Myra Hird - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Myra Hird
Routledge eBooks, Dec 16, 2021
Chapter 3 examined skeletons, gonads, hormones, and genes as often- cited signifiers of sex “diff... more Chapter 3 examined skeletons, gonads, hormones, and genes as often- cited signifiers of sex “differences” between women and men. However, the ability of some women to sexually reproduce is the most frequent and powerful signifier of “sexual difference” in Western cultures. Whatever social, political, and economic changes might take place to alter women’s position in society, female sexual reproduction is seen as both immutable “fact” and cause of structural differences between women and men. Of the almost countless references to female “materiality” as reproduction, my training as a sociologist secures Emile Durkheim’s rendition as a particularly sharp thorn in my side. He writes, “... society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated with sociability ... Man is actively involved in it whilst woman does little more than look on from a distance” (1970: 385). Not only does Durkheim remind his readers that it is female bodies that can be (passively) impregnated, but this impregnation is limited to fleshy materiality (babies). If male bodies are (actively) impregnated, it is with decidedly nonmaterial sociality.
Journal of Adolescence, Feb 1, 2000
The present study provides one of the first empirical investigations of adolescent dating aggress... more The present study provides one of the first empirical investigations of adolescent dating aggression (ADA) in Britain. The survey found almost half of sampled boys, and more than half of sampled girls, experienced psychological, physical and/or sexual aggression. The study found no significant association between religious affiliation, household composition, age, social class or the use of alcohol and ADA. The study also combined quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the``symmetry of violence'' theory, concluding that when the meaning and context of aggression are considered, male physical and sexual aggression is a significant problem in adolescent heterosexual relationships.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Jun 1, 2015
My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of ... more My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of the brownness in the world. Brownness is meant to be an expansive category that stretches outside the confines of any one group formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic. Thinking outside the regime of the human is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. It is a ceaseless endeavor, a continuous straining to make sense of something else that is never fully knowable. To think the inhuman is the necessary queer labor of the incommensurate. The fact that this thing we call the inhuman is never fully knowable, because of our own stuckness within humanity, makes it a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with the protocols of human knowledge production. Despite the incommensurability, this seeming impossibility, one must persist in thinking in these inhuman directions. Once one stops doing the incommensurate work of attempting to touch inhumanity, one loses traction and falls back onto the predictable coordinates of a relationality that announces itself as universal but is, in fact, only a substrata of the various potential interlays of life within which one is always inculcated. The radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant antiinhumanity. Queer thought is, in large part, about casting a pic-
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of D.Phil. The purpose... more A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of D.Phil. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate psychological, physical and sexual violence in adolescent, heterosexual, intimate relationships. Questionnaires were administered to 487 pupils at two secondary comprehensive schools in Oxford. Data from the questionnaire reveal that a minority of adolescents regularly employ violence in intimate relationships and suggest no significant differences in levels of violence between adolescents of different gender, religious affiliation, household composition or social class. A review of the literature on the use of this standardised questionnaire highlights serious methodological and epistemological problems and questions the use of such questionnaires in future research on the phenomenon of intimate violence The primary focus of the thesis concerns transcript data from seventeen single-sex focus groups and thirteen individual interviews. Transcript data reveals that girls and boys recount different experiences of reality. The discourse used by girls and boys represents an active negotiation of personal experience and cultural prescriptions of meaning. Peers, parents, siblings, teachers, school administrators and media inform adolescents about dominant definitions and boundaries of gender. These definitions are discussed as 'hegemonic masculinity' and 'emphasised femininity' in which gender is structured as distinct, separate, hierarchical and biologically determined. Girls and boys who employed discourses of biological determinism described intimate violence as inevitable and largely a function of female responsibility. Conflict results from the negotiation of this culturally dominant discourse and personal experience. A minority of girls and boys employed other discourses such as those of socialisation and feminism. These discourses provide alternative understandings of personal experience and social identity which some adolescents may find empowering and represent a crucial resistance to the ascendancy of culturally practiced gender. I thank my family. My father for teaching me the value of humility; my mother for teaching me strength (Mum, I'm looking into your eyes); my sister Janet for teaching me kindness and my sister Karen for teaching me to be bold. Most of all, I thank Sean for his face with a view. You have shared your life with me and given me more love than I could possibly deserve. Thank you for lifting up your wings. This must be the place.
This book would have no basis for discussion if contemporary Western society did not take “sex” a... more This book would have no basis for discussion if contemporary Western society did not take “sex” and “sexual difference” for granted. Scholars of history have for some time argued that “sex” and “sexual difference” have undergone significant shifts in meaning. This chapter provides a historical account of the making of “sex” and “sexual difference.” Using feminist research, the chapter focuses on what I have termed the “culture of matter” - that is, how culture has produced a discourse of “sexual difference” and complementarity, rather than some other discourse such as sex similarity. The “story” of sex “differences” is largely a story of the emphasis of difference rather than similarity, of intrasimilarity and inter difference. But, as Matt Ridley’s quote above suggests, the shift to emphasizing supposed differences between women and men carries the specter of its social construction: it is equally plausible to discuss sex similarity as it is to discuss sex difference.
Environment And Planning E: Nature And Space, Jun 11, 2019
An estimated 50 million kilograms of human placental material is produced worldwide every year. I... more An estimated 50 million kilograms of human placental material is produced worldwide every year. In countries such as Canada, human placentas are utilized in scientific research concerned with fetal and women's health, immunology, and cancer, to name a few. Through an empirical study involving interviews with placenta scientists and observations of placental science research laboratories and meetings, this article examines the material and discursive processes through which placentas are rendered materially and ethically available for scientific study. We argue that these processes involve a critical shift in placenta ontology such that placentas exist as waste and not-waste, an indeterminacy that is resolved in a four-phase praxis. The praxis ultimately makes placentas not only available, but also monetarily and morally 'free of charge' for scientific purposes. Our analysis reveals that the purported waste-ness of placentas potentiates their amenability to scientific experimentation, and is foundational to scientists' claims about their moral relationship with broader publics.
Contents: Mapping the discourse of heterosexual interpersonal violence Theoretical challenges to ... more Contents: Mapping the discourse of heterosexual interpersonal violence Theoretical challenges to the study of heterosexual interpersonal violence Learning the difference that gender makes Heteronormativity and sexual coercion: adolescents practicing gender Investing in masculinity: men who use interpersonal violence Investing in difference: violent women and masculinity in disguise? Engendering violence? Bibliography Index.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2001
In common with all males, gay disabled men regularly encounter diverse and conflicting claims abo... more In common with all males, gay disabled men regularly encounter diverse and conflicting claims about the ‘essence’ of their masculinity. Such claims, given that they often circulate explicitly contradictory accounts of both the characteristics and the project of masculinity, have had the sometimes unanticipated effect of exposing the lives of men as being relatively disunited and disparate. In this context, claims that there continues to exist a single coherent masculinity have been significantly discredited. Where once the assumption of unproblematic integration into collective gender identity guided understandings, there has emerged a new appreciation of the disquieting potential of masculinity. For marginalized males, and for those who choose to study their experiences, these new ways of understanding the complexity of masculinity, and the absence of coherence, are significant. The acknowledgement that there exists a plurality of differentially empowered masculinities substantiates what most gay disabled men have long known. Indeed, many such men may understand these advances less as theoretical innovation than as a validation of the extent and duration of their struggle. Few categories of male are so knowledgeable of the tentative nature, and fragility, of masculinity. Gay disabled men operate in the world with an awareness that the business of ‘being a man’ is a project of the self and others, which must be continually worked on and worked through.
parallax, Feb 1, 2010
parallax 16:1 (54). 'The Life of the Gift'. parallax calls for papers for a themed issu... more parallax 16:1 (54). 'The Life of the Gift'. parallax calls for papers for a themed issue on the life of the gift, to be edited by Myra J. Hird, Professor and Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Ontario. The aim of this themed ...
Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, Jun 28, 2017
As landfilling costs increase and controversies emerge over new waste processing facilities, mana... more As landfilling costs increase and controversies emerge over new waste processing facilities, managing growing quantities of municipal solid waste is a pressing environmental and political concern for Canadian municipalities, who bear the primary responsibility for coordinating waste management (WM). In 2015, Metro Vancouver's plans to expand their capacity to manage their waste through energy-from-waste technology was put on hold indefinitely despite shrinking landfill space and persistent public opposition to new landfills. Using Bulkeley et al.'s (2005) 'modes of governing framework', we analyze Metro Vancouver's failed attempt to expand their energy-fromwaste capacity to better understand the challenges associated with how waste is governed in Canada. We argue that a history of downloading responsibility for WM to municipalities, regional districts, and private industry has fragmented WM governance, posing a challenge for developing new waste infrastructure. We find that this localization of responsibility is incompatible with contemporary WM challenges. The scalar mismatch between waste's material impacts and the scale at which waste is managed has resulted in co-dependence and conflict between putatively independent municipalities, regional districts, and private companies. As a result, both higher-level WM coordination is inhibited while the autonomy of individual municipalities is simultaneously undermined.
Health Sociology Review, May 22, 2016
ABSTRACT A research-to-practice gap was identified in a study on knowledge sharing regarding futu... more ABSTRACT A research-to-practice gap was identified in a study on knowledge sharing regarding future cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk associated with a previous diagnosis of pre-eclampsia (PE) during pregnancy, where 41% of healthcare practitioners did not inform patients of increased risk more than 50% of the time. Employing an empirical, sociological lens, we conducted interviews with women and healthcare providers from the same sample as that study. In this article, we analyse participants’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the relationship between PE and CVD risk, assessing how relationships between research findings, risk, pregnancy, and women’s health are understood and acted upon in Canadian healthcare. Relating empirical observations to larger debates surrounding knowledge sharing practices, we argue that structural, practical, and ideological barriers impede knowledge sharing between healthcare practitioners and patients. Patient perceptions and experiences of the knowledge sharing gap must be addressed in practical and structural changes to healthcare.
Sexualities, May 1, 2004
This article introduces chimerism and mosaicism as two recent scientific ‘discoveries’ that prese... more This article introduces chimerism and mosaicism as two recent scientific ‘discoveries’ that present challenges to western heteronormative notions of kinship. Chimerism, in the form of xenotransplantation, already demands a rethinking of traditional boundaries between what is considered ‘kin’ and ‘non-kin’. Recent biological studies describing chimerism as two genetically distinct cell lines in one organism not caused by transplantation, invites further questions regarding the stability of kinship ideology. The aim of the article is to argue, with anthropologists and feminist science studies scholars, that the western understanding of kinship relies upon a problematic use of ‘nature’, and that this dependence necessarily produces shifting and contradictory definitions of kinship.
Environment And Planning D: Society And Space, 2010
My current research attempts to build a microontologyöengaging with sciences of the microcosmosöw... more My current research attempts to build a microontologyöengaging with sciences of the microcosmosöwithin biophilosophy (Hird, 2009). It is enlivened by Donna Haraway's contemplation about what can happen When Species Meet. In this short review, I hope to build on Haraway's important insights to contemplate meetings-with the Other in circumstances when the majority of Others are not species and when this Other majority meets without human recognition or involvement. At the outset of her latest work, Haraway details the community of the human body:`I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many'' (page 3). Haraway asks of these families of kin and (taxonomic) kind important questions about the possibilities for becoming-with companion species. Here, relating precedes identity. Not, as Haraway points out, that species do not have ontologies-in-themselves``sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter'' (page 25). But there is contagion at work in Haraway's species-meeting: kin and kind defined less through``arboreal descent'' and more through``the play of bodies'' (page 30). Haraway's companion species impregnation is metaphoric to be sure in its weaving of histories of codependence and production, but it is more than this: a literal enmeshing of bodies and all of their resident companion species (and those species') in a recursive cascade that defines how we know what we know.``Turtling all the way down'' as Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers (1997) put it. This incalculable enmeshment proceeds from a different, non-human-centered ontology than Kant's sublime, Wittgenstein's lion, Lyotard's inhuman and differend, Heidegger's Hand-Werk, Levinas's dog Bobby, and ultimately Derrida's cat, each of whose epistemologies pivot on a comparison between humans and (the) animal that leads to the latter's ultimate disavowal. And while the main meetings that concern Haraway are those of dogs and humans (and all of their cascading technological, political economic, ecological, and ethical entanglements), she is clearly sympathetic to the fact that focusing on animals``big like us'' (Margulis, 2007, personal communication) encourages a profoundly myopic humanism. In short, insofar as the philosophical limit remains the human-animalöand given that humans are animalsöbacteria's faciality' remains obscured within the human imaginative horizon. Microontologies concern companion species that are not species at all: companion with not-species as it were. Populating this`unseen majority' are about 5610 30 bacterial cells on Earth: that's 5000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bacterial cells (Whitman et al, 1998). Another estimated 10 18 ö1000 000 000 000 000 000öbacteria circulate in the atmosphere attached to dust. Most organisms are bacteria: they evince the greatest organismal diversity, and have dominated evolutionary history. Bacteria invented all major forms of metabolism, multicellularity, nanotechnology, metallurgy, sensory and
Theory, Culture & Society, Mar 1, 2010
Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we ... more Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theory as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, and through symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysical and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke the expectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want to argue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not efface difference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formulations of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial indifference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centred theories of globality.
Tidskrift för genusvetenskap, 2016
Feminist Theory, Dec 1, 2005
Routledge eBooks, Feb 4, 2014
Routledge eBooks, Dec 16, 2021
Chapter 3 examined skeletons, gonads, hormones, and genes as often- cited signifiers of sex “diff... more Chapter 3 examined skeletons, gonads, hormones, and genes as often- cited signifiers of sex “differences” between women and men. However, the ability of some women to sexually reproduce is the most frequent and powerful signifier of “sexual difference” in Western cultures. Whatever social, political, and economic changes might take place to alter women’s position in society, female sexual reproduction is seen as both immutable “fact” and cause of structural differences between women and men. Of the almost countless references to female “materiality” as reproduction, my training as a sociologist secures Emile Durkheim’s rendition as a particularly sharp thorn in my side. He writes, “... society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated with sociability ... Man is actively involved in it whilst woman does little more than look on from a distance” (1970: 385). Not only does Durkheim remind his readers that it is female bodies that can be (passively) impregnated, but this impregnation is limited to fleshy materiality (babies). If male bodies are (actively) impregnated, it is with decidedly nonmaterial sociality.
Journal of Adolescence, Feb 1, 2000
The present study provides one of the first empirical investigations of adolescent dating aggress... more The present study provides one of the first empirical investigations of adolescent dating aggression (ADA) in Britain. The survey found almost half of sampled boys, and more than half of sampled girls, experienced psychological, physical and/or sexual aggression. The study found no significant association between religious affiliation, household composition, age, social class or the use of alcohol and ADA. The study also combined quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the``symmetry of violence'' theory, concluding that when the meaning and context of aggression are considered, male physical and sexual aggression is a significant problem in adolescent heterosexual relationships.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Jun 1, 2015
My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of ... more My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of the brownness in the world. Brownness is meant to be an expansive category that stretches outside the confines of any one group formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic. Thinking outside the regime of the human is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. It is a ceaseless endeavor, a continuous straining to make sense of something else that is never fully knowable. To think the inhuman is the necessary queer labor of the incommensurate. The fact that this thing we call the inhuman is never fully knowable, because of our own stuckness within humanity, makes it a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with the protocols of human knowledge production. Despite the incommensurability, this seeming impossibility, one must persist in thinking in these inhuman directions. Once one stops doing the incommensurate work of attempting to touch inhumanity, one loses traction and falls back onto the predictable coordinates of a relationality that announces itself as universal but is, in fact, only a substrata of the various potential interlays of life within which one is always inculcated. The radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant antiinhumanity. Queer thought is, in large part, about casting a pic-
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of D.Phil. The purpose... more A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of D.Phil. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate psychological, physical and sexual violence in adolescent, heterosexual, intimate relationships. Questionnaires were administered to 487 pupils at two secondary comprehensive schools in Oxford. Data from the questionnaire reveal that a minority of adolescents regularly employ violence in intimate relationships and suggest no significant differences in levels of violence between adolescents of different gender, religious affiliation, household composition or social class. A review of the literature on the use of this standardised questionnaire highlights serious methodological and epistemological problems and questions the use of such questionnaires in future research on the phenomenon of intimate violence The primary focus of the thesis concerns transcript data from seventeen single-sex focus groups and thirteen individual interviews. Transcript data reveals that girls and boys recount different experiences of reality. The discourse used by girls and boys represents an active negotiation of personal experience and cultural prescriptions of meaning. Peers, parents, siblings, teachers, school administrators and media inform adolescents about dominant definitions and boundaries of gender. These definitions are discussed as 'hegemonic masculinity' and 'emphasised femininity' in which gender is structured as distinct, separate, hierarchical and biologically determined. Girls and boys who employed discourses of biological determinism described intimate violence as inevitable and largely a function of female responsibility. Conflict results from the negotiation of this culturally dominant discourse and personal experience. A minority of girls and boys employed other discourses such as those of socialisation and feminism. These discourses provide alternative understandings of personal experience and social identity which some adolescents may find empowering and represent a crucial resistance to the ascendancy of culturally practiced gender. I thank my family. My father for teaching me the value of humility; my mother for teaching me strength (Mum, I'm looking into your eyes); my sister Janet for teaching me kindness and my sister Karen for teaching me to be bold. Most of all, I thank Sean for his face with a view. You have shared your life with me and given me more love than I could possibly deserve. Thank you for lifting up your wings. This must be the place.
This book would have no basis for discussion if contemporary Western society did not take “sex” a... more This book would have no basis for discussion if contemporary Western society did not take “sex” and “sexual difference” for granted. Scholars of history have for some time argued that “sex” and “sexual difference” have undergone significant shifts in meaning. This chapter provides a historical account of the making of “sex” and “sexual difference.” Using feminist research, the chapter focuses on what I have termed the “culture of matter” - that is, how culture has produced a discourse of “sexual difference” and complementarity, rather than some other discourse such as sex similarity. The “story” of sex “differences” is largely a story of the emphasis of difference rather than similarity, of intrasimilarity and inter difference. But, as Matt Ridley’s quote above suggests, the shift to emphasizing supposed differences between women and men carries the specter of its social construction: it is equally plausible to discuss sex similarity as it is to discuss sex difference.
Environment And Planning E: Nature And Space, Jun 11, 2019
An estimated 50 million kilograms of human placental material is produced worldwide every year. I... more An estimated 50 million kilograms of human placental material is produced worldwide every year. In countries such as Canada, human placentas are utilized in scientific research concerned with fetal and women's health, immunology, and cancer, to name a few. Through an empirical study involving interviews with placenta scientists and observations of placental science research laboratories and meetings, this article examines the material and discursive processes through which placentas are rendered materially and ethically available for scientific study. We argue that these processes involve a critical shift in placenta ontology such that placentas exist as waste and not-waste, an indeterminacy that is resolved in a four-phase praxis. The praxis ultimately makes placentas not only available, but also monetarily and morally 'free of charge' for scientific purposes. Our analysis reveals that the purported waste-ness of placentas potentiates their amenability to scientific experimentation, and is foundational to scientists' claims about their moral relationship with broader publics.
Contents: Mapping the discourse of heterosexual interpersonal violence Theoretical challenges to ... more Contents: Mapping the discourse of heterosexual interpersonal violence Theoretical challenges to the study of heterosexual interpersonal violence Learning the difference that gender makes Heteronormativity and sexual coercion: adolescents practicing gender Investing in masculinity: men who use interpersonal violence Investing in difference: violent women and masculinity in disguise? Engendering violence? Bibliography Index.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2001
In common with all males, gay disabled men regularly encounter diverse and conflicting claims abo... more In common with all males, gay disabled men regularly encounter diverse and conflicting claims about the ‘essence’ of their masculinity. Such claims, given that they often circulate explicitly contradictory accounts of both the characteristics and the project of masculinity, have had the sometimes unanticipated effect of exposing the lives of men as being relatively disunited and disparate. In this context, claims that there continues to exist a single coherent masculinity have been significantly discredited. Where once the assumption of unproblematic integration into collective gender identity guided understandings, there has emerged a new appreciation of the disquieting potential of masculinity. For marginalized males, and for those who choose to study their experiences, these new ways of understanding the complexity of masculinity, and the absence of coherence, are significant. The acknowledgement that there exists a plurality of differentially empowered masculinities substantiates what most gay disabled men have long known. Indeed, many such men may understand these advances less as theoretical innovation than as a validation of the extent and duration of their struggle. Few categories of male are so knowledgeable of the tentative nature, and fragility, of masculinity. Gay disabled men operate in the world with an awareness that the business of ‘being a man’ is a project of the self and others, which must be continually worked on and worked through.
parallax, Feb 1, 2010
parallax 16:1 (54). 'The Life of the Gift'. parallax calls for papers for a themed issu... more parallax 16:1 (54). 'The Life of the Gift'. parallax calls for papers for a themed issue on the life of the gift, to be edited by Myra J. Hird, Professor and Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Ontario. The aim of this themed ...
Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, Jun 28, 2017
As landfilling costs increase and controversies emerge over new waste processing facilities, mana... more As landfilling costs increase and controversies emerge over new waste processing facilities, managing growing quantities of municipal solid waste is a pressing environmental and political concern for Canadian municipalities, who bear the primary responsibility for coordinating waste management (WM). In 2015, Metro Vancouver's plans to expand their capacity to manage their waste through energy-from-waste technology was put on hold indefinitely despite shrinking landfill space and persistent public opposition to new landfills. Using Bulkeley et al.'s (2005) 'modes of governing framework', we analyze Metro Vancouver's failed attempt to expand their energy-fromwaste capacity to better understand the challenges associated with how waste is governed in Canada. We argue that a history of downloading responsibility for WM to municipalities, regional districts, and private industry has fragmented WM governance, posing a challenge for developing new waste infrastructure. We find that this localization of responsibility is incompatible with contemporary WM challenges. The scalar mismatch between waste's material impacts and the scale at which waste is managed has resulted in co-dependence and conflict between putatively independent municipalities, regional districts, and private companies. As a result, both higher-level WM coordination is inhibited while the autonomy of individual municipalities is simultaneously undermined.
Health Sociology Review, May 22, 2016
ABSTRACT A research-to-practice gap was identified in a study on knowledge sharing regarding futu... more ABSTRACT A research-to-practice gap was identified in a study on knowledge sharing regarding future cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk associated with a previous diagnosis of pre-eclampsia (PE) during pregnancy, where 41% of healthcare practitioners did not inform patients of increased risk more than 50% of the time. Employing an empirical, sociological lens, we conducted interviews with women and healthcare providers from the same sample as that study. In this article, we analyse participants’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the relationship between PE and CVD risk, assessing how relationships between research findings, risk, pregnancy, and women’s health are understood and acted upon in Canadian healthcare. Relating empirical observations to larger debates surrounding knowledge sharing practices, we argue that structural, practical, and ideological barriers impede knowledge sharing between healthcare practitioners and patients. Patient perceptions and experiences of the knowledge sharing gap must be addressed in practical and structural changes to healthcare.
Sexualities, May 1, 2004
This article introduces chimerism and mosaicism as two recent scientific ‘discoveries’ that prese... more This article introduces chimerism and mosaicism as two recent scientific ‘discoveries’ that present challenges to western heteronormative notions of kinship. Chimerism, in the form of xenotransplantation, already demands a rethinking of traditional boundaries between what is considered ‘kin’ and ‘non-kin’. Recent biological studies describing chimerism as two genetically distinct cell lines in one organism not caused by transplantation, invites further questions regarding the stability of kinship ideology. The aim of the article is to argue, with anthropologists and feminist science studies scholars, that the western understanding of kinship relies upon a problematic use of ‘nature’, and that this dependence necessarily produces shifting and contradictory definitions of kinship.
Environment And Planning D: Society And Space, 2010
My current research attempts to build a microontologyöengaging with sciences of the microcosmosöw... more My current research attempts to build a microontologyöengaging with sciences of the microcosmosöwithin biophilosophy (Hird, 2009). It is enlivened by Donna Haraway's contemplation about what can happen When Species Meet. In this short review, I hope to build on Haraway's important insights to contemplate meetings-with the Other in circumstances when the majority of Others are not species and when this Other majority meets without human recognition or involvement. At the outset of her latest work, Haraway details the community of the human body:`I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many'' (page 3). Haraway asks of these families of kin and (taxonomic) kind important questions about the possibilities for becoming-with companion species. Here, relating precedes identity. Not, as Haraway points out, that species do not have ontologies-in-themselves``sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter'' (page 25). But there is contagion at work in Haraway's species-meeting: kin and kind defined less through``arboreal descent'' and more through``the play of bodies'' (page 30). Haraway's companion species impregnation is metaphoric to be sure in its weaving of histories of codependence and production, but it is more than this: a literal enmeshing of bodies and all of their resident companion species (and those species') in a recursive cascade that defines how we know what we know.``Turtling all the way down'' as Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers (1997) put it. This incalculable enmeshment proceeds from a different, non-human-centered ontology than Kant's sublime, Wittgenstein's lion, Lyotard's inhuman and differend, Heidegger's Hand-Werk, Levinas's dog Bobby, and ultimately Derrida's cat, each of whose epistemologies pivot on a comparison between humans and (the) animal that leads to the latter's ultimate disavowal. And while the main meetings that concern Haraway are those of dogs and humans (and all of their cascading technological, political economic, ecological, and ethical entanglements), she is clearly sympathetic to the fact that focusing on animals``big like us'' (Margulis, 2007, personal communication) encourages a profoundly myopic humanism. In short, insofar as the philosophical limit remains the human-animalöand given that humans are animalsöbacteria's faciality' remains obscured within the human imaginative horizon. Microontologies concern companion species that are not species at all: companion with not-species as it were. Populating this`unseen majority' are about 5610 30 bacterial cells on Earth: that's 5000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bacterial cells (Whitman et al, 1998). Another estimated 10 18 ö1000 000 000 000 000 000öbacteria circulate in the atmosphere attached to dust. Most organisms are bacteria: they evince the greatest organismal diversity, and have dominated evolutionary history. Bacteria invented all major forms of metabolism, multicellularity, nanotechnology, metallurgy, sensory and
Theory, Culture & Society, Mar 1, 2010
Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we ... more Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theory as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, and through symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysical and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke the expectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want to argue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not efface difference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formulations of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial indifference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centred theories of globality.
Tidskrift för genusvetenskap, 2016
Feminist Theory, Dec 1, 2005
Routledge eBooks, Feb 4, 2014