Intergenerational Responsibilities Research Articles

Overcoming vulnerability by editing the germline?

The concept of vulnerability has become widely acknowledged as a fundamental concept for medical ethics and research ethics, yet rarely considered with respect to ethical assessments of human germline genome editing. A first aim of this paper is to make vulnerability ethics considerations fruitful for issues related to these technical innovations. The possibility of altering the genome promises to overcome forms of vulnerability inherently connected to our existence as physical beings and would hence allow to increase the resilience of human nature or even to move evolution forward by equipping people with new character traits and enhanced capabilities. I suggest a more fine-grained distinction of various applications purposes than the dichotomy of therapeutic and enhancement. I support the rejection of most application purposes as ‘therapeutic’ and claim that framing them as ‘therapeutic’ in the context of the current discursive constellation runs the risk of accentuating existing vulnerabilities. With respect to intergenerational responsibilities, I reject the view that editing the germline necessarily leads to corrupt intergenerational relations based on which it must be categorically excluded. I conclude that it is nevertheless important to take a very close look at the challenges that arise, especially from a vulnerability perspective, before irreversible facts are created overhastily.

Women's transnational migration through football: Possibilities, responsibilities, and respectability in Ghana

The growth of girls’ and women's football in Africa, coupled with increased professionalisation in Europe and the United States, has led to rising international migration of African female players. This trend reflects the longer standing culture of independent, transnational migration among African women since the late 1980s and of enlarged possibilities and responsibilities triggered by neoliberal reform across the continent. This article explores how these sporting, cultural and economic transformations have coalesced to influence the aspirations and agency of female youth and young women in Ghana. To do so, we draw on original data from ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, Sweden and Denmark undertaken between 2015 and 2021. Our findings reveal that for ambitious, talented female footballers, transnational football migration is increasingly viewed as a speculative route to improve ones’ life chances and negotiate intergenerational responsibilities to family. Significantly, the article also illustrates that in seeking to produce this highly prized form of migration, they must carefully navigate gendered social norms and hierarchies related to ‘respectable’ career and life trajectories. The conclusion proposes a critical research agenda to explore the interplay between sporting opportunities, migration aspirations and diverse socioeconomic conditions in Africa.

Making the future in the present: using Science and Technology Studies to reflect on 40 years of research in the HADES Underground Research Laboratory

Abstract The timeframes involved in nuclear waste management often speak to the imagination, and even transcend it: what does it mean to isolate and contain human-made materials for periods up to hundreds of thousands or even a million years? In this article, we reflect on the role played by the HADES Underground Research Laboratory in making the distant future comprehensible today. Our argument starts by focusing on the pioneering role HADES played and plays in knowledge production on geological disposal. It highlights the heterogeneous nature of scientific experiments and experiences, and the performative role these play in defining matters of concern for research and development. Second, attention is directed to how HADES contributes to the defining of what is considered possible and imaginable, and how it therefore not only renders the future more predictable, but also contributes to the making of that future. We end the paper with a reflection on the implications of what ‘making the future’ could entail from an ethical perspective, discussing how the intergenerational responsibilities that come with these future-making capacities could be handled.

Dis/locating Preferential Memory within Settler Colonial Landscapes: A Forward-Looking Backward Glance at Memoration’s Per/formation

The degree to which authorized sites of commemoration such as monuments perpetuate deep-rooted practices of selective remembering and forgetting in settler states, and in doing so, help to entrench narratives and mythologies that mask ongoing colonial occupation and violence while denying Indigenous sovereignty, has arguably never been more evident. While official sites of remembrance undoubtedly shape the dominant imaginary, vernacular forms of commemoration exerted implicitly and explicitly in everyday life are also powerfully influential in the circulation of the nation’s ascendant ideation as what Audra Simpson calls “narration[s] of truth.” This paper will examine the ways “memoration,” an artistic/performance methodology I have developed through my inter-media art practice and scholarship, performs interventions into commemoration in the guise of public, national, and personal memory. As an adaptable and inherently relational, embodied and place-based methodology, memoration offers a framework of in Andrew Herscher's terms, “remembering otherwise”: one that activates a reckoning with the intergenerational responsibilities of being-in-relation, in my case as a white settler, on Indigenous lands that are at the same time “occupied” and unceded.

Multidirectional carework across borders: Latina immigrant women negotiating motherhood and daughterhood

AbstractObjectiveThe authors examine how transnational caregiving for immigrant women encompasses a set of complex gendered relationships and roles as mothers and daughters across national borders.BackgroundScholars have explored transnational motherhood for women who migrate, often in search of employment, while their children remain in their nation of origin. Much of this research has focused on how migration transforms mother–child relationships. Intergenerational relationships between immigrant mothers and their own mothers, and the emotional and economic care that facilitates these ties, are often left out of the picture of transnational family life.MethodsThrough ethnographic work, the authors conducted in‐depth interviews with 63 mothers from Latin America who migrated to the greater Boston metropolitan area. Additionally, the authors draw from extensive participant observation with mothers at home, school, and sites throughout their communities.ResultsThe authors theorize how Latina immigrant women are at the center of a web of multidirectional carework as they negotiate intergenerational responsibilities as mothers and daughters. The women in the present study orient their decisions, paid labor, and child‐rearing around sustaining transnational familial relationships across generations. As a result, they provide emotional and economic care in multiple directions, including maintaining relationships between children and grandchildren, even as they adapt to ruptures in receiving care from their own mothers.ConclusionThe authors argue that despite the gendered labor this emotional and economic work entails, the immigrant mothers in the present study value their carework, which ultimately becomes a means for them to exert agency in the face of anti‐immigrant policies and discourses.

Decision-making and experiences of preimplantation genetic diagnosis in inherited heart diseases: a qualitative study.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) ensures a disease-causing variant is not passed to the next generation, including for inherited heart diseases. PGD is known to cause significant emotional burden, but little is known about how parents experience PGD to select against inherited heart disease. We aim to understand how people with inherited heart disease, and their partners, experience and make decisions about PGD. Participants were recruited from a specialised inherited heart disease clinic. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with adult participants who had considered PGD. A semi-structured interview schedule explored overall experiences and reasons for undergoing PGD. Broad topics included experience of disease, reproductive history, psychosocial and financial considerations. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and thematically analysed using a framework method. Twenty participants were included (15 with inherited cardiomyopathy, 3 with inherited arrhythmia syndrome and 2 partners). In contemplating PGD, participants considered 3 main issues: past experience of disease e.g. sudden cardiac death, sport restrictions and clinical heterogeneity; intergenerational responsibilities; and practical considerations such as finances and maternal age. Among those who chose to undergo PGD (n = 7/18), past experience of a significant cardiac event, such as family history of sudden cardiac death, was important in the decision process. The decision to undergo PGD for inherited heart disease is complex and influenced by individual values and experience of disease. We highlight key areas where further discussion may assist in PGD decision processes.

Climate Change and Moral Responsibility toward Future Generations: A Confucian Perspective

Climate change challenges the harm-based justification of intergenerational responsibilities. Alternatively, this article provides a virtue-based account grounded in Confucian ethics. According to the virtue of Shengsheng, the intergenerational responsibility is justified in terms of enabling future generations to cultivate their innate virtue in a ceaseless life-generating natural world.

Dilemmas of an Aging Society: Family and State Responsibilities for Intergenerational Care in Taiwan

In an aging society with a declining birthrate, there are more and more elderly to care for and fewer adult children to provide them care; these adult children, and the state, are forced to weigh the costs of eldercare against the cost of child care. In Taiwan, these dilemmas may be particularly acute, given the persistence of Confucian norms of filial piety and the extended family structures. In this study, we examine the attitudes of Taiwanese people toward the relative responsibilities of both adult children and the welfare state for eldercare and child care. Data were taken from the Taiwan Social Change Survey in 2011. Using latent class analysis to develop a typology of attitudes toward intergenerational care responsibilities, we found four types: (a) Family cares for elders and children, (b) family cares mainly for children, (c) cooperation between family and government, (d) government cares for the elderly. Findings show that an individual’s attitudes toward welfare state policies are significantly related to both self-interest and sociocultural norms as well as intergenerational family interactions. In Taiwan, filial norms and the quality of family interaction significantly influence attitudes toward the division of intergenerational care responsibilities.

Young adults’ pathways into homeownership in Tokyo: Shifting practices and meanings

This paper examines homeownership pathways of young adults in Tokyo, Japan, making use of an original data set of qualitative interviews. By analyzing the narratives of young adults, the article argues that in contemporary Tokyo homeownership pathways are diversifying, due to changing gender roles within households, intergenerational responsibilities and an increasingly questionable potential of homeownership to result in asset accumulation. Thus, while still following housing pathways that result in homeownership, young people are both adapting to the conditions of a practically failing but politically and ideologically resilient homeownership system and challenging its boundaries.

All is not relative: intergenerational norms in Europe

ABSTRACTIs the sense of obligation we feel towards our parents comparable to the one we feel towards our children? Most studies of normative solidarity measure only filial norms, that is, norms for children’s obligations towards parents, whilst largely ignoring parental norms, that is, norms for parents’ obligations towards children. This article quantitatively investigates parental and filial norms in 20 countries within 5 European regions. The article examines the question of whether the family cultures of North-West Europe can be understood as cultures of descending familialism, that is, cultures in which parental obligations are emphasised over filial obligations, as opposed to cultures of extreme individualism. The article contributes to the literature on family norms theoretically by showing that family cultures should be differentiated not merely by their strength but also by their direction, and methodologically by highlighting the importance of developing precise measures of both parental and filial norms. For the Nordic countries in particular, the analysis shows that the family culture is pluralistic, with the question of intergenerational responsibilities being one likely to provoke discussion in these societies for years to come.

Desarme para el desarrollo humano: De una cultura de guerra a una cultura de Paz y no violencia

Federico Mayor Zaragoza afi rma en el presente texto, que es moralmente inaceptable que cada día mueran de hambre miles y miles de personas cuando se invierten en gastos militares y armamento millones de dólares. Advierte que la mejor solución es el desarme, incluyendo el nuclear y que actualmente, se está llegando a puntos de no retorno en cuestiones esenciales del legado intergeneracional.Señala lo urgente de un nuevo concepto de seguridad, dado a que los grandes poderes siguen pensando que la fuerza militar es la única expresión y referencia de “seguridad”. Las soluciones existen. La acción inmediata es necesaria para cumplir con nuestras responsabilidades intergeneracionales. Ahora, a través de la tecnología digital, la gente se puede expresar libremente, levantar su voz y reclamar no sólo seguridad territorial sino de alimentos, de acceso al agua potable, a los servicios de salud, a la acción rápida, coordinada y eficaz en situaciones de emergencia. Este, y no otro, es el tipo de seguridad que los seres humanos sueñan y merecen.Palabras clave: Desarme, desarrollo, gasto militar, paz, seguridad.

A Review of “The Politics of Sustainability: Philosophical Perspectives”

Concerns about sustainable development are not a recent phenomenon. Societal problem-solving efforts within this realm have focused on concrete problems such as the preservation of fisheries, forests and national reserves. 'The Politics of Sustainability' has been discussed extensively in literature, particularly after the publication of the Brundtland Commission's 'Our Common Future' report in 1987 [1] emphasizing inter-generational responsibilities involving economic, environmental and social aspects. Among other areas, the authors of the report highlighted the challenge of global climate change resulting from, amongst other things, unsustainable patterns of consumption. 'The Politics of Sustainability: Philosophical Perspectives', edited by Dieter Birnhacher and May Thorseth, brings a new angle into the discussion of the politics of sustainable development: ethical considerations.

‘Like a Stone’: Ecology,Enargeia, and Ethical Time in Alice Oswald'sMemorial

AbstractThis article argues that the Anthropocene is marked by haunted time. As the ‘geological agents’ of climate change, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, we both identify with ‘deep time’ processes and conjure the ghosts of those whose lives to come will be shaped in drastic ways by our actions in the present. This article explores a poetics of haunted time via readings of the work of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald. Halperin's recent work with the “slow and fast time” of geological processes (calcification and lava flows), and also with the body's own capacity to generate geologic material (in the form of body stones), engages with the possibility of “geologic intimacy.” From here, the article reads Memorial, Oswald's recent translation of the Iliad pared down to snapshot biographies of the soldiers killed in the Trojan wars interleaved with a series of astonishing similes of the natural world, as an example of a poetics of haunted time. Drawing on James Hatley's theory of ethical time and its ecocritical application by Deborah Bird Rose, I argue that Oswald's strategy of repeating similes creates a kind of spectral echo, giving expression to an enfolding of diachronic and synchronous time in which intergenerational responsibilities are realised. The haunted time of Oswald's poem thus represents a passage to the difficult intimacy of rethinking the relationship between past, present, and future actions and effects.

Migration and Intergenerational Responsibilities

Migration to Europe has become a major source of financial and social resources for an increasing number of Senegalese men who are the main providers for their natal households. European migration is seen as a transitory phase, since most of them plan to return to Senegal. We use qualitative interviews conducted in 2007 in a small town in northwest Senegal to explore the dynamics of migration among young Senegalese men, identifying their goals and examining how migration affects their lives and families. Motivations to migrate for these young men are related both to the social prestige associated with being a successful migrant and to the obligations they feel toward their elders to enable them to live out their old age in the best conditions. Because migrating is costly and demands mobilization of social networks, most migrants require the support of their elders to leave, thus reinforcing their obligations toward them and contributing to transforming the relationships between generations.

Searching for a Balance of Responsibilities: OECD Countries' Changing Elderly Assistance Policies

The rapid aging of OECD country populations and the now five-year-long financial crisis in Europe are causing many OECD countries to reconfigure their assistance programs for the elderly, particularly their long-term care (LTC) policies. Debates about intergenerational responsibilities are evident in recently published research papers that examine how countries are revising programs for the elderly. Building financial sustainability into program reforms has suddenly become a priority. Until just recently, reform efforts focused on creating efficiencies and better quality of services. What emerges from the recent literature is a strong sense that the OECD countries are responding to the financial crisis and the rapid aging of populations in very similar ways. Given the countries' different histories of how they provide assistance to their elderly citizens, the convergence of policy responses is not something we might have foreseen. The United States could learn much from the OECD countries' choices.

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the environment: Cultural and spiritual perspectives

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the environment: Cultural and spiritual perspectives

Towards an integrated approach for the analysis of gender equity in policies supporting paid work and care responsibilities

Abstract This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for analysing the degree to which public policies support equity in paid work and care. Combining the distinction between commodification and decommodification and the distinction between defamilialisation, supported familialism, and familialism by default our study identifies a number of relevant policies, ranging from services, leave entitlements, income support measures, and fiscal instruments to forms of acknowledgement of care work in pension systems. Although our main objective is conceptual, we offer a comparative overview of these policies for all of the EU countries, plus Norway. Thus, we provide a preliminary typology of policy approaches. 1. Introduction Interest in the way policies promote or hinder equity in the family and on the labour market is hardly new. Most studies have, however, considered only a small set of policies, or even just one policy, rather than looking at the interactions between different policies that intervene in the same area. In this paper, by using an intergenerational responsibilities perspective, and by looking at both financial and care responsibilities, we aim to develop and test a conceptual framework that will enable us to take an integrated approach to assessing equity that encompasses a variety of policy measures and spheres. We are aware that policies are only one part of the overall equity (or inequity) system. They interact with the labour market, family and cultures, and country-specific forms of class inequality (e.g., Cooke 2011, Crompton and Lyonette 2007; Lewis, Campbell, and Huerta 2008; McDonald 2009, Orloff 2009a). The relationship between these different contextual dimensions is neither one of pure causality nor one of pure autonomy. Nonetheless, since policies-regardless of their partiality-are structuring factors in the context-specific system of the resources and constraints within which individuals, households, and families develop their strategies, we seek to identify the implicit and explicit assumptions concerning gender-specific arrangements that shape the way policies directly or indirectly regulate responsibilities and obligations within families, and between families and the state. 2. Background literature, theoretical framework, and research questions The literature on inequality as it affects opportunities to participate in the labour market and to achieve financial autonomy focuses mainly on the division of paid and unpaid work in the family. This aspect is perceived as being largely responsible for the stalled (Hochshild 1989), unfinished (Gerson 2009). or incomplete (Esping-Andersen 2009) character of the gender equality revolution. Some authors emphasise, however, that unpaid work is not just a constraint on paid work, but also a valuable activity that deserves more social recognition (e.g., Knijn and Kremer 1997; Knijn and Ostner 2008). In an attempt to combine the two perspectives in order to develop a policy approach that fosters equity, Gornick and Meyers (2009) have argued that the dual earner/dual carer model resolves the tension between employment-focused and care-focused demands concerning both equity and women's financial autonomy. According to this perspective, policies should a) support women's labour force participation by partly relieving them of family-linked care responsibilities, b) acknowledge the value of care work by providing both time and financial compensation for care giving, and c) support and incentivise men to share care responsibilities. The dual earner/dual carer model has three obvious limitations, quite apart from the fact that it is not a normatively universal model (e.g., Lewis, Campbell, and Huerta 2008; Orloff 2009b). First, it presupposes that there are good jobs for all, so that working for pay is worthwhile in practice. Second, it is based on the assumption that the dual responsibilities of earning and caring are always shared by a couple. …

CAN WE IDENTIFY INTERGENERATIONAL POLICY REGIMES IN EUROPE?

ABSTRACT This paper examines whether it is possible to recognise specific patterns of institutionally regulated downward (towards children) and upward (towards the old) intergenerational obligations with regard to care and financial support, and to identify specific country profiles and clusters of countries in Europe. Based on the three-fold conceptualisation of familialism by default, supported familialism and de-familialisation, and using a complex set of indicators, we describe how countries, by means of policies, allocate intergenerational responsibilities between families and the state, also paying attention to their gender impact. The study includes all 27 EU countries and for the first time offers a comparative overview of a diversified set of policies with regard to both children and the old. It concludes that although specific policy profiles emerge with regard to the two sets of obligations, these do not always coincide. Furthermore, contrary to widespread opinion, supported familialism and de-familialisation are not always contrasting policy approaches. In some countries, they actually represent part of an integrated approach to public support of intergenerational obligations. Moreover, the gender impact of supported familialism may be different and even contrary, depending on the specific instrument. Finally, once the road of oversimplification is excluded, only one statistically sound cluster of countries emerges. It is, however, possible to detect groups of countries that are similar. These only partly overlap with prevalent welfare regime types.

Becoming ‘real’ Aboriginal teachers: attending to intergenerational narrative reverberations and responsibilities

Our paper, and the inquiry from which it emerges, is situated in world‐wide concern to increase the numbers of Aboriginal teachers in schools. In Canada, the population of Aboriginal young people is rapidly increasing. Yet, at the same time, the gap between the attainment of a university credential in Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal populations is widening. Set against this background and these urgencies, our paper focuses on an experience resonating across the lives of six Aboriginal teachers in Canada of being excluded or silenced by dominant historical, institutional, and social narratives positioning them as not ‘real’ teachers. As we inquire into these experiences in each teacher’s life, we pay attention to the responsibilities revealed in each teacher’s story. These responsibilities become visible by attending to intergenerational narrative reverberations, reverberations that maintain the historic narrative of colonization imposed on Aboriginal people and, reverberations poised to counter, to interrupt this dominant narrative, seeking to heal, to support and to sustain current and future generations of Aboriginal teachers as they compose their lives inside and outside of schools and universities.

Patterns of assistance between adult children and their older parents: Resources, responsibilities, and remarriage

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of patterns of resource exchange on beliefs about intergenerational responsibilities in older parent—adult child relationships. The effects of adult children's resources and later-life remarriage on beliefs about intergenerational responsibilities also were examined. A national sample of 1025 adults responded to a multiple segment factorial survey. Responsibilities to parents were associated with prior patterns of exchanges, older cohorts had lower expectations for adult children to help their parents, and parental remarriage creates limited responsibilities toward new stepparents. Family obligations were the main reason for helping, but histories of intergenerational assistance, the adult child's resources, and other obligations of the adult child also were considerations. Later-life remarriage complicates intergenerational obligations.