正义的社会:是现实的批判还是理想的建构——从马克思和罗尔斯的自由平等的正义观谈起

马克思与罗尔斯对正义社会的要求是自由平等的,但是二人对于自由平等观的正义社会是不同的,马克思是从现实社会出发,是一种批判的正义观,而罗尔斯是根据一种社会契约来建构正义的社会,建构的是理想社会的正义观,通过对二人正义观的比较,我们能够得出对于现行社会的启示。     

Cultural intertexts and scientific rationality: the case of pregnancy ultrasound

The text begins a line of dialogue between feminist and epistemological work in the life sciences using a case study of the concepts ‘foetus’ and ‘baby’ in diagnostic ultrasound and parental discourse. The case material illustrates the multiple, coexisting registers of clinical discourse and the significance of cultural intertexts, the insertion within biomedical discourse of concepts from other cultural domains. It follows that biomedical rationality lacks the autonomy that Canguilhem argued it has; rather than giving itself its own laws, biomedical rationality is heteronomous, receiving and using cultural intertexts from many and varied domains.     

Peddling a semiotics of fear: a critical examination of scare tactics and commercial strategies in public health promotion

In this study, we critically examine the ways in which a nationwide health promotion campaign – the 2013 Diabetes UK/Tesco diabetes campaign, the largest of its kind in the UK – seeks to raise the general public's awareness of Type 2 diabetes. We subject a series of six campaign images (including their layout and accompanying text) to a multimodal discourse analysis, identifying the presence of a range of fear-inducing, stigmatising and commercial strategies, through which the campaign emphasises the dangers of diabetes and advocates personal responsibility for assessing both individual and others' risk of the disease. Specifically, we describe, in multi-semiotic detail, three discursive techniques deployed in the campaign to achieve these ends: (1) the depiction of grief and amplification of diabetes-related danger, (2) the promotion of diabetes risk and localisation of individuals' responsibility for their health and (3) the commercial branding and framing of the Diabetes UK/Tesco partnership – including the promotion of goods and services – as a means of diabetes prevention and management. Our findings raise concerns about the moral legitimacy of using fear-inducing and commercial strategies in order to (effectively) raise public awareness of and responses to Type 2 diabetes, strategies which do little to address the environmental factors which are associated with increasing rates of the disease.     

Beauty is not always better: perfect babies and the tyranny of paediatric norms

During the early twentieth century, better baby contests were all the rage at agricultural fairs across the United States. Inaugurated at the Iowa State Fair in 1911, when progressive female reformers decided that the time had come to apply the techniques of breeding superior cattle, horses and hogs to infants, better baby contests stood at the crux of several overlapping trends of modern medicine and culture. One facet of a burgeoning eugenics movement, the contests were based on emergent notions of race betterment that increasingly focused on reproduction, sexuality and children. They also reflected and helped to promote the solidification of paediatrics as a medical profession dedicated to the unique physiological organism of the child. Stern examines the dynamic better baby campaign launched during the 1920s in Indiana, and argues that the norms utilized to test, measure and assess the young contestants were representative of a new optics of perfectibility. No longer judged by their apparent beauty and fulsomeness, babies began to be gauged by indicators, such as height-weight ratios and mental tests, that generated invisible statistical abstractions. The contests were critical to the severing of the Victorian association between beauty and physical perfection, ushering in a new way of visualizing the health and vigour of children. Furthermore, they were vehicles of racialization, as physicians and nurses determined deviation and difference according to scales and charts for which white, urban middle-class children had served as the objective base-line subjects. Stern raises questions about the complicated optics of race, medicine and heredity, and suggests that eugenic projects in the early twentieth century have left an intractable and often insidious mark on paediatric norms of child development.     

Citizenship and immigrant anti-rumour strategies: a critical outlook from the Barcelona case

This article analyses the case of the Barcelona Anti-Rumour Network, an initiative promoted by the City Council and social organizations, in order to deal with the uncontrolled proliferation of rumours, prejudices and stereotypes about immigration. Rumours convey false information with the aim of exploiting the fears of citizens often disconcerted in the face of the changes brought about the arrival of a considerable number of foreign immigrants. The article analyses, through policy analysis and in-depth interviews, the role of communication in immigration policies and the concept of citizenship that exists behind this strategy. Such policies can run the risk of focusing too much on the denial of rumours rather than on the affirmation of rights, as this may question the eligibility of the immigrant population to obtain the status of citizenship.     

Comfortably inhabiting reality: justifying and denouncing arguments in a development dispute in the post-industrial gentrified inner-city

This article seeks to understand the ‘critical capacities’ of actors involved in public disputes by focussing on one such case in Melbourne, Australia. The dispute centred on a non-government school's proposal to develop classrooms in a heritage listed building on public land sublet from a charitable foundation. Following local council's rejection of the original proposal, the school successfully appealed to the Victorian Planning Minister. After introducing a critical pragmatic analytic framework, five accounts of the dispute given by key actors are examined, uncovering similarities in the arguments used by each. Then, in the same accounts, analysis identifies differences in how the pro- and anti-development groups justified their own and denounced their opponents' positions. Both groups recognised formal rules as the best means for preserving equal citizens' access to public space, yet the pro-development group justified their argument by reference to local community benefit, in contrast with the anti-development group, who adopted an abstract argument concerning the privatisation of public space. Understood as mobilising different ‘models of justice’, the groups are regarded as appealing to a ‘real’ order, an implicit politicised hierarchy that situates winners in relation to losers. In effect, the pro-development group justified its position by representing it as congruent with, rather than disrupting, the real order encompassing the situation. In conclusion, the paper discusses the usefulness of the critical pragmatic analytic framework for understanding governmental power relations and assemblages, as actors demonstrate their critical capacities in contexts where erstwhile formal equality obscures the presence of hierarchical order.     

The paths to citizenship: a critical examination of immigration policy in Britain since 2001

ABSTRACT

McGhee explores the Labour government's attempts to manage the challenges and protect against the ‘risks’ associated with a particular group of migrants to Britain: permanent immigrants. He examines how Gordon Brown conceives of his three-stage proposals for ‘earned’ British citizenship working with the wider managed migration strategy introduced by Tony Blair and Charles Clarke. At the same time, McGhee contextualizes the earned British citizenship proposals within the recent immigration policies and citizenship/integration strategies introduced by David Blunkett when Home Secretary. If the episodes of social disorder involving the second generation of settled immigrant communities in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001 were the events that triggered Blunkett's new integration/citizenship strategies, including the introduction of English classes and citizenship lessons for would-be citizens, then the 7/7 attacks by so-called ‘home-grown’ extremists were the events that influenced the emergence of what will be described here as the institutional racialization associated with Brown's recommendations. McGhee also explores the shift from Blunkett's model of civic assimilation, with its Cantle-esque emphasis on participation, to the Brown model of civic nationalism, with its post-7/7-fuelled emphasis on loyalty, shared values and responsibilities.     

Feeding finance: a critical account of the shifting relationships between finance,food and farming

Abstract

Whether in the form of commodity index funds, farmland investment funds or commodities trading by agri-food companies, there is evidence of an increasingly close relationship between finance, food and agriculture. While these developments have received some critical attention of late, existing accounts of the ‘financialization of food’ are limited to the extent that they view finance as an external force with emphasis placed on the unnaturalness of its relationship with agriculture and its distortive effects on agricultural markets. Recognizing that finance and agriculture have a long history, this paper offers a more nuanced account of the place of financialization in the agricultural sector. Specifically, it examines how agriculture's emergence as an investment opportunity has reconfigured the terrain of agricultural interests and logics while creating new knowledge demands and agricultural visibilities. These dynamics are explored through a case study of the role of finance and processes of financialization in the recent demise of the Canadian Wheat Board as a state marketing agency. Through this discussion, the paper offers valuable insights into not only the reworking of agriculture as a particular type of financial space, but also the nature and limits of financialization itself as a way of engaging with the world beyond urban financial centres.     

Norm subsidiarity and institutional cooperation: explaining the straits of Malacca anti-piracy regime

Abstract

Given competing interests among the three littoral states of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, what explains the nature and timing of their cooperative arrangement in combating maritime piracy in the Straits of Malacca in the post-2004 period? This observation is especially puzzling because the material and strategic interests of these actors generally did not change during the time period that witnessed increased cooperation. We argue that key developments of the anti-piracy regime in the Straits of Malacca cannot be fully explained by rationalist approaches, which traditionally stresses material and national interests of states. By critically engaging constructivist approaches, this paper posits that Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia engaged in a process of norm subsidiarity. Through norm subsidiarity, relatively weak states get together to develop their own rules to prevent their exclusion or marginalization from institutions of global governance by more powerful actors. The littoral states engaged norm subsidiarity to resist extra-regional attempts to manage piracy in the Straits of Malacca. These extra-regional security proposals triggered a powerful regional cognitive prior, providing the impetus for an indigenous response, leading consequently to a collective cooperative effort to deal with the threat of piracy.     

John Dewey on experience: a critical resource for the theory and practice of youth civic engagement

Research on youth civic engagement often sees the everyday lives of young people as barriers to civic engagement. Recent qualitative approaches have drawn attention to the civic and political dimensions of young people's everyday lives. This is a crucial insight, but cannot – by itself – answer a key question: just how is it that everyday experience can be transformed into civic engagement? I argue that John Dewey's theory of experience makes two key contributions toward answering this question. First, Dewey's situational understanding of experience directs us to the concrete conditions of everyday life as the necessary groundwork and starting point for civic engagement. Second, his concept of reflective experience helps us understand how taken for granted assumptions about political and social life can be transformed into more active forms of engagement. I illustrate this argument by drawing on selected findings from a qualitative study of young people's experience in Public Achievement, a civic engagement initiative.     

Medicalisation,pharmaceutical promotion and the Internet: a critical multimodal discourse analysis of hair loss websites

This study conducts a critical multimodal discourse analysis of commercial hair loss websites. Specifically, I focus on eight sites which provide information about and promote the pharmaceutical hair loss treatment Propecia, a widely available medication marketed to treat male pattern baldness. I identify four salient discursive strategies through which the websites depict male hair loss and the Propecia treatment, namely (1) representing the balding man as type and outcast, (2) promoting the attractiveness and self-assurance of the hirsute man, (3) situating male hair loss in a scientific discourse and (4) encouraging consumers to self-evaluate their hair loss. By inducing insecurities in men experiencing hair loss and encouraging them to embrace pharmaceutical remedies as a viable response to male pattern balding, these discursive-semiotic strategies help to reproduce the contemporary sociocultural practice of medicalisation, the phenomenon whereby the natural processes of life are treated as medical problems. The findings of this study suggest that these promotional discourses play a role in transforming ordinary, benign ailments into illnesses, reconfiguring them as treatable disorders for commercial gain.     

The Rhetorical Strategy of George H. W. Bush during the Persian Gulf Crisis 1990–91: How to Help Lose a War You Won

Public perceptions of the relative failure of the first Bush administration's policy in the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–91 can be attributed in large part to its failure both to remove Saddam Hussein from office and to eliminate Iraq's nuclear weapons programme. Those objectives were not, in fact, among those that the administration initially set out to achieve. Midway through the crisis, however, it altered its rhetorical strategy in a fashion that helped to emphasize their significance in the public mind. This rhetorical shift resulted from a belief that its primary objectives were failing to maintain public support for its policies. However, the evidence for such a decline in public support is ambiguous at best, and there is no evidence that the change of rhetoric had any effect upon public support. The Bush administration unnecessarily drew attention to objectives that it could not achieve and helped to ensure public disillusion with the eventual outcome of the conflict.     

Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of The Biggest Loser Australia

The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality television weight-loss programme that positions itself as a response to the so-called “obesity crisis”. Research on TBL has thus far focussed on audience responses and its effect on viewers’ beliefs about weight loss. This article focuses instead on how meaning is constructed in TBL. We conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a key episode of TBL (the 2012 Australian season finale) to examine how the textual, visual and auditory elements combine to construct meanings beyond the ostensible health messages. Although the overt message is that all contestants have worked hard, turned their lives around and been “successful”, examination of editing choices, lighting and colour, clothing and time spent on contestants allows us to see that the programme constructs varying degrees of success between contestants and provides accounts for these differences in outcomes. In this way the programme is able to present itself as a putative celebration of all contestants while prescribing narrow limits around what constitutes success. TBL reinforces an ideology in which “success” is a direct result of “the work” of weight loss (both physical and emotional), which can apparently be read straightforwardly off the body. TBL’s “celebration” of weight loss thus reproduces and strengthens the widespread view of fat bodies as physical manifestations of individual (ir)responsibility and psychological dysfunction, and contributes to the ongoing stigmatisation of obesity.     

Rescuing constructivism from the constructivists: a critical reading of constructivist interventions in Southeast Asian security

Abstract

Constructivist contributions to the study of Southeast Asian security raise much-needed awareness of identity concerns and introduce conceptual and methodological innovations into the study of identity. However, their shared rationalist proclivity to couple subjectivity with sovereignty revives the enduring problem of treating agency as ultimately pre-given. Contrary to their professed aim to restore to security studies an appreciation for history and practice, the contributions of many Southeast Asia constructivists are quite tellingly essentialist, particularly their concessions to state-centrism and ideational/normative determinism, both due partly to an uncritical emulation of rationalist constructivist perspectives in International Relations (IR) theory. In granting ontological priority to states, Southeast Asia constructivists cannot fully transcend reification because their denaturalizing of international anarchy or regions comes at the expense of a reified state. In reifying either the state or ideas/norms, their claim to privilege practice in their analyses of Southeast Asian security becomes suspect. But if process and practice are to be taken seriously, then Southeast Asia constructivists must avoid presuming a preordained subjectivity that invalidates their claim to study social construction.     

How to humiliate and shame: a reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the author's reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society.     

In defense of the duty to assist: a response to critics on the viability of a Rawlsian approach to climate change

One test of the practical relevance of any theory of international justice will be to apply it to the case of global climate change. Several thinkers have already dismissed John Rawls’s Law of Peoples as a possible candidate for helping to manage this problem, arguing, among other things, that it demands too little, too late. This paper revisits and defends the Rawlsian framework as a viable approach to managing climate change. In particular, it argues that the duty to assist (the eighth principle of the Law of Peoples) may actually be an invaluable resource for dealing with the now inevitable consequences of global climate change.     

Plea bargaining and the decision to go to trial: The application of a rational choice model

What factors determine the plea bargain which prosecutors will offer defendants? What factors determine whether or not a defendant will demand a trial? The former question is relevant to our assessment of the fairness of plea bargaining; the latter question is relevant to prosecution management. Landes provides an economic model of the criminal courts which suggests answers to these questions. While several researchers have provided empirical analysis at least consistent with the Landes model, there has been no test of the model's power for predicting individual case decisions. After providing a derivation of a rational choice model similar to that of Landes but incorporating organizational considerations, the empirical validity of the model is tested using individual case data. Major predictions, including the structural form of the plea bargain offer equation, are validated. Other findings, which do not validate the model's predictions, are discussed in terms of the organizational incentive structure facing assistant prosecutors. A discussion of the application of the model to aid in prosecution management is presented, including an indication of the importance of looking at the distribution of prediction errors as well as the overall rate of prediction error. Finally, comments are made concerning the use of econometrics in an organizational context.