Positivism,pragmatism, and everyday life

Steven Ross teaches philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.     

Global media and technological change: Social justice,recognition and the meaningfulness of everyday life

This article argues that the technological development and globalisation of the media has important implications for questions of cultural citizenship. In particular these questions are explored through an enduring set of ‘cultural’ issues that might be connected to questions of social justice, recognition and hermeneutic concerns with meaningfulness. These questions arguably pose more fundamental questions for critical theory than those traditionally associated with either issues of media bias or the fragmentation of the post‐modern subject.     

Between the lines: Surf texts,prosthetics, and everyday theory

The texts of surfing have been largely neglected in serious cultural commentary. Surfing, as with other texts in popular culture, cannot be adequately explained through the deployment of existing theoretical and analytical paradigms. We must move beyond de Certeau's psychoanalysis and Fiske's semiotic essentialism in order to explain satisfactorily the ideo‐political and consumer dimensions of textual surfing.     

Constructing Subjects and Making Experts: Reading the Politics of the Psychotherapy Novel

This paper examines the ideological and political basis of the practice of psychotherapy in contemporary culture. Psychotherapy is argued to be both inherently political and intimately concerned with the construction of subjectivity. These arguments are examined through interrogating the representation of psychotherapy in the works of Lindner ( The Fifty-Minute Hour , Bantam, New York, 1955) and particularly in Yalom's fictional text Lying on the Couch (HarperPerennial, New York, 1996). The implications within psychotherapy for representing normality, negotiating power, and locating and constructing subjectivity are highlighted through the critical treatment of these texts.     

Theft of life

She is completing a book on infant death and maternal love in northeastern Brazil, Death Without Weeping.     

传统生命观的诠释与生命教育

生命是人类一切活动或尊严的基石和根本，是构建社会主义和谐社会的前提和基础。只有生命意识深入人心，只有每个人的生命得到珍爱、尊重、敬畏和保障，社会生活才能真正走上和谐。因此，在构建和谐社会的整个过程中，必须加强生命教育，形成珍爱生命、尊重生命、敬畏生命、善待生命的良好社会氛围。     

The devaluation of life

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been the target of two recent controversies involving the devaluation of life: the 2003 use of a senior discount for the value of statistical life for people over age 65, and the 2008 downward reassessment of the value of statistical life by the EPA Air Office. Even though these new values of statistical life were still among the highest used in the Federal government, there was a strong negative public reaction to each. The public outcry over the EPA policies appears to have stemmed from an irrational response to decreases in the value of statistical life. Proposed Congressional legislation that purportedly seeks to reform the valuations would politicize benefit assessments. A sounder approach is to establish a peer‐reviewed scientific advisory panel to advise agencies on the value of statistical life.     

Social process as everyday practice: the micro politics of community-based conservation and development in southeastern Mexico

This article explores the everyday exchanges associated with community-based natural resources management in southeastern Mexico to suggest how formal and informal social practices shape conservation and development outcomes. Discussions of social process in most policy analyses emphasize formal exchanges based in rational action but typically overlook the impact of everyday social practices, which often occur “off-stage.” First, I build on existing conceptualizations of social process in the policy sciences by exploring culturally-informed approaches focused on everyday practice, infrapolitics, and performance. Second, I present a case study detailing the emergence and decline of a timber marketing fund to reveal how informal lending among community members contributed to the decapitalization of the fund. Third, I trace flows of economic capital from the fund in order to discuss specific policy outcomes. Fourth, I present ethnographic and archival evidence showing the persistence and frequency of informal lending, the performative aspects of local social process, and the character of “off-stage” interactions. I conclude with a discussion of social process that extends analysis beyond values-based outcomes to consider how long-standing practices based in particular logics (political cultures) collide with formalized (technocratic) practices of the public sphere. I employ this conceptual approach to critically examine questions of petty corruption and local conflict, to uncover multiple dimensions of micro political interaction, and to explore how cultural perspectives on social process might inform policy responses.