Ethical Encounter Research Articles

Auster’s autobiographical ‘you’ in Report From the Interior: multi-faceted (inter)subjectivities

This article focuses on the choice of the second-person pronoun in Paul Auster’s autobiographical work, Report from the Interior (2013). Unusual in the genre, this article demonstrates that it serves several functions within the economy of the narration but also across it (in its reaching out to the reader). Sliding between different potential referents as is the case in traditional “you novels,” the pronoun is always on the verge on merging into the first or third person pronoun, while assuming its addressivity at all times. Dislodging the ‘I’ from its egocentric position, it also enables different intersubjective frames to co-exist, in keeping with Auster’s conception of life-writing as inevitably fragmented and non-linear. As argued, the pronoun is a metaleptic “space-opener”, opening the autobiographer’s mental space for the reader to share as a “by-sider”: the second-person pronoun is what ensures an ethical encounter of selves in the dialectic of singularity and solidarity/shareability that Auster’s work fosters.

Decolonizing Corporeality

The violence in Mexico is frequently signified in documentary images by the visibility of the corpse, which abstracts the social conditions of disenfranchisement and vulnerability parsed unevenly on the basis of gender and sexuality. Specifically with respect to missing and murdered women across the Americas, the corpse frequently comes to signify abstract violence itself rather than the social conditions of disenfranchisement and vulnerability that women and queer and trans people face daily. Through a reading of installations and interventions by the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, this article seeks to address how ethical encounters might be summoned through proximate, intimate encounters with the very absence of the disappeared body, represented through bodily fluids and fragmentary remains. The article argues that such aesthetic experiments point to decolonizing forms of intimacy that entail new forms of relationality, resisting a socially confined “rights-based” subject. Instead of structures of recognition, the decorporealized matter present in Margolles’s work both represents the biopolitical regulation of life and continues to impress themselves on the living from another social space. Finally, the article reflects on Margolles’s invitation to participate in performing her sculptures and on the circuits of debt, remittances, and gifts proffered by such intimate engagements with bodily and nonhuman life.

Entanglement HCI The Next Wave?

This article argues that our intimate entanglement with digital technologies is challenging the foundations of current HCI research and practice. Our relationships to virtual realities, artificial intelligence, neuro-implants or pervasive, cyberphysical systems generate ontological uncertainties, epistemological diffusion and ethical conundrums that require us to consider evolving the current research paradigm. I look to post-humanism and relational ontologies to sketch what I call Entanglement HCI in response. I review selected theories—Actor-Network Theory, Post-Phenomenology, Object-Oriented Ontology, Agential Realism—and their existing influences on HCI literature. Against this background, I develop Entanglement HCI from the following four perspectives: (a) the performative relationship between humans and technology; (b) the re-framing of knowledge generation processes around phenomena; (c) the tracing of accountabilities, responsibilities and ethical encounters; and (d) the practices of design and mattering that move beyond user-centred design.

More Than "Spending Time with the Body": The Role of a Family's Grief in Determinations of Brain Death.

In many ways, grief is thought to be outside the realm of bioethics and clinical ethics, and grieving patients or family members may be passed off to grief counselors or therapists. Yet grief can play a particularly poignant role in the ethical encounter, especially in cases of brain death, where the line between life and death has been blurred. Although brain death is legally and medically recognized as death in the United States and elsewhere, the concept has been contentious since its inception in 1968. Yet in most cases, families are not allowed to reject the determination of brain death. Apart from religious exemptions, families have no recourse to reject this controversial determination of death. This paper explores the role of grief in brain death determinations and argues that bioethics has failed to address the complexity of grief in determinations of brain death. Grief ought to have epistemological weight in brain death determinations because of the contested nature of the diagnosis and the unique ways in which grief informs the situation. Thus, I argue that, in some rare cases, reasonable accommodation policies should be expanded to allow for refusals of brain death determinations based on the emotional and moral force of grief. By drawing on ethnographic accounts of grief in other cultures, I problematize the current procedural and linear understandings of grief in brain death determinations, and I conclude by offering a new way in which to understand the case of Jahi McMath.

Creating spaces for radical pedagogy in higher education

This paper tells stories from a higher education study abroad collaboration entitled Investigating Diversity, Human Rights and Civil Society in Japan and Australia. Starting from a pedagogical focus on students’ active learning about human rights, this project has come to value relationship building—between academic institutions, civil society and community groups, and individuals. We ask ‘what is human rights education?’, and argue for a radical pedagogy in which knowledge about human rights and diversity is negotiated in ‘third spaces’ (Bhabha). In an attempt to address the ‘im/possibility of engaging with alterity outside of a pedagogic relationship of appropriation or domination’ (Sharma), learners ‘become border crossers in order to understand otherness on its own terms’ (Giroux). As the stories demonstrate, active learning also requires active unlearning (Spivak). Pivotal to our radical pedagogy is a conception of human rights education as dialogic and that creates the conditions for ethical encounters with otherness.

The contribution of levinas’ conception of responsibility to the ethical encounter counselor-counselee

In fact, humans have always been closely related to others. This relationship can be meant to encounter ethical counselor-counselee which is based on an attitude of responsibility. The concept of the responsibility of Levinas can be put as a foundation for ethical counselor-counselee relation in order to contribute to and strengthen the concept of responsibility in literature-literature for guidance and counseling, and counseling practice also does not impress as conditioning. Based on a literature review and critical analysis, we found the following results: 1). The helping profession is to be interpreted in the framework of thinking responsibility, and the responsibility of counselor-counselee should be able to be realized in concrete actions and patterned being-for so that it becomes I-for-You (asymmetrical), should not be reversed into a being-with so that it becomes You-to-I (reciprocity/mutuality); 2). Responsibility in the context of multicultural counseling is seen in phenomenological by pointing at reality in awareness counselor (intentionality), and 3). Empathy as a major component of the counselor in the basic attitude of its existence takes responsibility for substitution (one-in-the-place-of-another). The responsibility of substitution is the unique and total responsibility of the counselor-counselee.

ENACTING LEVINAS’S INFINITE RESPONSIBILITY AS AN ETHICO-POLITICAL COMPROMISE

Levinas’s work does not offer us an ethical theory but seeks rather todescribe a pre-originary ethical encounter with the other. Within this face-to-faceencounter with the other, my subjectivity is held hostage because of an originaryasymmetry between us. This ethical asymmetry produces an infinite responsibilityto and for the other, in order that the singularity of the other be preserved. In orderto moderate such a demanding position Levinas introduces the third party whorestores justice by permitting ethical calculation. This marks a move from ethics topolitics. Nonetheless, there remains a lacuna between ethics and politics. I arguefor a reading of Levinas’s claim that the third party is an incessant correction ofthe asymmetry of proximity in order to posit infinite responsibility as thecompromise of ethics with politics. I discuss some implications for business ethics,in particular CSR, in light of these findings.

The bare classroom- representation and the liminal presence of others

ABSTRACT This article begins with an account of an improvised classroom in a refugee camp. From this account, and building on Heidegger's' analysis of spatiality, two fundamental characteristics are identified as: first, that classrooms are 'sanctioned-off' from the world, and secondly, that educational situations involve attention to the world. Arendt's distinction between education and politics is presented not only as a normative call to action, but also, and perhaps primarily, as a phenomenology of education as a basic human activity. The article turns to Mollenhauer's account of the emergence of a pedagogical sphere in early modernity, and particularly to his notion of representation, to understanding the way things of the world appear in classrooms. The article proposes the concept of liminality to describe the classrooms as neither 'inside' nor 'outside' the world, and could therefore offer their inhabitants (i.e. students and teachers) opportunities for imaginative exploration, as well as ethical encounters.

Who’s afraid of the ‘beggar’? A psychoanalytic interpretation of the crises triggered by the begging of ‘EU migrants’ in Sweden

ABSTRACT The presence of poor migrants from the EU countries of Romania and Bulgaria (mainly Roma subjects) who beg in Swedish cities has since 2010 caused a collective crisis in Sweden, affecting Swedish identity and institutions such as the (local and national) welfare state. Employing a psychoanalytic framework, inspired primarily by Lacan and Žižek, we describe the various dimensions of this crisis and explain the socio-psychological processes that produce the experience of crisis. We argue that the reason the ‘EU migrant’/’beggar’ produces these crises is because this figure is a symptom of the Real. Encounters with ‘EU migrants’ in the Swedish landscape become ethical encounters with the Real within three main realms: intersubjective (individual), national identity (collective), and political economy (institutional). The individual experiences an ethical crisis where no action in the meeting with a ‘beggar’ provides a satisfactory solution to the problem. The presence of ‘EU migrants’ also threatens to undermine the hegemonic Swedish self-image as a moral superpower. And the ‘EU migrant’s’ presence interferes with the nation’s desire to believe in its political and economic institutions. Finally, the attempt to satisfactorily locate responsibility for solving the problem of the ‘EU migrant’ reveals contradictions within capitalism, nationalism, and liberalism as they operate in the Swedish context.

Without Why: Useless Plants in Daoism and Christianity

This article focuses on three examples of religious considerations of plants, with specific attention to the uselessness of plants. Drawing on Christian and Daoist sources, the examples include the following: (1) the lilies of the field described by Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; (2) the useless tree of Zhuangzi; and (3) Martin Heidegger’s reading of a mystic poet influenced by Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, for whom a rose blooms “without why,” which resonates with Heidegger’s deconstruction (Destruktion) of the history of metaphysics and his interpretation of uselessness in Zhuangzi. Each of those examples involves non-anthropocentric engagements with the uselessness of plants, which is not to say that they are completely free of the anthropocentrically scaled perspectives that assimilate uselessness into the logistics of agricultural societies. In contrast to ethical theories of the intrinsic value (biocentrism) or systemic value (ecocentrism) of plants, these Christian and Daoist perspectives converge with ecological deconstruction in suggesting that ethical encounters with plants emerge through attention to their uselessness. A viable response to planetary emergency can emerge with the radical passivity of effortless action, which is a careless care that finds solidarity with the carefree ways of plants.

Travelling cultures: religion, travel, and subjectivity in V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives

ABSTRACTThis article examines V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers (1981) and William Dalrymple's Nine Lives (2009) as texts that interrogate the metropolitan subjectivity of the traveller who arrives at sacred sites from a discursive grounding in secular modernity and whose rationalist, post-Enlightenment notion of travel as observation, empirical experience and knowledge, embedded in a conception of physical space as a tangible, homogeneous entity, enters into an interpretive struggle with travel as associated with a set of metaphysical ideas and identity practices which formulate the itinerary act as austerity, penance, subversion, transformation and social protest. Using Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the ethical encounter, Judith Butler's concept of primary vulnerability, and Michael Taussig's idea of mimesis, this essay explores how travel in conjunction with non-secular epistemes and praxes reconfigures culture, agency, selfhood, and power outside the rubric of modernity and liberal individualism.

Ghostly Narratives and the Limits of Fiction

Ghostly Narratives and the Limits of Fiction Hannah Manshel (bio) Haunting Encounters: The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference by Joanne Lipson Freed. Cornell University Press, 2017. 220 pp. Cloth $55.00. Joanne Lipson Freed's Haunting Encounters: The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference is a valuable addition to the scholarly conversation about the writing and reading of silenced histories. Lipson Freed argues that the "ethical and imaginative claims of fictions that unsettle us with their difference" make space for ethical encounters between readers and texts that depict cultures different from their own (3). Focusing primarily on the way texts by and about people of color can have material effects on the ethical actions of white readers, Lipson Freed posits haunting—within the bounds of narrative—as an ethical mode of relation that requires neither identification on the basis of similarity nor absolute alterity, between reader and text. "Haunted fiction," she writes, "encourages its readers to interrogate the assumption that reading fiction, in and of itself, can be an ethically significant act" (24). Without making claims that fictional narratives can actively remedy the violence of omission or produce more just encounters, Lipson Freed is bold enough to make a small claim: that the ethical encounter of haunted reading matters on its own terms. Each of the four main chapters pairs two narrative texts from different cultural contexts and shows how haunting, which she characterizes as an "intense, temporary, [End Page 281] and ultimately transformative encounter with unfathomable difference" (36), opens onto ethical relationships both among characters and, more importantly for her argument, between fictional narrative and reader. The first and strongest chapter pairs a canonical work of haunted fiction—Toni Morrison's Beloved—with a Bengali novella, Mahaswete Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." The novella, which is Lipson Freed's only subject not originally written in English and which, significantly, is translated by Gayatri Spivak, becomes something of an anchor for Haunting Encounters, appearing repeatedly to demonstrate different facets of the ethics of haunted reading. Lipson Freed locates within the texts she discusses the very haunted ethics of reading for which she advocates between reader and text. "Pterodactyl" is about Puran, a bourgeois Indian journalist sent to report on a famine in a tribal village. Despite his presumed worldliness and his wealth of empirical knowledge, Puran has trouble connecting with the tribal people about whom he is writing. An encounter with a pterodactyl—a living impossibility—leads Puran to have more ethical relationships with both the people in the village and his own family at home. Lipson Freed reads the pterodactyl, which Puran must attempt to care for and communicate with in the absence of reference-book knowledge, as a transformative haunting figure. The pterodactyl is different enough to challenge Puran's sense of relationality but similar enough to invite his empathy—for both the pterodactyl and for the villagers. In Beloved, the eponymous ghost challenges both Sethe's and the reader's claims to knowledge, "de-stabiliz[ing] meaning-making" for the other characters and for readers (46). In both texts, the supernatural creatures act as "ethical guides" for both the characters and the readers. Puran's encounter with the pterodactyl and Sethe's encounter with Beloved are encounters with difference that vex knowledge and that, because they are painful, are ultimately temporary but nonetheless provide an opening onto an ethical encounter. Importantly, Lipson Freed carefully argues that these creatures are not merely metaphors or symbolic standins for the silences of history, but rather are more capacious figures through whom we might imagine the possibilities of ethical relation across difference. In the following chapters, the book moves away from textual appearances of actual supernatural figures to discussion of the way this ethics of haunting works in the telling of the historical traumas of colonization, in "human rights novels" about people who [End Page 282] have been "disappeared" by repressive governments and in novels set in "dystopian" presents that are "haunted by futures that they themselves cannot presage" (136). The primary strength of Chapter 2, which focuses on Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, is its pointed...

The Natural Complexes of Encounters

The totalizing and absolutizing tendencies of metaphysics can undermine our essential ethical relationality. Is there a metaphysics that is robust enough and conducive to preserving this intuition? In answer, this paper will draw upon Martin Buber and Justus Buchler. Buber’s seminal work, I and Thou (1923), explores the nature of the ethical encounter. Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (1966) develops a general ontology, which can be described as an ordinal metaphysics. Encounters are thoroughly relational for Buber. Buchler’s metaphysics is also thoroughly relational. A phenomenological approach to relationality establishes the medium for this dialogue and provides a common ground for these texts. Not only is there a way to account for Buber’s encounter, but there is also an inherent moral understanding in Buchler’s metaphysics that preserves and is conducive to ethical relationality. Buchler’s metaphysics avoids the totalizing and absolutizing tendencies derided by Buber, while simultaneously promotes a version of the encounter.

The ethical experiences of trainees on short-term international trips: a systematic qualitative synthesis

BackgroundMedical student and resident participation in short-term international trips for trainees (STINTTs) has increased in the past few decades. However, there has been no systematic review of trainees’ actual ethical experiences. The authors sought to identify what ethical issues medical trainees encounter during STINTTs, as elicited by and reported in peer-reviewed, quantitative and qualitative research papers.MethodsThe authors systematically searched five academic databases finding 659 unique titles and abstracts. The authors applied inclusion and exclusion criteria to these titles and abstracts resulting in fourteen papers, which were analyzed using qualitative thematic synthesis.ResultsThe qualitative analysis of the papers generated four themes: (1) Trainees’ Concerns Over Perpetuating Medical Tourism; (2) Struggling to Identify and Balance the Benefits and Harms of STINTTs; (3) The Complicated Trainee Mens (mind); and (4) Ethical Situations Encountered by Trainees. The fourth theme, which was the largest, was further divided into (a) Navigating social and cultural dynamics, (b) Trainees’ experiences related to the learner role, and (c) Ethical situations not qualifying for other catagories. Some of these issues reported in the empirical research papers are well represented in the broader literature on STINTTs, while others were less so—such as mistreatment of trainees. All included papers were published after 2010, and comprised a total of less than 170 medical trainees.ConclusionsMedical trainees report experiencing a wide range of ethical challenges during short-term international trips in which they engage in clinical or research activities. The authors call educators’ attention to specific challenges that trainees face. The relevant literature covering US and Canadian STINTTs is relatively young and largely qualitative. The authors briefly sketch a program for expanding the research on this increasingly common educational experience.

“Creative Control: Navigating Foreign Presence in Contemporary Dominican and Cuban Narrative and Film”

This article participates in debates surrounding the ethics of international travel through analysis of contemporary short fiction by Dominican writer Aurora Arias, and Cubans Alberto Guerra Naranjo and Mylene Fernández Pintado. Through characters who are local and foreign writers and scholars, these works highlight the ethics and politics of mobility existing in transnational encounters, and the ramifications for the creative process of Caribbean cultural workers. I examine what these works communicate about the struggle of Caribbean cultural workers to be recognized and heard by their counterparts based in North America and Europe, as well as a broader readership. Arias and Guerra employ metafictional elements to critique and challenge feelings of illegitimacy, while all three writers use humor to turn the tables on power relations and inspire reflection on the possibility of ethical encounters, and even collaboration, between local and foreign intellectuals.

Hearing silence in Dylan Tighe’s Record: Madness, autobiographical performance and the ethical encounter

Abstract This article addresses the possibility of an ethical encounter in autobiographical performance concerning madness. Using previous work on autobiographical performance and the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, it specifically analyses Dylan Tighe’s RECORD, an autobiographical work detailing Tighe’s experience with Ireland’s psychiatric system. It interrogates the relationship between the political and ethical in terms of madness. It argues against the notion that an ethical encounter develops automatically through the presence of the performer. Instead, it suggests such an encounter is inculcated through the particular aesthetic and political structure of the performance. The article analyses how RECORD uses and positions multiple forms of silence against one another to achieve such an effect. It notes how through the silence of RECORD, aesthetic interpretation of Tighe becomes ethically loaded.

Feminine leadership and the ethics of sexual difference

This paper provides a critical reading of feminine approaches to leadership which are lauded for having the potential for women to rise into leadership positions by valorising particular feminine and feminized traits. We question the reliance of leadership ethics on feminized ideals such as care, empathy and relationality where much of this literature relies on rigid, oppressive gendered dualisms which reinforce the feminine other. Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference is developed as a means to challenge the symbolic status of women in leadership and leadership ethics. The paper then moves to consider the intercorporeal dimensions of leadership that facilitate ethical encounters with the other and progress the ways in which women in leadership are thought and the ways women respond to being un/recognised, de/valued and supported/discriminated. We conclude by suggesting different strategies by which the feminine may be rethought and the oppression of difference be identified and politically and practically addressed. Turning to Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference suggests that interventions for addressing in/equality is an ethical challenge for all genders where ethics emerge at the site of corporeal relations between bodies and require a more ethical openness to otherness.

Freedom from the Self: Luther and Løgstrup on Sin as “Incurvatus in Se”

Abstract The aim of this paper is to compare Martin Luther and K. E. Løgstrup on the theme of sin and grace, and to argue that while Løgstrup wanted to stay close to Luther in many respects, he nonetheless provides a secularized version of Luther’s picture, according to which we are liberated from our sinfulness not by God’s grace, but by our ethical encounter with other people. This then raises the question of whether Løgstrup’s approach can work, and thus whether this secularized alternative can be made stable and coherent. We begin by focusing on central themes concerning Løgstrup’s relation to Luther. We then outline the key features of Luther’s conception of sin and grace that were important to Løgstrup , and then consider how he develops that conception in a secularized manner. Finally, we discuss problems that might be raised for Løgstrup’s position.

Halloween, Organization, and the Ethics of Uncanny Celebration

This article examines the relationship between organizational ethics, the uncanny, and the annual celebration of Halloween. We begin by exploring the traditional and contemporary organizational function of Halloween as ‘tension-management ritual’ (Etzioni, Sociol Theory 18(1):44–59, 2000) through which collective fears, anxieties, and fantasies are played out and given material expression. Combining the uncanny with the folkloric concept of ostension, we then examine an incident in which UK supermarket retailers made national news headlines for selling offensive Halloween costumes depicting ‘escaped mental patients’. Rather than treating this incident as a problem of moral hygiene—in which products are removed, apologies made, and lessons learned—we consider the value of Halloween as a unique and disruptive ethical encounter with the uncanny Other. Looking beyond its commercial appeal and controversy, we reflect on the creative, generous, and disruptive potential of Halloween as both tension-management ritual and unique organizational space of hospitality through which to receive and embrace alterity and so discover the homely within the unheimlich.

The Role of Imagination in Kierkegaard’s Account of Ethical Transformation

AbstractIn this essay, I argue that Kierkegaard endorses a “grace model” of ethical transformation – that radical normative change is not a function of agent-choice, rational or otherwise. After showing how grace functions in Kierkegaard’s account of religious transformation, I go on to argue that he offers a parallel account in the case of ethical conversion, the latter drawing from a description of transformation detailed in Kierkegaard’sRepetition. There we find an example of ethical transformation that challenges received interpretations of the mechanics of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic-to-ethical transition. In the same way that God’s love is said to transform the heart of the Christian, Kierkegaard thinks that certain ethical encounters transform the desires and commitments of the aesthete.