The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities in terms of access, the need to ensure that there is still scope in our teaching practice for affective and performative encounters has also been thrown into sharp relief. I draw on two teaching contexts, the one dealing with a literary text, and the other a live performance in order to explore the decolonial potential of affective encounters. In addition to illustrating the complex and unpredictable workings of affect in teaching contexts, I also hope to show how these two incidents offer insight into the interface between sensorial and cognitive knowledge in relation to both literary and performance texts. The aim is to demonstrate how student responses to affective encounters resonate with, rather than directly address, some of the “everyday” processes of decoloniality.

Is Shakespeare universal? Is Hamlet a “strong” text that generates the same interpretation across cultural space and time, or is it a malleable text whose meaning is contingent upon variables in the encounter between text and reader and the contexts of reading? These were the kinds of questions that my students and I addressed in several courses I taught on Shakespeare over the past four years. As one might expect, our answers differed. Here, I develop and refine the argument I made and, sometimes, made incoherently: universality, whether in a writer, a text, or in criticism “is neither natural nor self-evident.” Because part of my reason for turning to Shakespeare was my dissatisfaction with contrapuntal reading as a pedagogical strategy for cultivating a “critical understanding of imperialism” in students, I conclude that we can only achieve that goal if we deploy contrapuntal reading across the literary curriculum.

What does it mean to decolonize the literature classroom? This short paper is intended as a personal reflection on teaching as an engagement with the social forces that bring neocolonial relations into the classroom, drawing on my experience teaching literature and literary theory in South Africa and Canada. I explore the idea of decolonizing the classroom as the production of an “outside” that provides meaning for the classroom’s “inside.”

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

The article tells the story of a pedagogical experiment that the author conducted in collaboration with final year master’s students in Kolkata, India. The aim was to “open up the classroom,” adapting Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy to an Indian context. The diverse group of students who participated in this experiment had a high degree of political consciousness regarding issues of gender, caste, sexuality, disability, and class due to the university’s history of student activism. Most students had already read a fair amount of postcolonial literature and theory. Postcolonial literature syllabus as it had conventionally been taught would not be able to engage these restive students or be relevant to their lived experiences. The experiment on classroom democratization and collaborative teaching would demonstrate to the future college teacher one kind of interventionist approach for raising student awareness in the Indian classroom.

This article reflects on the challenges that arise when the comparative literature classroom, especially in the Netherlands, is increasingly multilingual and simultaneously increasingly monolingual in its focus on English as a primary language. In view of moving comparative literary studies beyond its Eurocentric framework, what opportunities lie in teaching translated texts in “English(es)” in such a multilingual setting? What are the effects of such an interplay of mono- and multilingualism in view of a commitment to decolonizing the literary curriculum and pedagogical practice? What attention to language and linguistic difference might be available given the diverse linguistic and cultural literacies of students? Less interested in questions of translating texts, the article pursues how teaching literary texts in translation can foster listening to linguistic difference and encourage relational attunement when degrees of literacy and illiteracy are shared at varying levels of competence across students and teachers.

In English there are a variety of causal adjunct phrases such as because of, as a result of, on account of and in spite of. It was reported recently that a new structure because X is thriving in colloquial registers including conversations and blogs. The complement X is not only restricted to nominals but also includes other lexical categories such as adjectives, adverbs and even verbs. This article delves into the history of this usage and its reasoning, and conducts a survey on other causal adjuncts to determine whether the same kind of innovation is observed with other adjunct phrases. The survey shows that the new usage started from NP complements and has been extended to include complements of other lexical categories, and that the new usage attested in because X is also observed with in case X. The truncation of the final preposition is verified with all the adjunct phrases in the survey, but the category of the complement is basically restricted to nominals in the case of other phrases. We will look into the factors segregating the two groups of adjuncts, namely because/in case X, and other causal adjuncts.

Recent improvements in virtual reality (VR) allow for the representation of authentic environments and multiple users in a shared complex virtual world in real time. These advances have fostered clinical applications including in psychiatry. However, although VR is already used in clinical settings to help people with mental disorders (e.g., exposure therapy), the related ethical issues require greater attention. Based on a thematic literature search the authors identified five themes that raise ethical concerns related to the clinical use of VR: (1) reality and its representation, (2) autonomy, (3) privacy, (4) self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and (5) expectation bias. Reality and its representation is a theme that lies at the heart of VR, but is also of specific significance in a clinical context when perceptions of reality are concerned, for example, during psychosis. Closely associated is the autonomy of VR users. Although autonomy is a much-considered topic in biomedical ethics, it has not been sufficiently discussed when it comes to applications of VR in psychiatry. In this review, the authors address the different themes and recommend the development of an ethical framework for the clinical use of VR.

Today there are multiple implantable medical devices on the market. The type of implants that interface the body’s tissues has been considered to have particular strong ethical implications. This article describes a development of a novel practice for ethical assessment and reflection within medical device research and development of non-CE marked medical devices, taking the perspective of both the ethicist and the researcher. The research case was an EU funded project where the aim was to develop and compare the efficiency of invasive and non-invasive technological medical devices to create meaningful sensations as a novel therapy for phantom limb pain. An Independent Ethical Advisor (IEA) with a regulatory and advisory role was assigned to the project, allowing us to investigate the projects deliberate incorporation of ethics. In the article we suggest and applied a novel framework based on action research for combining ethical assessment with building ethical reflection. The case analyse five different activities / elements: 1) the use of informed consent; 2) a survey amongst the research partners; 3) a workshop session; 4) observation of consortium meetings; and 5) an interview with a participating patient.

Dystonia is a movement disorder that can have a debilitating impact on motor functions and quality of life. There are 250,000 cases in the United States, most with childhood onset. Due to the limited effectiveness and side effects of available treatments, pediatric deep brain stimulation (pDBS) has emerged as an intervention for refractory dystonia. However, there is limited clinical and neuroethics research in this area of clinical practice. This paper examines whether it is ethically justified to offer pDBS to children with refractory dystonia. Given the favorable risk-benefit profile, it is concluded that offering pDBS is ethically justified for certain etiologies of dystonia, but it is less clear for others. In addition, various ethical and policy concerns are discussed, which need to be addressed to optimize the practice of offering pDBS for dystonia. Strategies are proposed to help address these concerns as pDBS continues to expand.

Since the advent of neuroimaging technologies, their limits and possibilities have captivated scientists and philosophers. Thus far, the debate has largely concerned technical limits of our capacity to “read minds.” This paper extends the discussion concerning the limitations of neuroimaging to issues that are not dependent on technical issues or on our understanding of the complexity of brain activities. The author argues that there is a serious chance that brain scanning cannot replace usual intentional assertions, and that neuroimaging has principled limits. The information that people usually receive by neuroimaging is different in kind from the information they hear from what others tell them. To assert something is to act in a certain way, and scanners do not usually scan actions, but brain activities and the neural correlates of actions. Although it is possible to scan “mental assertions,” our usual assertions are not accompanied by separate “mental assertions.”

What purpose can be served by empirically unsubstantiated speculation in ethics? In answering that question, we need to distinguish between the major branches of ethics. In foundational moral philosophy, the use of speculative examples is warranted to the extent that ethical principles and theories are assumed to be applicable even under the extreme circumstances referred to in these examples. Such an assumption is in need of justification, and it cannot just be taken for granted. In applied ethics, the use of unrealistic scenarios is more difficult to justify. It can be positively harmful if it diverts our attention from more urgent issues. Neuroethics is one of the areas of applied ethics where speculative scenarios have taken up much of the attention that could instead have been devoted to problems that are relevant for the treatment and care of patients. Speculative ethics has often been defended with mere possibility arguments that may at first hand seem difficult to refute. It is shown with examples how such claims can be defeated with a combination of science and argumentation analysis.

In this essay, the author reflects on his development as a physician by recounting two patient narratives of patients he cared for as a third year medical student. In the process of telling these stories of sickness, the author also provides a window on medical practice in the 1980’s in an academic medicine center and how practices have changed. Decades before what has been dubbed “narrative medicine,” the author learned the power of words to shape relationships and promote professional formation.