Current national and international guidelines for the ethical design and development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics emphasize ethical theory. Various governing and advisory bodies have generated sets of broad ethical principles, which institutional decisionmakers are encouraged to apply to particular practical decisions. Although much of this literature examines the ethics of designing and developing AI and robotics, medical institutions typically must make purchase and deployment decisions about technologies that have already been designed and developed. The primary problem facing medical institutions is not one of ethical design but of ethical deployment. The purpose of this paper is to develop a practical model by which medical institutions may make ethical deployment decisions about ready-made advanced technologies. Our slogan is “more process, less principles.” Ethically sound decisionmaking requires that the process by which medical institutions make such decisions include participatory, deliberative, and conservative elements. We argue that our model preserves the strengths of existing frameworks, avoids their shortcomings, and delivers its own moral, practical, and epistemic advantages.

Filmic portrayals of Clara Schumann from World War II to the present provide a fascinating insight into changing conceptions of her professional and domestic roles. Just as fictional reshapings of her biography from the late-nineteenth century to the present can be understood to relate to changing social and political contexts, filmic portrayals of this great musical figure over the past 80 years speak to both constancy and change. The image that remains constant, the depiction of a loyal wife in the service of her husband's art, takes on different guises as it is reflected in the mirror of each film's historical, social, and political moment. In Träumerei (1943/44) Clara Schumann provides an idealized depiction of the German woman in the context of war, one who sacrifices her performance career for love of husband, children and domesticity. Song of Love (1947) reflects the revered role of the mother of a large family in post-war America. Limiting its narrative frame to the years leading up to Robert Schumann's death, Frühlingssinfonie (1974) casts a new light on the domestic strands explored in Träumerei, reflecting then recent developments in research in the Neue Schumann-Gesamtausgabe. In Geliebte Clara (2008), whereas the titular focus shifts explicitly to Clara herself, this passionate retelling is based on the familiar narrative that informs all four films. Building on the historiographical work of Beatrix Borchard, Matthias Wendt, and Yael Braunschweig, this article provides a rich cultural context for each film, and explores how that context relates to source materials including letters and diaries. Reaching beyond that scholarship, this article challenges the familiar narrative found in these movies by re-reading passages of Clara's letters and diaries that can be understood to express regret and frustration at the limitations that her domestic life imposed on her artistic career.

The 1945 Potsdam Agreement established a new border between Poland and Germany at the so-called “Oder-Neisse line,” but it left unsettled the question of the maritime boundary on the Baltic Sea. Until 1989, the water border remained a matter of dispute between the German Democratic Republic and the Polish People's Republic socialist allies otherwise at pains to demonstrate unity in geopolitical matters—especially with regard to their shared “border of peace and friendship.” In the intervening decades, East German fishermen and Polish ship captains repeatedly ran afoul of the invisible water border, the importance of which increased as UN conventions on the Law of the Sea affected fishing, shipping, drilling, and security matters. This article examines the diplomatic dispute over territorial waters in relation to its environmental dimensions and social consequences, demonstrating how the challenges of governing transnational space in a water environment greatly complicated everyday life for water users as well as the border work of both states.

No state has ever been as identified with its borders as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The guest editors’ introduction to this special issue analyzes the development of the historiography of the borders of the GDR, showing how new approaches to the country's history have also impacted scholarship on the everyday history of the border. We argue for approaches that understand the border simultaneously as a site of conflict and cooperation and that situate the border not just alongside its geographical neighbors, but within broader flows of natural resources, pollution, narcotics, migration, and disease. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of border studies, we argue that global approaches can help contextualize the exceptional and encourage scholars to ask new questions about which elements of GDR bordering practices were part of the globally emerging normalcy of border regimes, and which were unique to East Germany. In these ways, this special issue seeks to reveal new aspects of East German history and, in turn, make the GDR more legible within border studies.

This article explores East German responses to HIV/AIDS and the emergence of sex as a site of border insecurity in the imagination of the East German state in the mid-1980s. Existing histories often dismiss the East German response to HIV/AIDS as ineffective or negligible on account of its illiberalism and insularity. These narratives, however, ignore the tense debates and wide variety of state and activist responses to the AIDS epidemic that developed within the GDR over the course of its final decade. I argue that as scientists and health officials sought to integrate East German institutions into the “global AIDS community,” the specter of African sexuality loomed larger in their characterizations of this epidemiological threat (notably, in ways that do not neatly correlate with rates of HIV prevalence in the GDR). Explanations of East German AIDS policy should therefore focus less on the GDR's illiberalism and more on its liberalization—that is, its entrance in the mid-1980s into a global moral economy of AIDS that elided and disincentivized socialist commitments to the Global South.

This article presents reflections from 12 experts on language learners strategy (LLS) research. They were asked to offer their reflections in one of their domains of expertise, linking research into LLS with successful language learning and use practices. In essence, they were called upon to provide a review of recent scholarship by identifying areas where results of research had already led to the enhancement of learner strategy use, as well as to describe ongoing and future research efforts intended to enhance the strategy domain. The LLS areas dealt with include theory building, the dynamics of delivering strategy instruction (SI), meta-analyses of SI, learner diversity, SI for young language learners, SI for fine-tuning the comprehension and production of academic-level, grammar strategies at the macro and micro levels, lessons learned from many years of LLS research in Greece, the past and future roles of technology aimed at enhancing language learning, and applications of LLS in content instruction. This review is intended to provide the field with an updated statement as to where we have been, where we are now, and where we need to go. Ideally, it will provide ideas for future studies.

Henry Rider Haggard, the famed author of adventure romances, wrote the novel Dr. Therne (1898) in response to weakening compulsory smallpox vaccination laws, thus entering one of the most heated debates of the late nineteenth century. With Dr. Therne, Haggard aimed to intervene in the lives of the many working-class anti-vaccinationists who, from the 1850s onwards, mobilised to evade what they perceived as a gross – and targeted – extension of state power at the expense of individual rights. Recovering the novel, which has not yet received scholarly attention from historians of medicine, reveals the way fiction was called upon to change minds during a crucial period of Victorian medicine, one that witnessed a climactic shift in public health intervention. This article will examine the reception of Dr. Therne in various print media – middle-class London papers, medical journals and working-class, anti-vaccinationist publications – to consider some new dynamics of the debate which the disagreement over Haggard’s polemic exposes, including the perceived power of fiction (when properly priced and distributed) to change minds, and the contested role of the evangelical press. Additionally, a discussion of the different iterations of Dr. Therne, and a look at an exceptional anti-vaccinationist response in the form of a competing novel, illustrates that pro- and anti-vaccinationists alike contributed to a moment in late Victorian society when the role of fiction was considered a worthy contender in a debate ostensibly about fact.

From the last decades of the twentieth century, above all, in the more service-oriented post-industrial economies, and in a context of debilitation of public health systems, health care became exponentially profitable, thereby attracting new types of investors. In fact, this new stage entails moving from the commercialisation of health care to its financialisation; that is, medical care becomes just one more financial asset and its price and quality are quoted on the stock exchange. This study intends to participate in the debate initiated by historians of medicine and economic historians with the aim of tracing capitalist traits and market participation in the evolution of health coverage, a process initially promoted by professional doctors who converted their consulting rooms into small clinics and larger hospital companies and which, over time, saw the incorporation of financial capital. In particular, this paper has two specific objectives for the case of Spain. First, to analyse the relationship of collaboration and/or competition between public and private hospitals under democracy and the factors that have conditioned this relationship. Second, to make an initial contribution towards understanding how, in this context, the large private hospital groups have been created in Spain during this period, especially in recent decades with concentration in the hands of financial capital, originating from both the traditional banking sector and investment funds.

This article aims to highlight peculiarities relating to the realization of the state duty to protect human rights during the crisis situation after the 2020 presidential elections in Belarus. It proposes that we engage more seriously with the context of a strong authoritarian state, which does not have people’s protection as a priority and deliberately involves business in human rights violations. Such a context is at odds with the more often presumed model in the BHR discussion: a strong business and a weak state that cannot protect its people. Two systemic factors, which stem from the authoritarian nature of the Belarusian political regime and which worsened during the crisis are discussed in the context UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: the use of business as a tool to achieve political goals and the dependence of all institutions in the country on the authorities. One of the key conclusions of the article is that the Belarusian crisis, aggravated by the complicity of Belarus in the Russian aggression, prompts businesses to adopt a new optic on human rights due diligence and to assess their long-term risks and strategies in authoritarian countries. At the very least there is an awareness among businesses of the direct link between political and human rights risks.