Scope Of Harm Research Articles

Imposing calculations: The visibility and invisibility of harm in the Mackenzie Gas Project environmental assessment.

Environmental assessment is an institutional apparatus through which proponents concede harm associated with extractive projects. Within these processes proponents define the nature and scope of harm, which is made visible through the production of indicators and measurements and made manageable through mitigation measures or economic compensation. That the activities of extractive industries may have effects on surrounding ecologies is rarely in question; proponents of extractive projects regularly concede that their activities will result in negative (but also positive) changes to environments and communities. What is often contested in the course of environmental assessment and regulatory processes is the "significance" of the impacts identified, the nature of the harm caused, and whether or not it is possible or acceptable to accommodate it. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Sahtu Settlement Area, NWT during the Mackenzie Gas Project environmental assessment, along with regulatory documents and transcripts, this paper examines how proponents and regulatory regimes work to make the impacts of extractive industries visible, and how these logics deviate discursively and materially from many Indigenous peoples' understandings of appropriate relationships between human beings and nature.

Marketing’s Ethical Blind Spot: Catering to Consumer Preferences

Marketers are guided by a longstanding mantra: Consumers preferences are king. In many ways, to be the best marketer is to create products and services that are directly aligned with consumer preferences. This paper focuses on the potential ethical issues associated with blindly catering to consumer preferences. The preoccupation with consumer preferences leads marketers to prioritize them, even if the preferences are perverse. This preoccupation can trigger a kind of cultural, group based harm. Marketers and business ethicists alike have historically understood consumer harm narrowly. Traditional accounts of marketing and business ethics have used the theories of John Rawls to argue that certain practices are unethical because they harm individuals. (Rawls 1971) This paper seeks instead to use Iris Marion Young’s criticism of John Rawls to expand the scope of harms to which businesses should be attuned. Her account focuses on harms that reinforce cultural norms while stereotyping minorities, females, the LGBT community and other under-represented cultural groups — so called “cultural imperialism.” (Young 1990). Turning our attention to this kind of group-based harm has two ethical implications for marketers. First, marketers should not cater to customer preferences in ways that create these harms by reinforcing social hierarchies and stereotypes. And second, marketers may even have a positive obligation to counteract and mitigate this kind of cultural harm by promoting cultural diversity in their marketing activities, even if this means going against consumer preferences. The article concludes with a working applicable framework for marketing managers to analyze the potential cultural harms of their activities.

The Four Stages of Youth Sports TBI Policymaking: Engagement, Enactment, Research, and Reform

This article advances, for the first time, a framework for situating public health law interventions as occurring in a predictable four-stage process. Whether the intervention is related to mandatory seat-belt laws, HIV prevention through needle-exchanges, or distracted-driving laws, these public health law interventions have generally been characterized by the following four stages. First, a series of publicized incidents, observances, or outcomes generate significant media attention, and are framed as public health harms. Then, a few select states evaluate such harms and proactively seek testimony or evidence designed to support a law-based intervention. After this initial public engagement, states enact legal frameworks designed to minimize or reduce the harm, often in the absence of full information about the scope of harm or potential effectiveness of the intervention. In contrast, scholars have proposed that at these early stages, lawmaking should be evidence-based and “developed through a continuous process that uses the best available quantitative and qualitative evidence.”5 Our experience evaluating youth sports traumatic brain injury (TBI) lawmaking suggests that, like other public health issues with sudden and intense media (and, therefore, constituent) attention, an evidence-based approach was lacking during these early stages.

Potentially Harmful Therapy and Multicultural Counseling: Bridging Two Disciplinary Discourses.

In recent years psychologists have been increasingly concerned about potentially harmful therapy, yet this recent discourse has not addressed issues that have long been voiced by the multicultural counseling and psychotherapy movement. We aim to begin to bring these seemingly disparate discourses of harm into greater conversation with one another, in the service of placing the discipline on a firmer foothold in its considerations of potentially harmful therapy. After reviewing the two discourses and exploring reasons for their divergence, we argue that they operate according to differing assumptions pertaining to the sources, objects, and scope of harm. We then argue that these differences reveal the discipline's need to better appreciate that harm is a social construct, that psychotherapy may be inherently ethnocentric, and that strategies for collecting evidence of harm should be integrated with a social justice agenda.

The Business of Doctoring

The core business of medicine is the consultation. During the consultation one human being responds to another in distress. Most doctors spend more time talking with people than performing surgery, prescribing pills or ordering tests. The extent to which the doctor succeeds as a communicator may even govern the ‘success’ of any procedure performed, if we define success as relief from the condition causing distress. As human beings our ability to benefit from what is offered to alleviate our symptoms is limited by the extent to which we feel that we have been heard and supported with empathy. It has been demonstrated that the human body has the capacity to heal and that healers are limited by their capacity to facilitate that process. That is not to say that ‘talking’ can spare us the need for other interventions. In this review the author examines the factors that impact on the medical consultation with particular emphasis on the scope for harm when the consultation is interrupted.

Defining and redefining harm reduction in the Lao context

The response to drug use in Laos has focused on reducing opium supply (supply reduction) and rates of drug use (demand reduction). However, recently there is increased interest among government counterparts to discuss and develop broader responses to injecting drug use (IDU) including the introduction of harm reduction programs. The concept of harm reduction has just been introduced to Lao PDR and as yet there is no agreement on a definition of the concept. We highlight here a range of issues that remain controversial in Lao PDR in the HIV, drug use and harm reduction discourse, the definition of 'harm reduction' and related terms; and the scope of harm reduction.This was a qualitative study, consisting of in-depth interviews with 27 law enforcement and 8 health officers who work in the fields of HIV and/or drug control about their understanding of HIV related to drug use, and concepts of harm reduction. Content analysis was performed to identify the coding, categories and themes.We found that law enforcement officers in particular had limited understanding about harm reduction and the feasibility and appropriateness of harm reduction services in the Lao context.Harm reduction should be a core element of a public health response to HIV where drug use and IDU exists. Recommendations include the necessity of increasing the awareness of harm reduction among law enforcement officers and providing appropriate evidence to support the needs of harm reduction policy and programs. HIV prevention and treatment strategies should be integrated within existing social and cultural frameworks, working with the task force for HIV/IDU and other government counterparts.

University Governance and the Accountability of Academic Administrators

The two fundamental purposes of universities are to create and to disseminate knowledge. Knowledge is created through research and scholarship. Knowledge is disseminated through publication, teaching, conferences, public lectures, etc. Faculty members, administrative staff and physical infrastructure are justified by their respective roles in fulfilling these purposes. Any claim that universities have for public funding rests on the social benefit that realisation of these purposes brings. Against this backdrop, agreement to become an academic administrator entails accepting the responsibility for advancing these purposes within a specific domain. In practice, this means that academic administrators have a responsibility to maximise the achievement of these purposes. Failure to do so constitutes an instance of harm to the individuals and groups of individuals contributing to or depending on the fulfilment of the purposes. In some cases, the group harmed is the society of which the university is a part. Following Joel Feinberg (1977) harm in this context is the thwarting, invading, defeating or setting back of legitimate interests related to the achievement of the dual purposes. An academic administrator may be guilty of causing harm with intent or simply through a failure to discharge the positive responsibility of maximising the achievement of the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Determining culpability for causing harm and determining remedies is the crux of accountability. On the above definition of harm, the scope of harm that can flow from the actions or non-actions of an academic administrator is wide. It includes: embezzlement, failure to address problems or concerns effectively and in a timely way, failure to follow due process, and failure to allocate resources in ways that maximise the achievement of the purposes.