Telling It Slant: Gender Roles,Power, and Narrative Style in the First Ladies' Autobiographies

This article examines the first ladies' autobiographies as works that reveal their author-subjects' perspectives and interpretations. Attention is focused on the White House years and, more specifically, on the author-subjects' depiction of their performance of the gender-based roles attributed to the first ladyship. Consistent patterns are identified in the autobiographers' narrative styles, with a slant (persuasive) narrative style predominating and a direct (argumentative) narrative style typically reserved to countering critics. The implications of this interpretation, for the individual first ladies and for the institution of the first ladyship, are profound.     

'Stream of consciousness' and 'ownership of thought' in indigenous people in central Australia

Fifteen Central Australian Aboriginal adults (8 patients, 7 colleagues) were presented with a culturally modified version of Flavell's 'stream of consciousness' experiment (pictures of persons with empty or 'busy' thought-bubbles, and an invitation to assign a picture to the mental state of a second experimenter seen reading or sitting quietly). Only 4 people assigned the empty thought bubble to the quiet experimenter. This result was at least as good as that of a sample of Stanford College students tested by Flavell. The experiment provoked detailed comments from the informants about subjectivity, suggesting great subtlety of phenomenological awareness in Central Australian Aboriginal people, and attributing a kind of subjectivity to non-human entities, including inanimate elements. We learnt that the Western Deserts dialect term watiya was reserved for the subjectivity attributed to trees and rocks. The ownership of all thought was attributed to the tjukurpa (the Aboriginal dreaming). These Aboriginal cultural attributions were compared and contrasted with reflections developed by Jung and the post-Jungian David Holt on the nature of subjectivity, and religious notions of the redemption of matter.     

The Politics of Ethics in Human Services: Dueling Discourses

How ethics in human services is a political activity, shaping social relationships, is explored through the examination of two opposing discourses, a principle-based and a situated/relational narrative. Factors such as neo-liberalism, managerialism, and the risk-aversive society give a context for the reasons that the principle-based discourse has been the predominant influence, and what interests are served by this trope taking center stage. A delineation and critique of both perspectives are provided, including an explanation of the epistemological underpinnings of these discourses. The piece ends with what needs to be done to strengthen ethics.     

Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view

Strong disagreements have stymied today’s political discourse. We investigate intellectual humility – recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and appreciating others’ intellectual strengths – as one factor that can make disagreements more constructive. In Studies 1 and 2, participants with higher intellectual humility were more open to learning about the opposition’s views during imagined disagreements. In Study 3, those with higher intellectual humility exposed themselves to a greater proportion of opposing political perspectives. In Study 4, making salient a growth mindset of intelligence boosted intellectual humility, and, in turn, openness to opposing views. Results suggest that intellectual humility is associated with openness during disagreement, and that a growth mindset of intelligence may increase intellectual humility. Implications for current political polarization are discussed.     

Rethinking Compassion: Toward a Political Account of the Partisan Gender Gap in the United States

Scholarship on the political gender gap in the United States has attributed women's political views to their greater compassion, yet individual‐level measures of compassion have almost never been used to directly examine such claims. We address this issue using the only nationally representative survey to include psychometrically validated measures of compassion alongside appropriate political variables. We show that even though women are more compassionate in the aggregate than men in some respects, this added compassion does not explain the gender gap in partisanship. Female respondents report having more tender feelings towards the less fortunate, but these empathetic feelings are not associated with partisan identity. Women also show a slightly greater commitment to a principle of care, but this principle accounts for little of the partisan gap between men and women and has no significant relationship with partisanship after accounting for gender differences in egalitarian political values.     

Prophecy,Ethical Constraints,and Unjust Silence

Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt seeks to reorient the conversation among religious ethicists and political theorists about religion in public life. Rather than focus on religious speech in general, Kaveny distinguishes deliberation and indictment as forms of discourse, and she subjects indictment to ethical evaluation. She aims to constrain the public exercise of inordinate indictment, while encouraging prophetic indictment that meets the demands of justice. While the book is a much‐needed corrective, Kaveny's focus on the powerful rhetoric of prophetic indictment omits the harms that can come to the body politic from unjust silence. Such silence deserves more moral attention.     

Assembling the Whale: Parliaments in the Politics of Nature

Abstarct

In the field of science and technology studies (STS), much research has been concerned with politics. Nevertheless STS research tends to disregard the work of conventional political institutions such as parliaments, especially in the politics of nature, which is often seen as delegating ‘nature’ to science. Parliaments work on nature-objects through documents; paperwork is crucial in its procedures for delegating an issue to be further worked upon at other sites, for securing the issue's return and for enabling a decision. This mode of circulating an issue amounts to a central infrastructure for taking nature into account in politics; this infrastructure enables ‘assembling work’ as a specific mode of parliamentary practice. In the late nineteenth century the Norwegian parliament handled a controversy over whaling. New species, questions and publics were entangled with the whale issue through the parliament's work, its tools and procedures. As such, parliament enabled, worked upon and modified the issue. By assembling the whale issue it performed a politics of nature in rich, complex ways. Hence, understanding the specific site where an issue is taken up is necessary in order to grasp its trajectory and to understand how conventional political sites do politics of nature in practice     

The changing dynamics of religious authority on Pakistani religious television

This paper analyses the production, ownership and control of Pakistani religious talk shows, which have emerged as a popular genre of religious programming, subsequent to the liberalisation of Pakistani media in 2002. Much scholarship has implicated the nexus between Islam and televisual media in enabling the fragmentation of religious authority, by altering ‘lay’ engagements with Islam and thereby eliciting wider participation in religious discourse. In contrast, this paper focuses on the changing terms of asserting religious authority in the newly liberalised media context. Based on an analysis of the innovative formats and modes of editorial control characterising contemporary religious shows, I posit the significance of religious talk shows in both altering the nature of scholarly participation in religious public debate, and subjecting featured scholars to non-scholarly interests and agendas. I argue that the latter two insights into the nature of religious authority on television are only accessible from a production-based perspective, which is crucial for evaluating the wider implications of broadcast media for religious authority.