Privileged Status Research Articles

Cosmopolitan disobedience

Increasingly, protests occur across borders and are carried out by non-nationals. Many of these protests include elements that break the laws of their host country and are aimed at issues of global concern. Despite the increasing frequency of transnational protest, little ethical consideration has been given to it. This article provides a cosmopolitan justification for transnational disobedience on behalf of self and others. The article argues that individuals may be justified in illegally protesting in other states, and that in some circumstances they may do so even when laws have been legitimately constituted by the domestic constituencies of those states. Using a cosmopolitan reading of the notion of civility and of the civil realm, the article argues that transnational protests are capable of conforming to the normative and conceptual standards necessary for them to be labelled civil disobedience. As a result, they ought to carry a privileged moral status compared with other forms of protest. The article applies the All Affected Principle to argue that a democratic deficit can provide transnational protesters and resident migrants with a right to civil disobedience even where that right is not held by members of the demos they protest within.

Sexuality and statelessness: Queer migrations and national identity in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

ABSTRACTThis article reads James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a queer diasporic novel. Drawing on feminist work on diaspora and empire, it argues that Baldwin’s exploration of the damaging capacity of homophobia demonstrates its central role in maintaining white supremacy and supporting US nation-building and French imperialism. The narrative unreliability of the protagonist, David, manifests the internal contradictions of the larger state project which renders same-sex desire as both central to the national order and unspeakable within the framework of white imperial masculinity. Baldwin thus shows the privileged status of white masculinity to be impossible without the ubiquity of racialized queer desire as its constitutive Other. By considering Giovanni’s Room as a novel about queer diasporic consciousness, this article relocates Baldwin within an internationalist framework, acknowledges the urgent global political debates that animated his writing and contextualized the novel’s publication, and understands sexuality and race beyond the limits of the national.

Exposure to Evidence of White Privilege and Perceptions of Hardships Among White UK Residents

Research suggests that when confronted with evidence of privileged status White people will act to mitigate this evidence by reporting greater levels of personal hardships. There is little research exploring white privilege, or its consequences, in the UK, despite playing host to a diverse, multi-racial population. In the current study, 148 White individuals participated in an online experiment of the impact of exposure to evidence of White privilege. Individuals exposed to evidence of white privilege reported lower perceived personal privilege and greater personal life hardships, than those in the non-exposure condition. Exposure to hardships and belief in White privilege were independently related to reports of hardships but not when belief in personal privilege was considered. Findings suggest that exposure to evidence of White privilege may result in majority group members over-reporting personal hardship, but this may be lessened where personal privilege can be made salient.

The Politics of Sex Abuse in Sacred Hierarchies: A Comparative Study of the Catholic Church and the Military in the United States

The paper explores similarities in patterns of abuse and in patterns of how the known abuse cases are handled by the Catholic church and the U.S. military and develops preliminary explanations of why. The paper considers how the two organizations deal with external efforts by civil authorities at oversight and prosecution, and the extent to which they invoke their sacred status authority to evade responsibility and civilian oversight. The paper finds that the handling of sex abuse in each organization has been affected partly by the institutions seeing themselves as sacred, as something apart from the secular state, beholden to alternative authorities. The paper highlights the fact that child sex abuse by religious officials and sexual assault of soldiers by fellow soldiers and officers constitute profound challenges for democracy in the US and elsewhere, as the institutions claim and may be accorded separate and privileged status, beyond the reach of democratic laws and procedures. It is a warning about the costs of public deference to other institutions. The study utilizes documentation of Catholic church clergy child sex abuse cases in the US, and documentation of sex abuse cases in the US military.

Hemispheric Organization of Visual Word Recognition in Turkish Monolinguals

Recently obtained data from interdisciplinary research has expanded our knowledge on the relationship between language and the brain considerably. Numerous aspects of language have been the subject of research. Visual word recognition is a temporal process which starts with recognizing the physical features of words and matching them with potential candidates in the mental lexicon. Word frequency plays a significant role in this process. Other factors are the similarities in spelling and pronunciation, and whether words have meanings or are simply letter strings. The emotional load of the words is another factor that deserves a closer inspection as an overwhelming amount of evidence supports the privileged status of emotions both in verbal and nonverbal tasks. It is well-established that lexical processing is handled by the involvement of the brain hemispheres to varying degrees, and that the left hemisphere has greater involvement in verbal tasks as compared to the right hemisphere. Also, the emotional load of the verbal stimuli affects the specialized roles of the brain hemispheres in lexical processing.
 Despite the abundance of research on processing of words that belong to languages from a variety of language families, the number of studies that investigated Turkish, a language of Uralic-Altaic origin, is scarce. This study aims to fill the gap in the literature by reporting evidence on how Turkish words with and without emotional load are processed and represented in the brain. We employed a visual hemifield paradigm and a lexical decision task. The participants were instructed to decide if the letter strings presented either from the right or the left of the computer screen were real words or non-words. Their response times and accuracy of their answers were recorded. We obtained shorter response times and higher accuracy rates for real words than non-words as reported in the majority of studies in the literature. We also found that the emotional load modulated the recognition of words, supporting the results in the literature. Finally, our results are in line with the view of left hemispheric superiority in lexical processing in monolingual speakers.

US - Pakistani Relations 1979-1989

Since its independence , after the partition of India , on 14 August 1947 , Pakistan has enjoyed a privileged status in the foreign policy of the USA due to its geostrategic importance in Southern Asia . It is bordered by China , Afghanistan , India , Iran and Oman which is separated from it by the Arabian sea . On the other hand , Pakistan is considered as the apex of Arabian Gulf which represents one of the vital and essential pillars in the American policy . There have been a number of factors that affect the American – Pakistani relations both negatively and positively such as the Indian – Pakistani conflict , the Indian – Chinese conflict , the Iranian Revolution in 1979 which overthrew the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was deemed America's officer in the Arabian Gulf and the protector and defender of the American Interests there . Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to draw a new shape of the relation between USA and Pakistan and that shape continued till the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 .

Form and Relation: Difference and Alterity in Simmel

For Simmel, form is the basic concept that underlies the epistemological process. But he casts form in his sociological and philosophical writings as a function of a relation. Form, for Simmel, is a dynamic principle that can change depending on its function. This makes relation equal with form’s conventionally assigned privileged epistemological status. Reciprocity, according to Simmel, opens form, customarily considered self-enclosed, to elicit form’s dynamics as a part of a process that is able to reflect the difference it contains.

‘Do You Think Combat Pilots Have Haemorrhoids?’

The opening scene of Go, a dance piece created by Israeli choreographer Galit Liss in 2017, is accompanied by the music of the Israel Defense Forces march. On stage, however, do not appear vibrant young soldiers but elderly women who engage in performing a sequence of subtle movements that accentuate the vibrating muscles of their ageing bodies.For the past decade, Galit Liss has been working with ageing women who are non-professional dancers, and focused on revealing their emotional and bodily experiences, while uncovering the tension between their personal identities and society’s perception of them as old people. This choreographic practice of ‘writing’ the elderly female body resonates with a recurring theme in contemporary dance that accentuates ageing and adulthood, thus challenging a central characteristic of Western theatrical dance, which traditionally, and especially in genres like ballet, sanctifies youth and the virtuosic body.In addition to the significance of displaying elderly bodies on stage in light of their social silencing and artistic exclusion, Go examines ageing within the conflict between individual body and national identity. This, by means of reflecting on Israeli society’s idealization of the combat pilot, a masculine hero celebrated, even today, as the protector of the homeland that the generations to which her performers’ belong were educated and expected to adore.This essay will therefore discuss the choreographic and theatrical strategies utilized by Galit Liss to simultaneously ‘voice’ the ageing female body and validate its corporeal patina, while re-negotiating the privileged status of the combat male chosen body. Through this perspective, the images of elderly feminine corporeality in Go will be acknowledged as a social critique aimed at undermining the Zionist masculine-militarist ethos that still dominates Israel’s collective identity.

THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT’S TWO FRIENDS AND ARTURO ARIAS’ TOWARD PATZUN

This paper compares and contrasts two short stories, Guy De Maupassant’s Two Friends and Arturo Arias’ Toward Patzun. Both stories have the same thematic structure as the harshness and brutality during wartime situation is a similar concern to the aforementioned writers. Although both writers foreground the savagery of war, the different cultural background, nationality, literary tradition cause differences in the way both writer narrate their short stories. While De Maupassant depicts the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Arias squares his narration in the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996). The differences of canonical status between De Maupassant and Arias is also scrutinized in this paper. While De Maupassant is a household name in Western literary tradition, the popularity of Arias remains obscure. This paper argues that the differences in canonization is linked also with the status of Two Friends in the hypercanon, on the other hand Toward Patzun is located in the countercanon. It is hoped that this paper can contribute toward questioning the privileged status of Western literary works compared to the non-Western author.

To be "a developed country" or not to be? The effect of the Paris agreement on Turkish forest law.

The Paris Agreement (PA), which is an important step toward mitigating climate change, has ascribed new responsibilities to the signatory parties that differ from those of the Kyoto Protocol (KP). This study is focused on the new responsibilities and the reasons why Turkey has not yet assigned the agreement into its own domestic law, although it was signed on April 22, 2016. There are several political and legal reasons for this, but the most important is Turkey's membership in the OECD as a developed country. Besides, developing countries shall be supported by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) at a $100 billion budget per year. Turkey needs GCF support in terms of technology transfer, capacity building, and financial in order to achieve the agreement's goals. Turkey has demanded privileged status similar to the one in the KP, i.e., whether or not to be deemed as a developed country.The core aim of the PA is to keep global temperature increases below 20°C by the year 2030, insomuch as to limit temperature increases even further to 1.50°C. This goal depends on the mitigation of CO2 levels, which means that countries should mitigate GHG emissions caused by deforestation and take further actions by primarily abandoning fossil fuels, improving/attaching importance to energy efficiency, and changing/improving land use planning. Within this context, the second part of the study analyzes the efficiency level of forestry legislation and Turkey's climate policies in terms of the responsibilities to be assigned by the PA. The analysis is based on the question as to what extent the Turkish forestry legislation fulfills the responsibilities ascribed by the PA for preventing deforestation. Consequently, it has been concluded that eight criteria determined by the PA are not adequately included in the Turkish forestry legislation and shall require an amendment on a large scale, particularly when Turkey is deemed as a developed country.

Infant-directed speech facilitates neural encoding of speech during infants’ first year of life

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is the special speech register that parents use when addressing young infants. Compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), it is characterised by positive affect, high pitch and wide pitch range, and acoustically exaggerated speech sounds. These acoustic components of IDS have been proposed to facilitate early language acquisition by attracting infants’ attention to speech, or by providing them with a type of speech input that is easier to perceive and learn, or both. Indeed, infants are more successful in a variety of behavioural language processing tasks when presented with IDS stimuli, but it is unclear whether these effects are due to the linguistic function of IDS or solely to its attention-grabbing qualities. I will present three studies that address this question by directly measuring infants’ neurophysiological responses to IDS and ADS. Our findings demonstrate that IDS elicits greater neural activation and more mature neural response patterns compared to ADS in measures of neural entrainment to continuous speech, phonemic discrimination, and semantic processing in 4-to-9-month-old infants. This evidence indicates that beyond capturing infants’ attention to speech, IDShas a privileged status in facilitating neural encoding of speech, which may augment infants’ early speech processing and even later language development.

A Cognitive Grammatical Study of Possessive Constructions in Orwell’s ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’

This paper focuses on investigating the syntax and semantics of possessive constructions in A Clergyman’s Daughter at the phrasal level, within the framework of cognitive grammar using Heine’s (1997) model of possessives. The study aims at analyzing the various semantic relations in possessive constructions from a cognitive grammar perspective, and showing that possession does have a privileged status in the semantics of other concepts. This, however, proves the fallacy of the traditional view. It also shows that there is a natural and systematic relationship between possessive constructions and cognitive constructional schemas that give rise to them through conceptual transfer, and are motivated by experiential gestalt. No model alone can account for all semantic relations expressed through prototypical possessive. After analyzing possessive structures using Heine’s (1997) classification of possessives, there remains a group of other semantic relations that Heine (1997) could not have given a label; they are uncategorized. For underlying grammatical structures of these possessives, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) model is used, which propose that aspects of the experiential gestalt motivate the wider use of too complex possessive constructions.

Uniting the Vision for Health Equity through Partnerships: The 2nd Annual Dr. Elijah Saunders & Dr. Levi Watkins Memorial Lecture.

Minority health research focuses on outcomes by race and ethnicity categories used in the United States census. Overall mortality has decreased significantly for African Americans, Latinos, and Asians over the past 20 years even though it has stopped improving for poor Whites and continues to increase for American Indians/Alaska Natives. Prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease partly account for this trend, but there is room for improvement. Health disparities research also includes persons of less privileged socioeconomic status, underserved rural residents, and sexual and gender minorities of any race and ethnicity when the outcomes are worse than a reference population. Understanding mechanisms that lead to health disparities from behavioral, biological, environmental and health care perspectives will lead to interventions that reduce these disparities and promote health equity. Experiences with racism and discrimination generate a chronic stress response with measurable effects on biological processes and study is needed to evaluate long-term effects on health outcomes. A clinical example of effective approaches to reducing disparities is management of hypertension to promote stroke reduction that requires health system changes, patient-clinician partnerships and engagement of community organizations. Clinicians in health care settings have the potential to promote health equity by implementing standardized measures of social determinants, leveraging the power of health information technology, maximizing cultural competence and socially precise care and engaging communities to reduce health disparities. Strategic partnerships between health care institutions and community-based organizations need to parallel patient-clinician partnerships and are essential to promote health equity and reduce disparities.

Uniting the Vision for Health Equity through Partnerships: The 2nd Annual Dr. Elijah Saunders & Dr. Levi Watkins Memorial Lecture

Minority health research focuses on outcomes by race and ethnicity categories used in the United States census. Overall mortality has decreased significantly for African Americans, Latinos, and Asians over the past 20 years even though it has stopped improving for poor Whites and continues to increase for American Indians/ Alaska Natives. Prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease partly account for this trend, but there is room for improvement. Health disparities research also includes persons of less privileged socioeconomic status, underserved rural residents, and sexual and gender minorities of any race and ethnicity when the outcomes are worse than a reference population. Understanding mechanisms that lead to health disparities from behavioral, biological, environmental and health care perspectives will lead to interventions that reduce these disparities and promote health equity. Experiences with racism and discrimination generate a chronic stress response with measurable effects on biological processes and study is needed to evaluate long-term effects on health outcomes. A clinical example of effective approaches to reducing disparities is management of hypertension to promote stroke reduction that requires health system changes, patient-clinician partnerships and engagement of community organiza­tions. Clinicians in health care settings have the potential to promote health equity by implementing standardized measures of social determinants, leveraging the power of health information technology, maxi­mizing cultural competence and socially precise care and engaging communities to reduce health disparities. Strategic partner­ships between health care institutions and community-based organizations need to parallel patient-clinician partnerships and are essential to promote health equity and reduce disparities. Ethn Dis. 2019;29(Suppl 1):193-200; doi:10.18865/ed.29.S1.193.

Trusting diversity: nationalist and multiculturalist orientations affect generalised trust through ethnic in‐group and out‐group trust

AbstractOne premise of popular nationalism is that ascribing to a shared culture that enjoys a privileged political status enables us to construct the foundation that is vital to generating and supporting trust among members of the ethnic majority. Multiculturalism presumes that the accommodation of new minority cultures is conducive to trust. Utilising structural equation modelling, this paper distinguishes between ethnic in‐group trust (in the Danish context, trusting fellow Danes) and ethnic out‐group trust (trusting refugees and immigrants), in addition to a more generalised social trust towards unknown others. Previous studies in this field have not distinguished between these different dimensions of social trust. Results show that, vis‐à‐vis generalised trust, at the individual level, nationalism cannot compensate for lower trust towards immigrants with higher trust towards other Danes. There is some support for the ‘national identity’ argument, whereby nationalism, perceived shared values and in‐group trust are positively correlated. However, the net effect of nationalism upon generalised trust remains negative. By contrast, multiculturalism is associated with higher levels of in‐group trust and out‐group trust and ultimately of generalised trust.

Rethinking the Female Body: A Phenomenological Account

Throughout much of human history, the detachment of the mind from the body seems to be the conspicuous antagonism that permeates the Western philosophy. René Descarte's decisive premise « I think, therefore I am » usurped the body's role in rational thought, relegating it into a state where it has almost no relevance in philosophical discourse. As a result of this exclusion, women were seen as creatures of nature and emotion and therefore deterritorialized from the realm of the rational as their bodies are intrinsically associated with their identities which are much more likely to be marked by defectiveness. Because phenomenology is concerned with the lived experience of subjects, it serves as a major impetus for understanding subjective embodiment. In this vein, Maurice Merleau Ponty, a 20th century French philosopher, argues that the body is an essential agent in the world since it is the implied sine qua none for making any orientation when the subject perceives. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau Ponty dissects how embodiment is experienced by humans in a universal account assuming that the male body remains an asset of all types of embodiment. This paper juxtaposes Merleau Ponty and philosophy's deliberate omission of the female body. I claim that the superiority of the mind/reason over the body/emotion is used as a pretext to separate men and women. Drawing on Iris Marison Young's feminist phenomenology, I contend that Merleau Ponty's phenomenological account is so problematic since he merely reversed the binary while still maintaining the privileged status of the male subject. I call attention to the essential need to interrogate the sexual difference when addressing the issue of embodiment. Because bringing back the body to the philosophical interest seems to offer "an Archimedean point of stability” in a cultural condition where, according to Sarah Coakly, no "universal ‘grand narrative'” is plausible anymore, I reflect on the essential account of the liberating potential of the female body drawing on my moral convictions.

On universality of classical probability with contextually labeled random variables: Response to A. Khrennikov

In his constructive and well-informed commentary, Andrei Khrennikov acknowledges a privileged status of classical probability theory with respect to statistical analysis. He also sees advantages offered by the Contextuality-by-Default theory, notably, that it “demystifies quantum mechanics by highlighting the role of contextuality,” and that it can detect and measure contextuality in inconsistently connected systems. He argues, however, that classical probability theory may have difficulties in describing empirical phenomena if they are described entirely in terms of observable events. We disagree: contexts in which random variables are recorded are as observable as the variables’ values. Khrennikov also argues that the Contextuality-by-Default theory suffers the problem of non-uniqueness of couplings. We disagree that this is a problem: couplings are all possible ways of imposing counterfactual joint distributions on random variables that de facto are not jointly distributed. The uniqueness of modeling experiments by means of quantum formalisms brought up by Khrennikov is achieved for the price of additional, substantive assumptions. This is consistent with our view of quantum theory as a special-purpose generator of classical probabilities. Khrennikov raises the issue of “mental signaling,” by which he means inconsistent connectedness in behavioral systems. Our position is that it is as inherent to behavioral systems as their stochasticity.

Gene therapy and the adeno-associated virus in the treatment of genetic and acquired ophthalmic diseases in humans: Trials, future directions and safety considerations.

Voretigene neparvovec-rzyl was recently approved for the treatment of Leber congenital amaurosis, and the use of gene therapy for eye disease is attracting even greater interest. The eye has immune privileged status, is easily accessible, requires a reduced dosage of therapy due to its size and is highly compartmentalized, significantly reducing systemic spread. Adeno-associated virus (AAV), with its low pathogenicity, prolonged expression profile and ability to transduce multiple cell types, has become the leading gene therapy vector. Target diseases have moved beyond currently untreatable inherited dystrophies to common, partially treatable acquired conditions such as exudative age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma, but use of the technology in these conditions imposes added obligations for caution in vector design. This review discusses the current status of AAV gene therapy trials in genetic and acquired ocular diseases, and explores new scientific developments, which could help ensure effective and safe use of the therapy in the future.

“Natural Born Aliens”: Transnational Adoptees and US Citizenship

Adoptee deportation in the last decade reveals tensions in adoptees' progressive embrace of immigrant identity, and their privileged status as exceptional Americans whose inclusion is predicated on their (white) adoptive parents' full citizenship rights. This paper contextualizes transnational adoption discourses within the history of US federal immigration law regarding transnational adoption.

Prepare for Transition

8 | International Union Rights | 26/4 FOCUS | CLIMATE CHANGE & TRADE UNIONS Prepare for Transition The beginning of the 21st Century is certainly a time of continuous and rapid change, which requires trade unions to have the capacity for both analysis and quick and effective responses. In the field of labour, these changes relate significantly to globalisation, technological evolution and how these contribute to new forms of production and the modification of the labour conditions. Further changes will inevitably occur in the development model because it is clear that – with the current rate of demand for raw materials and fossil fuels – we are going to destroy the planet. The intensity and rate of change will depend to a large extent on the sensitivity and intentions of States. There are those who deny the evidence and drag their feet because they understand that their privileged status and that of powerful business interests, which are major contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, are being threatened. Either things will change or the struggle will be one for our very existence. Countries must be honest with the commitments and objectives that they have undertaken – in our case at European level, as well as at international level under the Paris Agreement. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls for the adoption of intense and imminent measures to drastically reduce the rate of GHG emissions into the atmosphere. At the current rate of emissions, the goal of avoiding temperature increase of 1.5°C by the end of the century will be exceeded between 2030 and 20501. The IPCC has provided a detailed description of the serious consequences of warming and identified which regions are the most vulnerable to this phenomenon - among them Spain. A new report from the World Meteorological Organisation was presented this November, which states that the concentration of GHGs has risen again to historic levels. The transition from an economy based on the consumption of fossil fuels to a decarbonised economy is not going to be an easy path – nor will it be easy to adapt our companies, industrial or not, to new modes of producing and working. Our responsibility Our trade union responsibility is to ensure that these changes respect workers’ fundamental rights. The transition should not be used as an excuse to dismiss workers or make working life more precarious. Trade unions must prepare to face this transition, which is already impacting on sectors such as energy, but which will sooner or later reach everyone. If we have robust strategies and are well prepared, we will increase our capacity to influence the management of these ‘revolutions’, and to guide our development model towards more sustainable ends that are underpinned by respect for labour rights. It is crucial that trade union organisations assume a commitment to defend social, economic and environmental sustainable development, properly managed through social dialogue, in order to ensure that the energy and ecological transition is an effective and fair process. Participation in negotiating this process must be at the forefront of our demands. There is no doubt that in the medium-term all sectors will have to adapt to the conditions of this new era, and that some sectors will face more difficulties in this transformation than others. For those, it is necessary to negotiate policies that reduce the economic, labour and social impacts, which facilitate their viability. They must also have a just transition. Comisiones Obreras has been discussing just transition for many years, long before the concept surfaced at the Cancun Climate Change Conference in 2010. Already in the 1980s and 1990s in Spain, workers in some sectors suffered harshly from transition and globalisation – in particular in the mining, steel and shipbuilding industries. We debated not only how to protect workers, but also the need to give alternatives to the workers in these regions, and how to secure a role in seeking shared solutions. These struggles for their rights and futures represented a milestone in labour mobilisations in Spain, including several marches of 500 kilometres, hard confrontations with the forces of public order, and a lot of solidarity from many in our communities. We cannot wait Recently, ILO Spain published a study compiling the...