Ethical Space Research Articles

Promises of Presence

My review of Ike Kamphof’s “Webcams to Save Nature: Online Space as Affective and Ethical Space” focuses on the question how the engagement of the spectator of the described websites is temporally structured and how the discrepancy between the instantaneity of affective response and the duration of moral engagement is solved. I propose to draw on Alexander Nehamas’ philosophy of beauty as an in-between, bringing affect and ethics closer together.

The Politics of Care

Responding to Ike Kamphof’s “Webcams to save nature: Online space as affective and ethical space,” this essay considers the further contextualization of Kamphof’s analysis using the idea of agencement and the provocation to consider further the politics of affect.

Editorial introduction: where is business ethics?

[Extract] Where is business ethics today? And with this, where are business ethics today? Where do we find them? Are there enough? These questions strike us today, and present us with our starting points. First of all in considering how business ethics has evolved, and what state it is in. But also, in asking where business and ethics are today and how and where they might be in the future. Starting out with these seemingly innocent questions, we face a set of somewhat more troubling questions about the location of business ethics. For some, business ethics is quite easy to locate. When seen as a business function, an academic discipline or a part of business school education, business ethics is often taken as something that obviously has a location. If business ethics is readily locatable, then it can be disciplined, generalised, taught and instituted as part of best practice and corporate strategy. But are business ethics so easily locatable? Are they a 'something' characterised by a 'thingliness' that might allow them to be taken in hand and put to use? If business ethics are not open to such reification, then we might find that ethics in business involves a basic dislocation relating to phenomenal experiences arising when things are out of place. Business ethics would then take place when, as was sensed by Hamlet, things are 'out of joint'. The experience of whistleblowers and the victims of corporate malfeasance is certainly one of deeply felt dislocation. If we find business ethics in these practices, might ethics also be found in other spaces of dislocation?

Indigenous Literature and Comparability

In her article "Indigenous Literature and Comparability" Katherine Durnin discusses some of the barriers to the comparative study of Indigenous literature alongside non-Indigenous literature. These barriers include the Eurocentrism of traditional comparative literature, certain aspects of postcolonial theory and, above, all the assumption that Indigenous and Western epistemologies belong to separate and incommensurable worlds. Durnin examines some recent theoretical and critical approaches that offer ways to bridge the two worlds and make comparative literature an ethical space of mutual respect and understanding.

‘What do you do when you don’t know what to do?’: The respected other of Peter Lomas

The paper explores Peter Lomas's influence on the author as a therapist, and in particular his idea that therapy is inescapably an ethical endeavour, however much we try to avoid this. Less persuasive, however, is Lomas's belief in therapy as a moral influence. The author sees it more as an ethical space (after Roger Poole) where people can feel free to explore, without judgement, the difficulties that have brought them there - despair, loss, inauthenticity, unfulfilled lives. The paper also explores R.D. Laing's idea of ‘fear of the soul’ which afflicts therapists (including those who do not hold much with ideas of technique) - despite our title - as well as many of those who come to see us. This fear is, it is argued, understandable as it takes us into uncharted waters, a minefield. In other words, therapy can be dangerous. The paper draws both on the author's work with individuals, and in the Philadelphia Association's community house, with which he has been involved for many years.

YOUNG WOMEN'S BLOGS AS ETHICAL SPACES

The increased visibility of personal blogs in the last decade has been lamented by some scholars as a sign of increasing individualization and superficiality in public discourse. New media technology and culture blur boundaries and raise new questions about personal and public issues, roles and responsibilities. In this they may also open up spaces for individual self-expression as well as collective reflections on values and norms for interpersonal relations. This article explores how personal blogs written by some of the best known young Swedish female bloggers can be seen as ‘ethical spaces’. Such spaces are formed in interaction between media producers, texts and users, and have a performative character in that they contribute to expanding and negotiating social norms and cultural values in society. Through an analysis of postings to and comments on the blogs, the article discusses the ethical issues that are raised, and what connections between personal experiences and discourses on young women's self-expression, social relations and position in society are being made. The analysis also shows how bloggers in various ways create ethical spaces through performing roles as moderators, provocateurs or friends. Finally, the article argues that, despite the focus on personal issues, these blogs constitute performative spaces that contribute to personal as well as public negotiations of ethics, values and norms in contemporary Sweden.

Negative ethics: The missed event in the French films of Michael Haneke

ABSTRACTIn their engagement with guilt, complicity and the multiple forms of violence, Michael Haneke's films interrogate the ethical implications of violent action. I argue that this cinematic interrogation of violence articulates an ethics of radicality that can be paralleled with Alain Badiou's concept of the event. As opposed to the more conventional definition of ethics as an investigation of moral problems, norms or criteria for the way in which we live, ethics in Badiou suggests a revolutionary radicality, one that posits an alteration in the structure of the symbolic, and in the subject that breaks new territory and shatters past frameworks. Similarly engaged with the interrogation of the ethics of violence, Badiou's concept of the event highlights the way in which Haneke's films articulate an ethical space for interjection. Focusing on the missed events, those ethical encounters with radicality that do not occur, this article argues that Haneke's films suggest a negative utopia by pointing to what could have been.

<b>As pegadas do texto-onça: vestígios e sobrevivências para uma abertura na história</b><br>doi:10.5007/2175-7917.2010v15n2p68

A jaguar-text is a impure text, hybrid, full of vestige, of survival, that brings with it not only a history, but the murmur under it, the history of those that have no history. As jaguar-text, this anachronic esthetics, where the past inscribes itself in the present, and vice-versa, opens itself to all the possibilities of the human sensibility and put itself as an ethical and heterogeneous space, where the other finds a voice.

Climate, Sustainability And The Space Of Ethics

In sustainability, climate is mostly understood as a collection of scientific data of natural phenomena. Confronting this tendency, this article has two aims. First, it explores a distinctive notion of climate by Tetsuro Watsuji in order to illuminate climate as a concrete form of bond in which “who we are”—the subjective human experience—is indivisibly intertwined with the natural phenomena. Second, following Watsuji, this article elucidates the inter-personal nature of climatic experiences to establish communal sharing as an ethical basis for sustainability. Concretizing the argument, this paper investigates the space of ethics as embodied in Japanese vernacular and contemporary houses.

Webcams to Save Nature: Online Space as Affective and Ethical Space

This article analyses the way in which websites of conservation foundations organise the affective investments of viewers in animals by the use of webcams. Against a background of—often overly—general speculation on the influence of electronic media on our engagement with the world, it focuses on one particular practice where this issue is at stake. Phenomenological investigation is supplemented with ethnographic observation of user practice. It is argued that conservation websites provide caring spaces in two interrelated ways: by providing affective spaces where users’ feelings are evoked, articulated and organised; and by opening up ethical space where the beauty of animals appears as an incentive to care. As an alternative to thinking of on- and off-line places as clearly delineated and of bodies and technologies as separate entities, the analysis focuses on trajectories of engagement that cut through these in various directions. In actual acts of looking and being affected, users, animals, places and technologies are intimately entwined. The article further suggests how focussing on trajectories of involvement can be developed to evaluate various websites and their user activity in relationship to clearly defined goals, e.g. conservation goals.

'Keys of the Past: Keys to the Future' - A Critical Analysis of the Construction of the Palestinian National Museum Policy as an Alternative Deconstruction of Routinised International Heritage Discourse

Writing in a recent issue of The Jerusalem Quarterly, Doumani (2009) is one of a number of critics who in diagnosing the spread of ‘archive fever’ in Palestine has made the connection between the growing phenomena of a popular ‘archival impulse’ and the on-going violences (structural, direct, cultural, among many others) synonymous with the occupation of Palestine by Israel. This paper offers a critical reading of one particular intervention within this turbulent yet vital Palestinian archival and heritage context: the process of developing a Palestinian National Museum Policy (PNMP). I argue that the urgent need to reject ‘top-down’ formatted models synonymous with the heritage ‘Holy Trinity’ -UN/UNESCO, International consultant(s) and states-party - is paramount as is the need to foster, support and extend the alternative ‘bottom up’ approach by drawing upon sustained research into relevant heritage networks and to engage with the issues, agendas, needs and ‘voices’ collecting around the popular expression of ‘archive fever’. As described in this paper the beginnings of such a transformed model emerged from PNMP workshop sessions and related discussions but require more dedicated investigation. Certainly this and other comments reiterated by Palestinian voices address the need for new and alternative forms of heritage and museum development strategies and models in local, regional, national and international contexts. What must be concluded from this experience is that the process of constructing the PNMP likewise offered an effective deconstruction of routinised practice and this is something to take forward as a significant outcome and cause for both recognition and cautious optimism. By doing so, dominant heritage discourse, as a site synonymous with structural violence, can be transformed into a more ‘just’ space of ethics and shared action. كتب الباحثون في العدد الأخير من مجلة القدس الفصلية ، دوماني (2009) وهي واحدة من عدد من النقاد الذين يقومون بتشخيص انتشار”’حمى الارشيف” في فلسطين, جعلت من العلاقة بين الظواهر المتزايدة من” دفعة الأرشفة” ، والعنف المسمتر(البنيوي والمباشر والثقافي ، و أشياء أخرى كثيرة) مرادفا لاحتلال فلسطين من قبل اسرائيل. هذه الورقة تقدم قراءة نقدية واحدة تدخل خاصة ضمن الأرشيف و التراث الفلسطيني المضطرب والذي ما زال حيويا : عملية وضع السياسات للمتحف الوطني الفلسطيني. أنا أعتقد أن الحاجة الملحة لرفض “من أعلى إلى أسفل” نماذج متناسقة مع تراث “الثالوث المقدس”و اليونسكو ,المستشارون الدوليون ,والدول الاعضاء هو أمر بالغ الاهمية, ودعم وتوسيع النهج البديل”من أسفل الى أعلى” بالاعتماد على البحث المستمر في شبكات التراث ذات الصلة والتعامل مع القضايا والاحتياجات والخطط وجمع الأصوات في جميع أنحاء التعبير الشعبي”لحمى الأرشيف” ,كما هو موضح في هذه الورقة ظهرت بدايات تحول هذا النموذج من جلسات ورشات عمل “السياسات الوطنية للمتحف الفلسطيني” والمناقشات ذات الصلة ولكنها تحتاج إلى مزيد من التحقيق المخصص. بالتأكيد , هذه التعليقات وغيرها من التي تكررت من قبل الفلسطينين قامت بتحديد وتلبية الحاجة الى اشكال جديدة وبديلة للتراث ,واستراتيجيات التنمية وتطوير المتاحف , والسياقات الإقليمية والوطنية والدولية. والذي يجب استخلاصه من هذه التجربة هو ان عملية انشاء وتكوين “السياسات الوطنية للمتحف الفلسطيني” ,بالمثل عملت بفاعلية على تفكيك النمط او الممارسة الروتينية . وهذا شيء للمضي قدما في تحقيق نتائج كبيرة والسبب للاعتراف والتفاؤل الحذر على حد سواء, وبعمل ذلك ,, يمكن تحويل الخطاب التراثي المهيمن ، كموقع مرادفا للعنف الهيكلي ، الىشيء أكثر من كونه عمل أخلاقي و عمل مشترك.

Ethical Space: Journal with a Difference

Ethical Space is a journal with a difference—based on the premise that many segments of the modern media are neglecting ethical concerns. In a reality of fierce competition, ratings, and economic considerations, ethics becomes a secondary, sometimes irritating issue. The idea, so to speak, is “Let me do my job of reporting and don't trouble me with your morals.” As the media have grown in size, scope, and means of dissemination, so the academic interest in the media has grown. More and more departments of media, journalism, and communication have been established in North America, in Europe, as well as in other parts of the world. More courses on media ethics are being offered to evoke awareness to ethical media concerns that will accompany students in their future work in the field. And more pertinent journals have been established to entertain ethical concerns. But it is an unfair race. Often, economic and financial considerations triumph over ethical considerations. Many academic programs do not hire media ethicists and, if they teach media ethics, the courses are taught by scholars who are not specialists. Often, media ethics courses are not obligatory for all students. Thus they miss the only opportunity they may have to acquire awareness and knowledge of ethical concerns. The commitment of the academic journal, Ethical Space, is to examine significant historical and emerging ethical issues in communication.

Conversations as Signifiers: Characters on the Margins of Morality in the First Three Novels of Frances Burney

This paper shows that Frances Burney used language and interaction features in the dialogue of her novels to indicate the moral worth of some of her characters. It also shows how Burney's linking of language and morality allowed her to contribute to stimulating contemporary debates in which three major discourses of the enlightenment intersected: philosophical debates relating to the nature of goodness; consideration of the functions of language, in particular its potential to represent or govern morality; and discussions of the efficacy of spoken language in conversational contexts. In Frances Burney's novels the criteria by which people should be judged are not so much social as moral, and her heroines are located in ethical spaces where predatory opportunists, pretentious egoists, and violent oppressors are to be recognized and spurned. But recognition is not always easy, and sometimes polish and rank can mask unsavoury motives. Conduct books rarely tackled the complex issue of detecting pretence; nor did they offer a nuanced understanding of more complicated and therefore more demanding social contexts. Burney's novels address such omissions, providing narrational schemata for working through diverse situations and relationships, through the various difficulties which the heroines encounter in their educative process. For Burney, speech is the index of morality, offering a reliable code to read an individual's qualities and principles, beyond background, education, and gender. Making flexible use of modern linguistics, this paper shows how Burney encodes interiority in dialogue to signify moral marginality.

Interior horizons: an ethical space of selfhood in South India

While interiority is typically associated with selfhood in the modern West, this article conveys the formation of an interior topography of selfhood in South India. A ‘genealogy’ of interiority, it is argued, would address the moral forces, ethical practices, and historical accidents through which such an internal space of subjectivity may be constituted. Focusing most closely upon the moral life of a single individual, the article charts a ‘folding’ inward of three forms of exterior life: collective histories of moral transformation, vernacular traditions of ethical conduct, and personal experiences of inhabited landscape, all of which work together upon the ‘heart’ as an interior terrain of ethical self-engagement. Résumé Bien que l'intériorité soit habituellement associée à la notion de soi dans l'Occident moderne, l'auteur décrit ici la formation d'une topographie intérieure du soi dans le Sud de l'Inde. Il avance qu'une « généalogie » de l'intériorité tiendrait compte des forces morales, des pratiques éthiques et des accidents historiques susceptibles de créer cet espace interne de subjectivité. En examinant de très près la vie morale d'un seul individu, l'article trace les contours d'un « repli » vers l'intérieur de trois formes de vie extérieure : histoires collectives de transformation morale, traditions vernaculaires de conduite éthique et expériences personnelles d'un paysage habité, qui se rejoignent au « cœur » d'un terrain intérieur d'engagement éthique sur soi.

The Undecided Space of Ethics in Organizational Surveillance

While much contemporary organizational research has highlighted how surveillance and self-surveillance are dominant modes of attempting subjective control in organizations, in this article we consider whether ‘being seen’ harbours the potential to also engender an ethics that motivates care for self and other. This ethics resides in an ‘undecided space’— one where individual conduct and subjectivity are not decided by surveillance-based discipline but performed by active subjects in interaction with each other in relation to that discipline. We draw on fieldwork conducted in the spinal unit of a major hospital to explore and demonstrate the instability of the association between discipline and surveillance in organizational life. The article provides an account of how a video-based intervention in the hospital led to alternative conducts and outcomes. We consider examples of in situ practice that show clinicians being dynamically attuned to one another in response to the video study. The contribution of the article is to demonstrate and illustrate how emergent subjectivity and interaction can result from such video ‘surveillance’. We conclude that ‘being seen’ can intensify mutual attentiveness to the point where interaction affords an ethic of care for self and other.

Vattel's Law of Nations: Diplomatic Casuistry for the Protestant Nation

AbstractThis paper argues that Vattel's Droit des gens cannot be adequately interpreted as based on a philosophical principle, whether of universal justice or of raison d'état. Rather, Vattel unfolds his law of nations within a casuistical discourse where inconsistent principles are deployed strategically. This forms an ethical space in which universal justice can be continuously adapted to the exigencies of national self-interest as interpreted by the diplomat of a Protestant republican nation.

The Ichinen Sanzen System: A Contribution to a Theory of Cognition

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a cognitive model considering the Buddhist System of Ichinen Sanzen (SIS), three thousand realms in a single moment of life and the theories of complexity. The Buddhist system was developed in China, in the VI century A.D., by the erudite Chih-i (538-597). His description of the system shows life itself as three thousand realms consisting of three realms of existence, ten states of life, which possess each other, and ten factors of individuation that can be formalized as following: 3 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 3000. For the purpose of this work, the SIS is taken as a model of Buddhist tradition that can help scientists to understand cognition as a system that integrates person and environment; body and spirit; mind and experience; sense and conscience. The theories of complexity and their authors contribute to the creation of a cognitive theory model based on the SIS. The authors and concepts are used in this paper to approach the errors of understanding to a Buddhist notion, the poisons of attachments as an obstruction of comprehension. For this, the main concept used is the intercritique of science and religion by Henri Atlan that enables us to approach these two areas of knowledge, by analyzing of their components of intersection, to construct an ethical space to discuss the connection between cognition and values. The discussion leads us to a new ontological and epistemological perspective of the subject of knowledge, related to its phenomenological manifestation in the world. It means that human beings have something different which influences the life of a person and its surroundings as the same entity: the conscience of existence and its possibilities. In this sense, it is possible for a person to reach within the universe of three thousand possibilities of life, for the best one, even when we consider the determinisms inherent to life. This model of cognition is an important contribution to social and psychological sciences and education, based on the fact that a person has to observe their inner world as an extension of their environment, and vice-versa, consciously, choosing what is desired in an ethical domain of life to reach a better life. At last, we offer a hybrid model a contribution to a theory of cognition.

Multiple methods, complex dilemmas: negotiating socio-ethical spaces in participatory research with disadvantaged children

The paper explores the methodological and socio-ethical dilemmas of researching with disadvantaged children in two contrasting fieldwork settings in Ethiopia. The challenges of adhering to dominant, ‘Western’ ethical principles and of creating and sharing ethical spaces during fieldwork are discussed. It is argued that research ethics originating in the Global North entail standards that are difficult to apply in social, cultural and economic contexts elsewhere, and that these needed to be reworked in reflexive ways during fieldwork. The indeterminate nature of grounded field research and the fluidity of its unfolding directions, not only make the contextualization of universal ethics in local ethos about childhood necessary. The paper also highlights how fieldwork with children is a morally contested terrain embedded in and through personal, social and ethical spatiality (Soja 2001, Massey 2005). Some questions are raised that require further consideration in research with children in similar circumstances.

Identity Transformation in Education for Sustainable Development: A Question of Location

Traditionally the individual “I” is described as a relatively stable entity that is carried from one situation to another. However, a growing body of research has argued for a more flexible approach to identity. This article looks at identity as something situated and transformed in social transaction. The analysis made here examines three aspects of identity formation disjunctive space, inter‐subjective space and ethical space. We study the rhythmic shift between those different identity spaces in six college students’ ongoing conversation concerning sustainable development, human freedom, and solidarity. It is shown how identity is constituted in the three different spaces during student discourse. We demonstrate how identity is part of a continuous and contingent inter‐human activity, where the interlocutors are constantly forced to answer the question: Who are you? We discuss the consequences of this finding for education for sustainable development.

Política, emancipação e humanitarismo: Uma leitura crítica da escola inglesa sobre a questão da intervenção humanitária

O artigo analisa as possibilidades de realização de intervenções humanitárias a partir da lógica desenvolvida pela Escola Inglesa das Relações Internacionais. Apesar da ênfase dada ao tema de intervenções humanitárias por muitos de seus adeptos atualmente, buscamos evidenciar a necessidade do diálogo da Escola Inglesa com os Estudos da Paz e com outras teorias que trabalham especificamente com intervenções para superar as suas limitações, ontológicas e epistemológicas. Isto acontece principalmente pela impossibilidade do consenso sobre a existência de valores compartilhados pela sociedade internacional, tornando problemática a legitimação destas ações. Sugerimos que tais limitações sejam superadas a partir de um novo entendimento do que seriam "fronteiras". Enxergando as fronteiras como zonas políticas de troca onde a diferença é preservada para garantir a ordem internacional, podemos vê-las como espaço ético de delimitação e proteção da diferença, não apenas de exclusão. Neste sentido, e resgatando o ideal de diversidade e tolerância de Hannah Arendt, partimos em busca da valorização e aceitação da diferença no plano internacional, não nos restringindo às comunidades estatais dos pluralistas, nem à aceitação absoluta de valores universais solidaristas. Com isso, podemos ampliar coerentemente o conceito de intervenção.