Corrupting Conversations with the Marquis de Sade: On Education,Gender, and Sexuality

In this essay, the author joins a conversation started by Martin (Reclaiming the conversation: the ideal of the educated woman. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985) regarding gender and education seeking to extend the conversation to address sexuality. To do so, the author brings a reading of the Marquis de Sade to challenge the emphasis on reproduction in education as it relates to gendered and sexual norms. The author, following Martin’s approach in Reclaiming the Conversation, reads one particular text of Sade’s—Philosophy in the Bedroom—to argue for queer possibilities that Sade brings to the conversation around gender and sexuality within twenty-first century education. The Marquis de Sade may viscerally seem an inappropriate choice to return to and use to join the conversation, but his novelic imagination incites complications in the conversation. Following in the footsteps of Martin’s re-reading of historic philosophical texts the author offers not only another layer of thinking about “female education,” but also opens up space for engaging gender and sexuality in the history and philosophy of education. As issues around gender and sexed bodies become ever more present and contested in educational discourses, does Sade continue the conversation in ways that corrupt the reproductive aims of education?     

Drama,intimacy, and vulnerability: the spiritual challenges of digital culture

The ever-increasing engagement of children and youth in social media and gaming activities online has created new challenges for scholars and practitioners of children’s spirituality. Bringing psychosocial and media studies research on the phenomena of adolescent ‘drama’ and morality, cyberbullying, and the vulnerable adolescent’s desire for intimacy and community into conversation with ideas about and practices for children’s spiritual nurture is essential work. Questions about the positive and negative influences of digital participation on moral imagination, levels of aggression and prosocial behaviours in social media communication, and the extent to which intimate relationships can be developed online are key concerns to be explored in this article.     

Learning about Teaching in Communities: Lessons for Faculty Development

Abstract. While teaching workshops like those offered by the Wabash Center provide a unique opportunity for scholars to reflect on their teaching, three elements important to the workshops’ success can be effective in institutional settings as well. Certain characteristics of community, conversation stimulated by differences, and appropriate attention to self‐care help create an environment supportive of faculty development throughout a scholar's career.     

Scientific Research and Human Rights: A Response to Kitcher on the Limitations of Inquiry

In his recent work exploring the role of science in democratic societies Kitcher (Science in a democratic society. Prometheus Books, New York, 2011) claims that scientists ought to have a prominent role in setting the agenda for and limits to research. Against the backdrop of the claim that the proper limits of scientific inquiry is John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle (Kitcher in Science, truth, and democracy. Oxford University Press, New York, 2001), he identifies the limits of inquiry as the point where the outcomes of research could cause harm to already vulnerable populations. Nonetheless, Kitcher argues against explicit limitations on unscrupulous research on the grounds that restrictions would exacerbate underlying social problems. I show that Kitcher’s argument in favor of dissuading inquiry through conventional standards is problematic and falls prey to the same critique he offers in opposition to official bans. I expand the conversation of limiting scientific research by recognizing that the actions that count as ‘science’ are located in the space between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’. In this space, we often attempt to balance freedom of research, as scientific speech, against the disparate impact citizens might experience in light of such research. I end by exploring if such disparate impact justifies limiting research, within the context of the United States, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or under international human rights standards more generally.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

Honoring (Recollecting) Our Memory of Peter McHugh as Social Theorist

The recent death of Peter McHugh becomes an occasion for the remembrance and recollection of the distinctive form of reflexive or analytic social inquiry, which framed his work and that of his longtime friend and collaborator, Alan Blum. Following dual appointments at York University, Toronto, Canada in 1972, Blum and McHugh’s partnership formed the basis for a community of scholars and students throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. A brief review of McHugh and Blum’s works shows theoretical roots in social constructivism and a deep appreciation of the linguistic turn, which in turn lead to the development of a form of social analysis that meets the stringent requirements of a reflexive sociology by repudiating any claim to a privileged exemption of theoretical speech (practice) from the hermeneutical circle of speech and language. Blum and McHugh are shown to embrace and not to evade the hermeneutical circle by a form of social inquiry that subverts the inherent possibilities available within speech and social convention to make available an encounter with the (moral) authority or form of life for that self-same speech. With each example of everyday life or conventional usage, McHugh (and Blum) move from theorizing which formulates the complexity of a particular instance of social interaction through its rules, to the question of the form of life that make that particular instance of the rules possible. It is the pursuit of transparency between speech and its roots in language that informed and continues to inform the distinctive style of social theory fostered at York-Toronto under the orchestration of McHugh and Blum.     

Scanning the Landscape of Narrative Inquiry

Narrative inquiry in psychology has become a richly hued endeavor with multiple and significant implications for social and personality investigation. Such inquiry first represents an important venue for dialogue between psychologists and scholars from across the social sciences and humanities. Furthermore, the focus on narrative invigorates concern with the sociocultural context of human action. This article reviews some of the major lines of inquiry in narrative psychology. The narrative structuring of reality, the achievement of narrative intelligibility in conversation, and the function of narrative in individual life experiences, all receive attention. This review also reveals how narrative inquiry has added importantly to social and personality psychology in its enhancement of critical sensitivities, methodological tools, and investments in social action.     

Memory for conversation and the development of common ground

Efficient conversation is guided by the mutual knowledge, or common ground, that interlocutors form as a conversation progresses. Characterized from the perspective of commonly used measures of memory, efficient conversation should be closely associated with item memory—what was said—and context memory—who said what to whom. However, few studies have explicitly probed memory to evaluate what type of information is maintained following a communicative exchange. The current study examined how item and context memory relate to the development of common ground over the course of a conversation, and how these forms of memory vary as a function of one’s role in a conversation as speaker or listener. The process of developing common ground was positively related to both item and context memory. In addition, content that was spoken was remembered better than content that was heard. Our findings illustrate how memory assessments can complement language measures by revealing the impact that basic conversational processes have on memory for what has been discussed. By taking this approach, we show that not only does the process of forming common ground facilitate communication in the present, but it also promotes an enduring record of that event, facilitating conversation into the future.     

Dis/Assembling Schizophrenia on YouTube: Theorizing an Analog Body in a Virtual Sphere

As visual technologies become increasingly networked online, websites like YouTube provide a space to share vlogs (video blogs) online, suggest related content for viewers, and help in/form virtual communities, including those of mental illness. Within this space, vlogs of schizophrenia and comments generated about them by other users can represent transitional, dialogical states of illness that speak back to the analog body and affect a body’s way of being in the world. Moreover, as vlogs create resistance against static definitions of schizophrenia, they may foster a creativity, experimentation, and inventiveness that transforms understandings of schizophrenia within the sciences and humanities.     

Referees, editors, and publication practices: Improving the reliability and usefulness of the peer review system

The documented low levels of reliability of the peer review process present a serious challenge to editors who must often base their publication decisions on conflicting referee recommendations. The purpose of this article is to discuss this process and examine ways to produce a more reliable and useful peer review system. The author is a Senior Research Scientist & Biostatistician, Child Study Center and Department of Psychiatry in the Yale University School of Medicine. Note: The main points of this report were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 9, 1996.     

New Horizons: A Center for Research into Information and Religion

This article introduces the creation of a new research center focused on the study of information and religion. The Center, located at Kent State University, provides a new opportunity for scholars in the field of library and information science to collaborate with researchers in other disciplines in the exploration of many potential intersections of information and religion. The Center founders have already begun to present and publish in this area. Planned symposia and an annual conference add to the exposure of interested parties to ongoing studies in this field.     

Between lived and the law: power,empire, and expansion in studies of North American religions

Taking debates about the Park51 (or ‘Ground Zero’) mosque and Islamic Community Center as a case study, this article demonstrates the need for scholars of religious traditions in North America to move beyond liberal modes of historicizing that pluralize narratives about religion but ignore how religion is defined and regulated. Liberal modes of historicizing create space for different traditions by first naturalizing differences as ostensibly fixed, inherent, and eternal – a dynamic that has proven to produce antagonistic narratives and relations as well as ‘tolerant’ ones. This is in part due to the fact that such narratives somewhat broaden the inclusivity of the U.S. public sphere but in so doing obscure the various means and power dynamics by which the boundaries of acceptable religiosity are policed. Finally, this article examines and offers analyses that provide more robust mechanisms by which to understand issues of religious diversity and liberty in the United States.     

Aspects of Repetition in Bonobo–Human Conversation: Creating Cohesion in a Conversation Between Species

Ape language research has primarily focused on specific isolated language features. In contrast, in research into human language, traditions such as conversational analysis and discourse analysis propose to study language as actual discourse. Consequently, repetitions are seen as accomplishing various discursive and pragmatic functions in human conversations, while in apes, repetitions are seen as rote imitations and as proof that apes do not exhibit language. Tools from discourse analysis are applied in this study to a conversation between a language-competent bonobo, Pan paniscus and a human. The hypothesis is that the bonobo may exhibit even larger linguistic competency in ordinary conversation than in controlled experimental settings. Despite her limited productive means, the bonobo Panbanisha competently engages in co-constructing the conversational turns. She uses shared knowledge and repetitions to achieve compliance with a request. This reveals a knowledge about socio-linguistic interactions which goes beyond the pure informational content of words. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Reflections on a Community Psychology Setting and the Future of the Field

The 50th anniversary of the Swampscott Conference offers an opportunity to reflect on a community psychology setting, The Consultation Center at Yale, that was formed in response to the 1963 Community Mental Health Act and the 1965 Swampscott Conference. The Center has flourished as a community psychology setting for practice, research, and training for 39 of the 50 years since Swampscott. Its creation and existence over this period offers an opportunity for reflection on the types of settings needed to sustain the field into the future.     

The Platonic conception of intellectual virtues: its significance for virtue epistemology

Synthese - Several contemporary virtue scholars (e.g. Zagzebski in Virtues of the mind: an inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical foundations of knowledge, Cambridge University Press,...     

Social Change Movements and the Struggle Over Meaning-Making: A Case Study of Domestic Violence Narratives

Social movement theorists have emphasized the important role of meaning-making for social change movements (e.g., D. A. Snow and R. D. Benford, 1992, In: A. D. Morris & C. M. Mueller (Eds.) Frontiers in social movement theory. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, pp 133-155; C. M. Mueller, 1992, In: A. D. Morris & C. M. Mueller (Eds.) Frontiers in social movement theory. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, pp 3-26). Using the domestic violence movement as a case study, this study undertakes a close analysis of advocates' narratives about the phenomenon of domestic violence. This analysis sheds light on the current status of the movement as a social change movement attempting to promote alternative understandings of domestic violence as a social, rather than individual, problem. Study findings provide some evidence that the domestic violence movement has become increasingly de-politicized by documenting a range of narratives that convey an apolitical, degendered, individual-level analysis of domestic violence.     

Following Foucault: Tall stories of mapping and inhabiting Pierre Rivière's landscapes as a 21st century inquiry

This paper documents the research methods adopted in a series of workshops on Pierre Rivière that took place at the University of Bristol. A group of scholars from Europe and Australia used philosophical, narrative, performative and artful approaches to re-examine the life of Pierre Rivière and family as documented by Michel Foucault (1975) and his team. They watched the film of the book (Allio, 1976) listened to emerging papers and wrote themselves into pivotal moments within the narratives they heard. They conducted narrative family therapy sessions with the ‘Rivière family’ and wrote themselves into the ensuing moments of evocation and connection. They made dolls, and wrote themselves into the voices of those dolls, and they gave presentations about how Pierre Rivière might be positioned within contemporary therapeutic, educational and media discourses. They wanted to find out if different kinds of knowledge might emerge from these ways of doing research differently. And yet it seemed that whatever form of inquiry they undertook, other subliminal, imaginary, fantasy and folk and fairy tale narratives seeped under efforts to produce rational, coherent academic texts. This paper explores this dual process of investigation in real time accompanied by eruptions into imaginary folklore and fairy story times, with segues into contemporary, fantastical stories of horror and murder. Each step the research team took became a doubled step, involving doubled listening and doubled knowing. To this end they have represented their research process (after Lather, 2007) as a doubled text and yet they have still not fully captured the emotional space of the workshops they inhabited. It was as if they were, for the short, intense period of time they were working together, collectively emotionally disassociated.     

You Can Get Here From There

This paper is a review of my development from psychology intern and research assistant to the psychoanalytic tester and theoretician David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in the 1940s, through my career in psychological testing, my psychoanalytic training in the Western New England Institute, and my working successively at the Austen Riggs Center, Yale Department of Psychiatry, Yale Student Mental Health Center, Cornell Department of Psychiatry, and eventually private practice in New York City. During this period, I rose to the academic rank of Professor and the analytic position of Training Analyst. I have written extensively: first on testing, then more or less in turn on psychoanalytic ego psychology, action language for psychoanalysis, feminist issues, narrative in psychoanalysis, and the contemporary Kleinians of London. This memoir traces the intellectual continuity that characterizes these writings and my continuing development as a psycho-analyst—my first ambition and great love.     

The word "bioethics": the struggle over its earliest meanings.

An article by Warren Reich in the December 1994 issue of this journal concludes that the word "bioethics" and the field of study it names experienced a "bilocated birth" in 1970/1971 under Van Rensselaer Potter, at the University of Wisconsin, and André Hellegers, at Georgetown University. Further historical inquiry confirms (1) that there were, from the start, some major differences -- even clashes -- between the Potter and the Hellegers/Georgetown understandings of bioethics; and (2) that the Hellegers/Georgetown approach came to be the more widely accepted meaning of the term, while Potter's idea of bioethics remained largely marginalized. However, this inquiry also results in a third, unanticipated, conclusion: that Hellegers (in contrast to the dominant model offered by the Georgetown scholars) actually proposed a global approach to bioethics, bringing his vision much closer to Potter's evolving view than previously has been acknowledged.