using nets, brush fences or stone walls. Burnt ground served to contain the animals in place of fencing, and regular harvesting kept numbers from rising to levels which would place pressure on other species (Gammage 79, 281–86; Pascoe 42–43). Contemporary advocates of eating kangaroo have promoted the idea that they should be deliberately co-produced with other livestock instead of being killed to preserve feed and water for sheep and cattle (Ellicott; Wilson 39). Substituting kangaroo for the meat of more environmentally damaging animals would facilitate a reduction in the numbers of cattle and sheep, lessening the harm they do.Most proponents have assumed that their audience is current meat eaters who would substitute kangaroo for the meat of other more environmentally costly animals, but kangatarianism can also emerge from vegetarianism. Wendy Zukerman, who wrote about kangaroo hunting for New Scientist in 2010, was motivated to conduct the research because she was considering becoming an early adopter of kangatarianism as the least environmentally taxing way to counter the longterm anaemia she had developed as a vegetarian. In 2018, George Wilson, honorary professor in the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society called for vegetarians to become kangatarians as a means of boosting overall consumption of kangaroo for environmental and economic benefits to rural Australia (39).Given these persuasive environmental arguments, it might be expected that many people would have perceived eating kangaroo instead of other meat as a favourable bargain and taken up the call to become kangatarian. Certainly, there has been widespread interest in trying kangaroo meat. In 1997, only five years after the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption had been legalised in most states (South Australia did so in 1980), 51% of 500 people surveyed in five capital cities said they had tried kangaroo. However, it had not become a meat of choice with very few found to eat it more than three times a year (Des Purtell and Associates iv). Just over a decade later, a study by Ampt and Owen found an increase to 58% of 1599 Australians surveyed across the country who had tried kangaroo but just 4.7% eating it at least monthly (14). Bryce Appleby, in his study of kangaroo consumption in the home based on interviews with 28 residents of Wollongong in 2010, specifically noted the absence of kangatarians—then a very new concept. A study of 261 Sydney university students in 2014 found that half had tried kangaroo meat and 10% continued to eat it with any regularity. Only two respondents identified themselves as kangatarian (Grant 14–15). Kangaroo meat advocate Michael Archer declared in 2017 that “there’s an awful lot of very, very smart vegetarians [who] have opted for semi vegetarianism and they’re calling themselves ‘kangatarians’, as they’re quite happy to eat kangaroo meat”, but unless there had been a significant change in a few years, the surveys did not bear out his assertion (154).The ethical calculations around eating kangaroo are complicated by factors beyond the strictly environmental. One Tweeter advised Justin: “‘I’m a kangatarian’ isn’t a pickup line, mate”, and certainly the reception of his declaration could have been very cool, especially as it was delivered to a self declared animal warrior (N’Tash Aha). All of the studies of beliefs and practices around the eating of kangaroo have noted a significant minority of Australians who would not consider eating kangaroo based on issues of animal welfare and animal rights. The 1997 study found that 11% were opposed to the idea of eating kangaroo, while in Grant’s 2014 study, 15% were ethically opposed to eating kangaroo meat (Des Purtell and Associates iv; Grant 14–15). Animal ethics complicate the bargains calculated principally on environmental grounds.These ethical concerns work across several registers. One is around the flesh and blood kangaroo as a charismatic native animal unique to Australia and which Australians have an obligation to respect and nurture. Sheep, cattle and pigs have been subject to longterm propaganda campaigns which entrench the idea that they are unattractive and unintelligent, and veil their transition to meat behind euphemistic language and abattoir walls, making it easier to eat them. Kangaroos are still seen as resourceful and graceful animals, and no linguistic tricks shield consumers from the knowledge that it is a roo on their plate. A proposal in 2009 to market a “coat of arms” emu and kangaroo-flavoured potato chip brought complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau that this was disrespectful to these native animals, although the flavours were to be simulated and the product vegetarian (Black). Coexisting with this high regard to kangaroos is its antithesis. That is, a valuation of them informed by their designation as a pest in the pastoral industry, and the use of the carcasses of those killed to feed dogs and other companion animals. Appleby identified a visceral, disgust response to the idea of eating kangaroo in many of his informants, including both vegetarians who would not consider eating kangaroo because of their commitment to a plant-based diet, and at least one omnivore who would prefer to give up all meat rather than eat kangaroo. While diametrically opposed, the end point of both positions is that kangaroo meat should not be eaten.A second animal ethics stance relates to the imagined kangaroo, a cultural construct which for most urban Australians is much more present in their lives and likely to shape their actions than the living animals. It is behind the rejection of eating an animal which holds such an iconic place in Australian culture: to the dexter on the 1912 national coat of arms; hopping through the Hundred Acre Wood as Kanga and Roo in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books from the 1920s and the Disney movies later made from them; as a boy’s best friend as Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in a fondly remembered 1970s television series; and high in the sky on QANTAS planes. The anthropomorphising of kangaroos permitted the spectacle of the boxing kangaroo from the late nineteenth century. By framing natural kangaroo behaviours as boxing, these exhibitions encouraged an ambiguous understanding of kangaroos as human-like, moving them further from the category of food (Golder and Kirkby). Australian government bodies used this idea of the kangaroo to support food exports to Britain, with kangaroos as cooks or diners rather than ingredients. The Kangaroo Kookery Book of 1932 (see fig. 1 below) portrayed kangaroos as a nuclear family in a suburban kitchen and another official campaign supporting sales of Australian produce in Britain in the 1950s featured a Disney-inspired kangaroo eating apples and chops washed down with wine (“Kangaroo to Be ‘Food Salesman’”). This imagining of kangaroos as human-like has persisted, leading to the opinion expressed in a 2008 focus group, that consuming kangaroo amounted to “‘eating an icon’ … Although they are pests they are still human nature … these are native animals, people and I believe that is a form of cannibalism!” (Ampt and Owen 26). Figure 1: Rather than promoting the eating of kangaroos, the portrayal of kangaroos as a modern suburban family in the Kangaroo Kookery Book (1932) made it unthinkable. (Source: Kangaroo Kookery Book, Director of Australian Trade Publicity, Australia House, London, 1932.)The third layer of ethical objection on the ground of animal welfare is more specific, being directed to the method of killing the kangaroos which become food. Kangaroos are perhaps the only native animals for which state governments set quotas for commercial harvest, on the grounds that they compete with livestock for pasturage and water. In most jurisdictions, commercially harvested kangaroo carcasses can be processed for human consumption, and they are the ones which ultimately appear in supermarket display cases.Kangaroos are killed by professional shooters at night using swivelling spotlights mounted on their vehicles to locate and daze the animals. While clean head shots are the ideal and regulations state that animals should be killed when at rest and without causing “undue agonal struggle”, this is not always achieved and some animals do suffer prolonged deaths (NSW Code of Practice for Kangaroo Meat for Human Consumption). By regulation, the young of any female kangaroo must be killed along with her. While averting a slow death by neglect, this is considered cruel and wasteful. The hunt has drawn international criticism, including from Greenpeace which organised campaigns against the sale of kangaroo meat in Europe in the 1980s, and Viva! which was successful in securing the withdrawal of kangaroo from sale in British supermarkets (“Kangaroo Meat Sales Criticised”). These arguments circulate and influence opinion within Australia.A final animal ethics issue is that what is actually behind the push for greater use of kangaroo meat is not concern for the environment or animal welfare but the quest to turn a profit from these animals. The Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia, formed in 1970 to represent those who dealt in the marsupials’ meat, fur and skins, has been a vocal advocate of eating kangaroo and a sponsor of market research into how it can be made more appealing to the market. The Association argued in 1971 that commercial harvest was part of the intelligent conservation of the kangaroo. They sought minimum size regulations to prevent overharvesting and protect their livelihoods (“Assn. Backs Kangaroo Conservation”). The Association’s current website makes the claim that wild harvested “Australian kangaroo meat is among the healthiest, tastiest and most sustainable red meats in the world” (Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia). That this is intended to initiate a new and less controlled branch of the meat industry for the benefit of hunters and processors, rather than foster a shift from sheep or cattle to kangaroos which might serve farmers and the environment, is the opinion of Dr. Louise Boronyak, of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney (Boyle 19).Concerns such as these have meant that kangaroo is most consumed where it is least familiar, with most of the meat for human consumption recovered from culled animals being exported to Europe and Asia. Russia has been the largest export market. There, kangaroo meat is made less strange by blending it with other meats and traditional spices to make processed meats, avoiding objections to its appearance and uncertainty around preparation. With only a low profile as a novelty animal in Russia, there are fewer sentimental concerns about consuming kangaroo, although the additional food miles undermine its environmental credentials. The variable acceptability of kangaroo in more distant markets speaks to the role of culture in determining how patterns of eating are formed and can be shifted, or, as Elspeth Probyn phrased it “how natural entities are transformed into commodities within a context of globalisation and local communities”, underlining the impossibility of any straightforward ethics of eating kangaroo (33, 35).Kangatarianism is a neologism which makes the eating of kangaroo meat something it has not been in the past, a voluntary restriction based on environmental ethics. These environmental benefits are well founded and eating kangaroo can be understood as an Anthropocenic bargain struck to allow the continuation of the consumption of red meat while reducing one’s environmental footprint. Although superficially attractive, the numbers entering into this bargain remain small because environmental ethics cannot be disentangled from animal ethics. The anthropomorphising of the kangaroo and its use as a national symbol coexist with its categorisation as a pest and use of its meat as food for companion animals. Both understandings of kangaroos made their meat uneatable for many Australians. Paired with concerns over how kangaroos are killed and the commercialisation of a native species, kangaroo meat has a very mixed reception despite decades of advocacy for eating its meat in favour of that of more harmed and more harmful introduced species. Given these constraints, kangatarianism is unlikely to become widespread and indeed it should be viewed as at best a temporary exigency. As the climate warms and rainfall becomes more erratic, even animals which have evolved to suit Australian conditions will come under increasing pressure, and humans will need to reach Kübler-Ross’ final state of grief: acceptance. In this case, this would mean acceptance that our needs cannot be placed ahead of those of other animals.ReferencesAmpt, Peter, and Kate Owen. Consumer Attitudes to Kangaroo Meat Products. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 2008.Appleby, Bryce. “Skippy the ‘Green’ Kangaroo: Identifying Resistances to Eating Kangaroo in the Home in a Context of Climate Change.” BSc Hons, U of Wollongong, 2010 <http://ro.uow.edu.au/thsci/103>.Archer, Michael. “Zoology on the Table: Plenary Session 4.” Australian Zoologist 39, 1 (2017): 154–60.“Assn. Backs Kangaroo Conservation.” The Beverley Times 26 Feb. 1971: 3. 22 Feb. 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article202738733>.Barone, Tayissa. “Kangatarians Jump the Divide.” Sydney Morning Herald 9 Feb. 2010. 13 Apr. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/kangatarians-jump-the-divide-20100209-gdtvd8.html>.Black, Rosemary. “Some Australians Angry over Idea for Kangaroo and Emu-Flavored Potato Chips.” New York Daily News 4 Dec. 2009. 5 Feb. 2019 <https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/australians-angry-idea-kangaroo-emu-flavored-potato-chips-article-1.431865>.Boyle, Rhianna. “Eating Skippy.” Big Issue Australia 578 11-24 Jan. 2019: 16–19.Cawthorn, Donna-Mareè, and Louwrens C. Hoffman. “Controversial Cuisine: A Global Account of the Demand, Supply and Acceptance of ‘Unconventional’ and ‘Exotic’ Meats.” Meat Science 120 (2016): 26–7.Conservation of Kangaroos. Melbourne: Australian Conservation Foundation, 1970.Des Purtell and Associates. Improving Consumer Perceptions of Kangaroo Products: A Survey and Report. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 1997.Ellicott, John. “Little Pay Incentive for Shooters to Join Kangaroo Meat Industry.” The Land 15 Mar. 2018. 28 Mar. 2019 <https://www.theland.com.au/story/5285265/top-roo-shooter-says-harvesting-is-a-low-paid-job/>.Garnaut, Ross. Garnaut Climate Change Review. 2008. 26 Feb. 2019 <http://www.garnautreview.org.au/index.htm>.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012.Golder, Hilary, and Diane Kirkby. “Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangaroo: A Married Woman Tests Her Property Rights in Colonial New South Wales.” Law and History Review 21.3 (2003): 585–605.Grant, Elisabeth. “Sustainable Kangaroo Harvesting: Perceptions and Consumption of Kangaroo Meat among University Students in New South Wales.” Independent Study Project (ISP). U of NSW, 2014. <https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/1755>.Haslam, Nick. “The Five Stages of Grief Don’t Come in Fixed Steps – Everyone Feels Differently.” The Conversation 22 Oct. 2018. 28 Mar. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/the-five-stages-of-grief-dont-come-in-fixed-steps-everyone-feels-differently-96111>.Head, Lesley. “The Anthropoceans.” Geographical Research 53.3 (2015): 313–20.Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia. Kangaroo Meat. 26 Feb. 2019 <http://www.kangarooindustry.com/products/meat/>.“Kangaroo Meat Sales Criticised.” The Canberra Times 13 Sep. 1984: 14. 22 Feb 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article136915919>.“Kangaroo to Be Food ‘Salesman.’” Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 2 Dec. 1954. 22 Feb 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article134089767>.Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and their own Families. New York: Touchstone, 1997.Jackson, Stephen, and Karl Vernes. Kangaroo: Portrait of an Extraordinary Marsupial. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010.Lappé, Frances Moore. Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971.N’Tash Aha (@Nsvasey). “‘I’m a Kangatarian’ isn’t a Pickup Line, Mate. #LoveIslandAU.” Twitter post. 27 May 2018. 5 Apr. 2019 <https://twitter.com/Nsvasey/status/1000697124122644480>.“NSW Code of Practice for Kangaroo Meat for Human Consumption.” Government Gazette of the State of New South Wales 24 Mar. 1993. 22 Feb. 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page14638033>.Oxford University Press, Australia and New Zealand. Word of the Month. June 2017. <https://www.oup.com.au/dictionaries/word-of-the-month>.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala Books, 2014.Probyn, Elspeth. “Eating Roo: Of Things That Become Food.” New Formations 74.1 (2011): 33–45.Steinfeld, Henning, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vicent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, and Cees d Haan. Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 2006.Trust Nature. Essence of Kangaroo Capsules. 26 Feb. 2019 <http://ncpro.com.au/products/all-products/item/88139-essence-of-kangaroo-35000>.Victoria Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. Kangaroo Pet Food Trial. 28 Mar. 2019 <https://www.wildlife.vic.gov.au/managing-wildlife/wildlife-management-and-control-authorisations/kangaroo-pet-food-trial>.Willett, Walter, et al. “Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems.” The Lancet 16 Jan. 2019. 26 Feb. 2019 <https://www.thelancet.com/commissions/EAT>.Wilson, George. “Kangaroos Can Be an Asset Rather than a Pest.” Australasian Science 39.1 (2018): 39.Zukerman, Wendy. “Eating Skippy: The Future of Kangaroo Meat.” New Scientist 208.2781 (2010): 42–5.
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42

Wolbring, Gregor. "Is There an End to Out-Able? Is There an End to the Rat Race for Abilities?" M/C Journal 11, no. 3 (July 2, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.57.

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Abstract:
Introduction The purpose of this paper is to explore discourses of ‘ability’ and ‘ableism’. Terms such as abled, dis-abled, en-abled, dis-enabled, diff-abled, transable, assume different meanings as we eliminate ‘species-typical’ as the norm and make beyond ‘species-typical’ the norm. This paper contends that there is a pressing need for society to deal with ableism in all of its forms and its consequences. The discourses around 'able' and 'ableism' fall into two main categories. The discourse around species-typical versus sub-species-typical as identified by certain powerful members of the species is one category. This discourse has a long history and is linked to the discourse around health, disease and medicine. This discourse is about people (Harris, "One Principle"; Watson; Duke) who portray disabled people within a medical model of disability (Finkelstein; Penney; Malhotra; British Film Institute; Oliver), a model that classifies disabled people as having an intrinsic defect, an impairment that leads to ‘subnormal’ functioning. Disability Studies is an academic field that questions the medical model and the issue of ‘who defines whom’ as sub-species typical (Taylor, Shoultz, and Walker; Centre for Disability Studies; Disability and Human Development Department; Disabilitystudies.net; Society for Disability Studies; Campbell). The other category is the discourse around the claim that one has, as a species or a social group, superior abilities compared to other species or other segments in ones species whereby this superiority is seen as species-typical. Science and technology research and development and different forms of ableism have always been and will continue to be inter-related. The desire and expectation for certain abilities has led to science and technology research and development that promise the fulfillment of these desires and expectations. And science and technology research and development led to products that enabled new abilities and new expectations and desires for new forms of abilities and ableism. Emerging forms of science and technology, in particular the converging of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive sciences and synthetic biology (NBICS), increasingly enable the modification of appearance and functioning of biological structures including the human body and the bodies of other species beyond existing norms and inter and intra species-typical boundaries. This leads to a changed understanding of the self, the body, relationships with others of the species, and with other species and the environment. There are also accompanying changes in anticipated, desired and rejected abilities and the transhumanisation of the two ableism categories. A transhumanised form of ableism is a network of beliefs, processes and practices that perceives the improvement of biological structures including the human body and functioning beyond species-typical boundaries as the norm, as essential. It judges an unenhanced biological structure including the human body as a diminished state of existence (Wolbring, "Triangle"; Wolbring, "Why"; Wolbring, "Glossary"). A by-product of this emerging form of ableism is the appearance of the ‘Techno Poor impaired and disabled people’ (Wolbring, "Glossary"); people who don’t want or who can’t afford beyond-species-typical body ability enhancements and who are, in accordance with the transhumanised form of ableism, perceived as people in a diminished state of being human and experience negative treatment as ‘disabled’ accordingly (Miller). Ableism Today: The First Category Ableism (Campbell; Carlson; Overboe) privileges ‘species typical abilities’ while labelling ‘sub-species-typical abilities’ as deficient, as impaired and undesirable often with the accompanying disablism (Miller) the discriminatory, oppressive, or abusive behaviour arising from the belief that sub-species-typical people are inferior to others. To quote the UK bioethicist John Harris I do define disability as “a physical or mental condition we have a strong [rational] preference not to be in” and that it is more importantly a condition which is in some sense a “‘harmed condition’”. So for me the essential elements are that a disabling condition is harmful to the person in that condition and that consequently that person has a strong rational preference not to be in such a condition. (Harris, "Is There") Harris’s quote highlights the non acceptance of sub-species-typical abilities as variations. Indeed the term “disabled” is mostly used to describe a person who is perceived as having an intrinsic defect, an impairment, disease, or chronic illness that leads to ‘subnormal’ functioning. A low quality of life and other negative consequences are often seen as the inevitable, unavoidable consequence of such ‘disability’. However many disabled people do not perceive themselves as suffering entities with a poor quality of life, in need of cure and fixing. As troubling as it is, that there is a difference in perception between the ‘afflicted’ and the ‘non-afflicted’ (Wolbring, "Triangle"; also see references in Wolbring, "Science") even more troubling is the fact that the ‘non-afflicted’ for the most part do not accept the self-perception of the ‘afflicted’ if the self-perception does not fit the agenda of the ‘non-afflicted’ (Wolbring, "Triangle"; Wolbring, "Science"). The views of disabled people who do not see themselves within the patient/medical model are rarely heard (see for example the positive non medical description of Down Syndrome — Canadian Down Syndrome Society), blatantly ignored — a fact that was recognised in the final documents of the 1999 UNESCO World Conference on Sciences (UNESCO, "Declaration on Science"; UNESCO, "Science Agenda") or rejected as shown by the Harris quote (Wolbring, "Science"). The non acceptance of ‘sub-species-typical functioning’ as a variation as evident in the Harris quote, also plays itself out in the case that a species-typical person wants to become sub-species-typical. Such behaviour is classified as a disorder, the sentiment being that no one with sound mind would seek to become sub-species-typical. Furthermore many of the so called sub-species-typical who accept their body structure and its way of functioning, use the ability language and measure employed by species-typical people to gain social acceptance and environmental accommodations. One can often hear ‘sub-species-typical people’ stating that “they can be as ‘able’ as the species-typical people if they receive the right accommodations”. Ableism Today: The Second Category The first category of ableism is only part of the ableism story. Ableism is much broader and more pervasive and not limited to the species-typical, sub-species dichotomy. The second category of ableism is a set of beliefs, processes and practices that produce a particular understanding of the self, the body, relationships with others of the species, and with other species and the environment, based on abilities that are exhibited or cherished (Wolbring, "Why"; Wolbring, "NBICS"). This form of ableism has been used historically and still is used by various social groups to justify their elevated level of rights and status in relation to other social groups, other species and to the environment they live in (Wolbring, "Why"; Wolbring, "NBICS"). In these cases the claim is not about species-typical versus sub-species-typical, but that one has - as a species or a social group- superior abilities compared to other species or other segments in ones species. Ableism reflects the sentiment of certain social groups and social structures to cherish and promote certain abilities such as productivity and competitiveness over others such as empathy, compassion and kindness (favouritism of abilities). This favouritism for certain abilities over others leads to the labelling of those who exhibit real or perceived differences from these ‘essential’ abilities, as deficient, and can lead to or justify other isms such as racism (it is often stated that the favoured race has superior cognitive abilities over other races), sexism (at the end of the 19th Century women were viewed as biologically fragile, lacking strength), emotional (exhibiting an undesirable ability), and thus incapable of bearing the responsibility of voting, owning property, and retaining custody of their own children (Wolbring, "Science"; Silvers), cast-ism, ageism (missing the ability one has as a youth), speciesism (the elevated status of the species homo sapiens is often justified by stating that the homo sapiens has superior cognitive abilities), anti-environmentalism, GDP-ism and consumerism (Wolbring, "Why"; Wolbring, "NBICS") and this superiority is seen as species-typical. This flavour of ableism is rarely questioned. Even as the less able classified group tries to show that they are as able as the other group. It is not questioned that ability is used as a measure of worthiness and judgement to start with (Wolbring, "Why"). Science and Technology and Ableism The direction and governance of science and technology and ableism are becoming increasingly interrelated. How we judge and deal with abilities and what abilities we cherish influences the direction and governance of science and technology processes, products and research and development. The increasing ability, demand for, and acceptance of changing, improving, modifying, enhancing the human body and other biological organisms including animals and microbes in terms of their structure, function or capabilities beyond their species-typical boundaries and the starting capability to synthesis, to generate, to design new genomes, new species from scratch (synthetic biology) leads to a changed understanding of oneself, one’s body, and one’s relationship with others of the species, other species and the environment and new forms of ableism and disablism. I have outlined so far the dynamics and characteristics of the existing ableism discourses. The story does not stop here. Advances in science and technology enable transhumanised forms of the two categories of ableism exhibiting similar dynamics and characteristics as seen with the non transhumanised forms of ableism. Transhumanisation of the First Category of AbleismThe transhumanised form of the first category of ableism is a network of beliefs, processes and practices that perceives the constant improvement of biological structures including the human body and functioning beyond species typical boundaries as the norm, as essential and judges an unenhanced biological structure — species-typical and sub-species-typical — including the human body as limited, defective, as a diminished state of existence (Wolbring, "Triangle"; Wolbring, "Why"; Wolbring, "Glossary"). It follows the same ideas and dynamics as its non transhumanised counterpart. It just moves the level of expected abilities from species-typical to beyond-species-typical. It follows a transhumanist model of health (43) where "health" is no longer the endpoint of biological systems functioning within species-typical, normative frameworks. In this model, all Homo sapiens — no matter how conventionally "medically healthy" — are defined as limited, defective, and in need of constant improvement made possible by new technologies (a little bit like the constant software upgrades we do on our computers). "Health" in this model means having obtained at any given time, maximum enhancement (improvement) of abilities, functioning and body structure. The transhumanist model of health sees enhancement beyond species-typical body structures and functioning as therapeutic interventions (transhumanisation of medicalisation; 2, 43). The transhumanisation of health and ableism could lead to a move in priorities away from curing sub-species-typical people towards species-typical functioning — that might be seen increasingly as futile and a waste of healthcare and medical resources – towards using health care dollars first to enhance species-typical bodies towards beyond-species-typical functioning and then later to shift the priorities to further enhance the human bodies of beyond species-typical body structures and functioning (enhancement medicine). Similar to the discourse of its non transhumanised counterpart there might not be a choice in the future to reject the enhancements. An earlier quote by Harris (Harris, "Is There") highlighted the non acceptance of sub- species-typical as a state one can be in. Harris makes in his 2007 book Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People the case that its moral to do enhancement if not immoral not to do it (Harris, "One Principle"). Keeping in mind the disablement people face who are labelled as subnormative it is reasonable to expect that those who cannot afford or do not want certain enhancements will be perceived as impaired (techno poor impaired) and will experience disablement (techno poor disabled) in tune with how the ‘impaired labelled people’ are treated today. Transhumanisation of the Second Category of Ableism The second category of Ableism is less about species-typical but about arbitrary flagging certain abilities as indicators of rights. The hierarchy of worthiness and superiority is also transhumanised.Cognition: Moving from Human to Sentient Rights Cognition is one ability used to justify many hierarchies within and between species. If it comes to pass whether through artificial intelligence advances or through cognitive enhancement of non human biological entities that other cognitive able sentient species appear one can expect that rights will eventually shift towards cognition as the measure of rights entitlement (sentient rights) and away from belonging to a given species like homo sapiens as a prerequisite of rights. If species-typical abilities are not important anymore but certain abilities are, abilities that can be added to all kind of species, one can expect that species as a concept might become obsolete or we will see a reinterpretation of species as one that exhibits certain abilities (given or natural). The Climate Change Link: Ableism and Transhumanism The disregard for nature reflects another form of ableism: humans are here to use nature as they see fit as they see themselves as superior to nature because of their abilities. We might see a climate change-driven appeal for a transhuman version of ableism, where the transhumanisation of humans is seen as a solution for coping with climate change. This could become especially popular if we reach a ‘point of no return’, where severe climate change consequences can no longer be prevented. Other Developments One Can Anticipate under a Transhumanised Form of AbleismThe Olympics would see only beyond-species-typical enhanced athletes compete (it doesn’t matter whether they were species-typical before or seen as sub-species-typical) and the transhumanised version of the Paralympics would host species and sub-species-typical athletes (Wolbring, "Oscar Pistorius"). Transhumanised versions of Abled, dis-abled, en-abled, dis-enabled, diff-abled, transable, and out-able will appear where the goal is to have the newest upgrades (abled), that one tries to out-able others by having better enhancements, that access to enhancements is seen as en-ablement and the lack of access as disenablement, that differently abled will not be used for just about sub-species-typical but for species-typical and species-sub-typical, that transable will not be about the species-typical who want to be sub-species-typical but about the beyond-species-typical who want to be species-typical. A Final WordTo answer the questions posed in the title. With the fall of the species-typical barrier it is unlikely that there will be an endpoint to the race for abilities and the sentiment of out-able-ing others (on an individual or collective level). The question remaining is who will have access to which abilities and which abilities are thought after for which purpose. I leave the reader with an exchange of two characters in the videogame Deus Ex: Invisible War, a PC and X-Box videogame released in 2003. It is another indicator for the embeddiness of ableism in societies fabric that the below is the only hit in Google for the term ‘commodification of ability’ despite the widespread societal commodification of abilities as this paper has hopefully shown. Conversation between Alex D and Paul DentonPaul Denton: If you want to even out the social order, you have to change the nature of power itself. Right? And what creates power? Wealth, physical strength, legislation — maybe — but none of those is the root principle of power.Alex D: I’m listening.Paul Denton: Ability is the ideal that drives the modern state. It's a synonym for one's worth, one's social reach, one's "election," in the Biblical sense, and it's the ideal that needs to be changed if people are to begin living as equals.Alex D: And you think you can equalise humanity with biomodification?Paul Denton: The commodification of ability — tuition, of course, but, increasingly, genetic treatments, cybernetic protocols, now biomods — has had the side effect of creating a self-perpetuating aristocracy in all advanced societies. When ability becomes a public resource, what will distinguish people will be what they do with it. Intention. Dedication. Integrity. The qualities we would choose as the bedrock of the social order. (Deus Ex: Invisible War) References British Film Institute. "Ways of Thinking about Disability." 2008. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/disability/thinking/›. Canadian Down Syndrome Society. "Down Syndrome Redefined." 2007. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.cdss.ca/site/about_us/policies_and_statements/down_syndrome.php›. Carlson, Licia. "Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation." Hypatia 16.4 (2001): 124-46. Centre for Disability Studies. "What is the Centre for Disability Studies (CDS)?" Leeds: Leeds University, 2008. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/what.htm›. Deus Ex: Invisible War. "The Commodification of Ability." Wikiquote, 2008 (2003). 25 June 2008 ‹http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Deus_Ex:_Invisible_War›. Disability and Human Development Department. "PhD in Disability Studies." Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, 2008. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.ahs.uic.edu/dhd/academics/phd.php›, ‹http://www.ahs.uic.edu/dhd/academics/phd_objectives.php›. Disabilitystudies.net. "About the disabilitystudies.net." 2008. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.disabilitystudies.net/index.php›. Duke, Winston D. "The New Biology." Reason 1972. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/irvi/irvi_34winstonduke.html›. Finkelstein, Vic. "Modelling Disability." Leeds: Disability Studies Program, Leeds University, 1996. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/finkelstein/models/models.htm›. Campbell, Fiona A.K. "Inciting Legal Fictions: 'Disability's' Date with Ontology and the Ableist Body of the Law." Griffith Law Review 10.1 (2001): 42. Harris, J. Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. Princeton University Press, 2007. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.studia.no/vare.php?ean=9780691128443›. Harris, J. "Is There a Coherent Social Conception of Disability?" Journal of Medical Ethics 26.2 (2000): 95-100. Harris, J. "One Principle and Three Fallacies of Disability Studies." Journal of Medical Ethics 27.6 (2001): 383-87. Malhotra, Ravi. "The Politics of the Disability Rights Movements." New Politics 8.3 (2001). 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue31/malhot31.htm›. Oliver, Mike. "The Politics of Disablement." Leeds: Disability Studies Program, Leeds University, 1990. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/Oliver/p%20of%20d%20Oliver%20contents.pdf›, ‹http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/Oliver/p%20of%20d%20Oliver1.pdf›. Overboe, James. "Vitalism: Subjectivity Exceeding Racism, Sexism, and (Psychiatric) Ableism." Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies 4 (2007). 25 June 2008 ‹http://web.cortland.edu/wagadu/Volume%204/Articles%20Volume%204/Chapter2.htm› ‹http://web.cortland.edu/wagadu/Volume%204/Vol4pdfs/Chapter%202.pdf›. Miller, Paul, Sophia Parker, and Sarah Gillinson. "Disablism: How to Tackle the Last Prejudice." London: Demos, 2004. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.demos.co.uk/files/disablism.pdf›. Penney, Jonathan. "A Constitution for the Disabled or a Disabled Constitution? Toward a New Approach to Disability for the Purposes of Section 15(1)." Journal of Law and Equality 1.1 (2002): 84-115. 25 June 2008 ‹http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID876878_code574775.pdf?abstractid=876878&mirid=1›. Silvers, A., D. Wasserman, and M.B. Mahowald. Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspective on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy. Landham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Society for Disability Studies (USA). "General Guidelines for Disability Studies Program." 2004. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.uic.edu/orgs/sds/generalinfo.html#4›, ‹http://www.uic.edu/orgs/sds/Guidelines%20for%20DS%20Program.doc›. Taylor, Steven, Bonnie Shoultz, and Pamela Walker. "Disability Studies: Information and Resources.". Syracuse: The Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies, Syracuse University, 2003. 25 June 2008 ‹http://thechp.syr.edu//Disability_Studies_2003_current.html#Introduction›. UNESCO. "UNESCO World Conference on Sciences Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge." 1999. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/declaration_e.htm›. UNESCO. "UNESCO World Conference on Sciences Science Agenda-Framework for Action." 1999. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/framework.htm›. Watson, James D. "Genes and Politics." Journal of Molecular Medicine 75.9 (1997): 624-36. Wolbring, G. "Science and Technology and the Triple D (Disease, Disability, Defect)." In Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science, eds. Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003. 232-43. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/›, ‹http://www.bioethicsanddisability.org/nbic.html›. Wolbring, G. "The Triangle of Enhancement Medicine, Disabled People, and the Concept of Health: A New Challenge for HTA, Health Research, and Health Policy." Edmonton: Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, Health Technology Assessment Unit, 2005. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.ihe.ca/documents/hta/HTA-FR23.pdf›. Wolbring, G. "Glossary for the 21st Century." International Center for Bioethics, Culture and Disability, 2007. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.bioethicsanddisability.org/glossary.htm›. Wolbring, G. "NBICS, Other Convergences, Ableism and the Culture of Peace." Innovationwatch.com, 2007. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.innovationwatch.com/choiceisyours/choiceisyours-2007-04-15.htm›. Wolbring, G. "Oscar Pistorius and the Future Nature of Olympic, Paralympic and Other Sports." SCRIPTed — A Journal of Law, Technology & Society 5.1 (2008): 139-60. 25 June 2008 ‹http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol5-1/wolbring.pdf›. Wolbring, G. "Why NBIC? Why Human Performance Enhancement?" Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 21.1 (2008): 25-40.
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43

Duncan, Pansy Kathleen. "The Uses of Hate: On Hate as a Political Category." M/C Journal 20, no. 1 (March 15, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1194.

Full text
Abstract:
I. First Brexit, then Trump: Has the past year or so ushered in a “wave” (Weisberg), a “barrage” (Desmond-Harris) or a “deluge” (Sidahmed) of that notoriously noxious affect, hate? It certainly feels that way to those of us identified with progressive social and political causes—those of us troubled, not just by Trump’s recent electoral victory, but by the far-right forces to which that victory has given voice. And yet the questions still hanging over efforts to quantify emotional or affective states leaves the claim that there has been a clear spike in hate moot (Ngai 26; Massumi 136-7; Ahmed, Promise 3-8). So let’s try asking a different question. Has this same period seen a rise, across liberal media platforms, in the rhetorical work of “hate-attribution”? Here, at least, an answer seems in readier reach. For no one given to scrolling distractedly through liberal Anglophone media outlets, from The New York Times, to The Guardian, to Slate, will be unfamiliar with a species of journalism that, in reporting the appalling activities associated with what has become known as the “alt-right” (Main; Wallace-Wells; Gourarie), articulates those activities in the rubric of a calculable uptick in hate itself.Before the U.S. Presidential election, this fledgling journalistic genre was already testing its wings, its first shudderings felt everywhere from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s widely publicized documentary, Hate Rising (2016), which explores the rise of white supremacist movements across the South-West U.S, to an edition of Slate’s Trumpcast entitled “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate,” which broached the torment-by-Twitter of left-wing journalist David French. In the wake of the election, and the appalling acts of harassment and intimidation it seemed to authorize, the genre gained further momentum—leading to the New Yorker’s “Hate Is on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” to The Guardian’s “Trump’s Election led to Barrage of Hate,” and to Vox’s “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” And it still has traction today, judging not just by James King’s recent year-in-review column, “The Year in Hate: From Donald Trump to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” but by Salon’s “A Short History of Hate” which tracks the alt-right’s meteoric 2016 rise to prominence, and the New York Times’ recently launched hate-speech aggregator, “This Week in Hate.”As should already be clear from these brisk, thumbnail accounts of the texts in question, the phenomena alluded to by the titular term “hate” are not instances of hate per se, but rather instances of “hate-speech.” The word “hate,” in other words, is being deployed here not literally, to refer to an emotional state, but metonymically, as a shorthand for “hate-speech”—a by-now widely conventionalized and legally codified parlance originating with the U.N. Declaration to describe “violent or violence-inciting speech or acts that “aim or intend to inflict injury, or incite prejudice or hatred, against persons of groups” because of their ethnic, religious, sexual or social affiliation. And there is no doubt that, beyond the headlines, these articles do incredibly important work, drawing connections between, and drawing attention to, a host of harmful activities associated with the so-called “alt-right”—from a pair of mangled, pretzel-shaped swastikas graffiti-ed in a children’s playground, to acts of harassment, intimidation and violence against women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people, to Trump’s own racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tweets. Yet the fact that an emotion-term like hate is being mobilized across these texts as a metonym for the “alt-right” is no oratorical curio. Rather, it perpetuates a pervasive way of thinking about the relationship between the alt-right (a political phenomenon) and hate (an emotional phenomenon) that should give pause to those of us committed to mining that vein of cultural symptomatology now consigned, across the social sciences and critical humanities, to affect theory. Specifically, these headlines inscribe, in miniature, a kind of micro-assessment, a micro-geography and micro-theory of hate. First, they suggest that, even prior to its incarnation in specific, and dangerous, forms of speech or action, hate is in and of itself anathema, a phenomenon so unquestioningly dangerous that a putative “rise” or “spike” in its net presence provides ample pretext for a news headline. Second, they propose that hate may be localized to a particular social or political group—a group subsisting, unsurprisingly, on that peculiarly contested frontier between the ideological alt-right and the American Midwest. And third, they imply that hate is so indubitably the single most significant source of the xenophobic, racist and sexist activities they go on to describe that it may be casually used as these activities’ lexical proxy. What is crystallizing here, I suggest, is what scholars of rhetoric dub a rhetorical “constellation” (Campbell and Jamieson 332)—a constellation from which hate emerges as, a) inherently problematic, b) localizable to the “alt-right,” and, c) the primary engine of the various activities and expressions we associate with them. This constellation of conventions for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movement has coalesced into a “genre” we might dub the genre of “hate-attribution.” Yet while it’s far from clear that the genre is an effective one in a political landscape that’s fast becoming a political battleground, it hasn’t appeared by chance. Treating “hate,” then, less as a descriptive “grid of analysis” (Sedgwick 152), than as a rhetorical projectile, this essay opens by interrogating the “hate-attribution” genre’s logic and querying its efficacy. Having done so, it approaches the concept of “alternatives” by asking: how might calling time on the genre help us think differently about both hate itself and about the forces catalyzing, and catalyzed by, Trump’s presidential campaign? II.The rhetorical power of the genre of hate-attribution, of course, isn’t too difficult to pin down. An emotion so thoroughly discredited that its assignment is now in and of itself a term of abuse (see, for example, the O.E.D’s freshly-expanded definition of the noun “hater”), hate is an emotion the Judeo-Christian tradition deems not just responsible for but practically akin to murder (John 3:1). In part as a result of this tradition, hate has proven thoroughly resistant to efforts to elevate it from the status of an expression of a subject’s pestiferous inner life to the status of a polemical response to an object in the world. Indeed, while a great deal of the critical energy amassing under the rubric of “affect theory” has recently been put into recuperating the strategic or diagnostic value of emotions long scorned as irrelevant to oppositional struggle—from irritation and envy, to depression, anger and shame (Ngai; Cvetkovich; Gould; Love)—hate has notably not been among them. In fact, those rare scholarly accounts of affect that do address “hate,” notably Ahmed’s excellent work on right-wing extremist groups in the United Kingdom, display an understandable reluctance to rehabilitate it for progressive thought (Cultural Politics). It should come as no surprise, then, that the genre of “hate-attribution” has a rare rhetorical power. In identifying “hate” as the source of a particular position, gesture or speech-act, we effectively drain said position, gesture or speech-act of political agency or representational power—reducing it from an at-least-potentially polemical action in or response to the world, to the histrionic expression of a reprehensible personhood. Yet because hate’s near-taboo status holds across the ideological and political spectrum, what is less clear is why the genre of hate-attribution has achieved such cachet in the liberal media in particular. The answer, I would argue, lies in the fact that the work of hate-attribution dovetails all too neatly with liberal political theory’s longstanding tendency to laminate its social and civic ideals to affective ideals like “love,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” and, when in a less demonstrative humor, “tolerance”. As Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions has recently shown, this tradition has an impressive philosophical pedigree, running from Aristotle’s philia (16), John Locke’s “toleration” and David Hume’s “sympathy” (69-75), to the twentieth century’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its promotion of “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” And while the labour of what Lauren Berlant calls “liberal sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza”, 636) has never quite died away, it does seem to have found new strength with the emergence of the “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, Queen)—from its recent popular apotheosis in the Clinton campaign’s notorious “Love Trumps Hate” (a slogan in which “love,” unfortunately, came to look a lot like resigned technocratic quietism in the face of ongoing economic and environmental crisis [Zizek]), to its revival as a philosophical project among progressive scholars, many of them under the sway of the so-called “affective turn” (Nussbaum; Hardt; Sandoval; hooks). No surprise, then, that liberalism’s struggle to yoke itself to “love” should have as its eerie double a struggle to locate among its ideological and political enemies an increasingly reified “hate”. And while the examples of this project we’ve touched on so far have hailed from popular media, this set of protocols for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movements is not unique to media circles. It’s there in political discourse, as in ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement, on MSNBC, that “Americans will unite against [Trump’s] hatred.” And it’s there, too, in academic media studies, from FLOW journal’s November 2016 call for papers inviting respondents to comment, among other things, on “the violence and hatred epitomized by Trump and his supporters,” to the SCMS conference’s invitation to members to participate in a pop-up panel entitled “Responding to Hate, Disenfranchisement and the Loss of the Commons.” Yet while the labor of hate-attribution to which many progressive forces have become attached carries an indisputable rhetorical force, it also has some profound rhetorical flaws. The very same stigma, after all, that makes “hate” such a powerful explanatory grenade to throw also makes it an incredibly tough one to land. As Ahmed’s analysis of the online rhetoric of white supremacist organizations should remind us (Cultural Politics), most groups structured around inciting and promoting violence against women and minorities identify, perversely, not as hate groups, but as movements propelled by the love of race and nation. And while left-wing pundits pronounce “hate” the signature emotion of a racist, misogynist Trump-voting right, supporters of Trump ascribe it, just as routinely, to the so-called “liberal elite,” a group whose mythical avatars—from the so-called “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW,” to the supercilious Washington politico—are said to brand “ordinary [white, male] Americans” indiscriminately as racist, misogynistic, homophobic buffoons. Thus, for example, The Washington Post’s uncanny, far-right journalistic alter-ego, The Washington Times, dubs the SPLC a “liberal hate group”; the Wikipedia mirror-site, Conservapedia, recasts liberal objections to gun violence as “liberal hate speech” driven by an “irrational aversion to weapons”; while one blood-curdling sub-genre of reportage on Steve Bannon’s crypto-fascist soapbox, Breitbart News, is devoted to denouncing what it calls “ ‘anti-White Racism.’” It’s easy enough, of course, to defend the hate-attribution genre’s liberal incarnations while dismissing its right-wing variants as cynical, opportunistic shams, as Ahmed does (Cultural Politics)—thereby re-establishing the wellspring of hate where we are most comfortable locating it: among our political others. Yet to do so seems, in some sense, to perpetuate a familiar volley of hate-attribution. And to the extent that, as many media scholars have shown (Philips; Reed; Tett; Turow), our digital, networked political landscape is in danger of being reduced to a silo-ed discursive battleground, the ritual exchange of terminological grenades that everyone seems eager to propel across ideological lines, but that no one, understandably, seems willing to pick up, seems counter-productive to say the least.Even beyond the genre’s ultimate ineffectiveness, what should strike anyone used to reflecting on affect is how little justice it does to the ubiquity and intricacy of “hate” as an affective phenomenon. Hate is not and cannot be the exclusive property or preserve of one side of the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s critical faculties too far to see the extent to which the genre of hate-attribution participates in the emotional ballistics it condemns or seeks to redress. While trafficking in a relatively simple hate-paradigm (as a subjective emotional state that may be isolated to a particular person or group), the genre itself incarnates a more complex, socially dynamic model of hate in which the emotion operates through logics of projection perhaps best outlined by Freud. In the “hate-attribution” genre, that is, hate—like those equally abjected categories “sentimentality,” “worldliness” or “knowingness” broached by Sedgwick in her bravura analyses of “scapegoating attribution” (150-158)—finds its clearest expression in and through the labor of its own adscription. And it should come as no surprise that an emotion so widely devalued, where it is not openly prohibited, might also find expression in less overt form.Yet to say as much is by no means to discredit the genre. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, there’s no particular reason why “the passions and emotions that lie behind a particular speech act” (34)—even up to and including hate—should devalue the speech acts they rouse. On the contrary, to pin the despicable and damaging activities of the so-called “alt right” on “hate” is, if anything, to do an injustice to a rich and complex emotion that can be as generative as it can be destructive. As Freud suggests in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” for example, hate may be the very seed of love, since the forms of “social feeling” (121) celebrated under the liberal rubric of “tolerance,” “love,” and “compassion,” are grounded in “the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (121; italics mine). Indeed, Freud projects this same argument across a larger, historical canvas in Civilization and its Discontents, which contends that it is in our very struggle to combat our “aggressive instincts” that human communities have developed “methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (31). For Freud, that is, the practice of love is a function of ongoing efforts to see hate harnessed, commuted and transformed. III.What might it mean, then, to call time on this round of hate-attribution? What sort of “alternatives” might emerge when we abandon the assumption that political engagement entails a “struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 131), and thus, by that same token, a struggle over the exact location and source of hate? One boon, I suggest, is the license it gives those of us on the progressive left to simply own our own hate. There’s little doubt that reframing the dangerous and destructive forms of speech fomented by Trump’s campaign, not as eruptions of hate, or even as “hate-speech,” but as speech we hate would be more consistent with what once seemed affect theory’s first commandment: to take our own affective temperature before launching headlong into critical analysis. After all, when Lauren Berlant (“Trump”) takes a stab at economist Paul Krugman’s cautions against “the Danger of Political Emotions” with the timely reminder that “all the messages are emotional,” the “messages” she’s pointing to aren’t just those of our political others, they’re ours; and the “emotions” she’s pointing to aren’t just the evacuated, insouciant versions of love championed by the Clinton campaign, they’re of the messier, or as Ngai might put it, “uglier” (2) variety—from shame, depression and anger, to, yes, I want to insist, hate.By way of jump-starting this program of hate-avowal, then, let me just say it: this essay was animated, in part, by a certain kind of hate. The social critic in me hates the breathtaking simplification of the complex social, economic and emotional forces animating Trump voters that seem to actuate some liberal commentary; the psychologist in me hates the self-mystification palpable in the left’s insistence on projecting and thus disowning its own (often very well justified) aggressions; and the human being in me, hating the kind of toxic speech to which Trump’s campaign has given rise, wishes to be able to openly declare that hatred. Among its other effects, hate is characterized by hypervigilance for lapses or failings in an object it deems problematic, a hypervigilance that—sometimes—animates analysis (Zeki and Romoya). In this sense, “hate” seems entitled to a comfortable place in the ranks of what Nick Salvato has recently dubbed criticism’s creative “obstructions”—phenomena that, while “routinely identified as detriments” to critical inquiry, may also “form the basis for … critical thinking” (1).Yet while one boon associated with this disclosure might be a welcome intellectual honesty, a more significant boon, I’d argue, is what getting this disclosure out of the way might leave room for. Opting out of the game of hurling “hate” back and forth across a super-charged political arena, that is, we might devote our column inches and Facebook posts to the less sensational but more productive task of systematically challenging the specious claims, and documenting the damaging effects, of a species of utterance (Butler; Matsuda; Waldron) we’ve grown used to simply descrying as pure, distilled “hate”. And we also might do something else. Relieved of the confident conviction that we can track “Trumpism” to a spontaneous outbreak of a single, localizable emotion, we might be able to offer a fuller account of the economic, social, political and affective forces that energize it. Certainly, hate plays a part here—although the process by which, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, affect “make[s] present, vivid and mattering … a worldly world” (371) demands that we scrutinize that hate as a syndrome, rather than simply moralize it as a sin, addressing its mainsprings in a moment marked by the nerve-fraying and life-fraying effects of what has become known across the social sciences and critical humanities as conditions of social and economic “precarity” (Muehlebach; Neil and Rossiter; Stewart).But perhaps hate’s not the only emotion tucked away under the hood. Here’s something affect theory knows today: affect moves not, as more traditional theorists of political emotion have it, “unambiguously and predictably from one’s cognitive processing,” but in ways that are messy, muddled and indirect (Gould 24). That form of speech is speech we hate. But it may not be “hate speech.” That crime is a crime we hate. But it may not be a “hate-crime.” One of the critical tactics we might crib from Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is that of decoding and decrypting, in even the most hateful acts, an instance of what Berlant, herself optimistically, calls “optimism.” For Berlant, after all, optimism is very often cruel, attaching itself, as it seems to have done in 2016, to scenes, objects and people that, while ultimately destined to “imped[e] the aim that brought [it to them] initially,” nevertheless came to seem, to a good portion of the electorate, the only available exponent of that classic good-life genre, “the change that’s gonna come” (“Trump” 1-2) at a moment when the Democratic party’s primary campaign promise was more of the free-market same. And in a recent commentary on Trump’s rise in The New Inquiry (“Trump”), Berlant exemplified the kind of critical code-breaking this hypothesis might galvanize, deciphering a twisted, self-mutilating optimism in even the most troublesome acts, claims or positions. Here’s one translation: “Anti-P.C. means: I feel unfree.” And here’s another: “people react negatively, reactively and literally to Black Lives Matter, reeling off the other ‘lives’ that matter.” Berlant’s transcription? “They feel that they don’t matter, and they’re not wrong.”ReferencesAhmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge, 2004.Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010.———. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. 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Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.Sidahmed, Mazin. “Trump's Election Led to 'Barrage of Hate', Report Finds.” The Guardian 29 Nov. 2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/29/trump-related-hate-crimes-report-southern-poverty-law-center>.Stengers, Isabelle. “Wondering about Materialism.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Philosophy and Realism. Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, 2001. 368-380. Stewart, Kathleen. “Precarity’s Forms.” Cultural Anthropology 27.3 (2012): 518-525. Tett, Gillian. The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.Waldron, Jeremy. The Harm in Hate Speech. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 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