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The chapter investigates the complexities of defining the human right to family planning in regards to conflicts between collective and individual rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Various perspectives from such UN organizations as the Commission on the Status of Women, UNESCO, FAO, and ECLA are analyzed regarding responsible parenthood, state intervention in family planning, and the balance between individual rights and communal well-being. The chapter further investigates the relationship between aspirations of sexual liberation and the human right to family planning, the role of the Vatican and Catholic Church, and attempts by the Population Council to establish a form of human rights utilitarianism that justified grave violations of individual reproductive rights by promises of a better future for all. The document also discusses the political conflicts at the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, emphasizing the complex interplay between individual reproductive rights, economic development, and global justice within the framework of human rights discourse.
Monsters may frighten but also fascinate us in their weird and unfamiliar ways. As Gramsci once observed, periods of radical transformation are also times of monsters. AI fits the description. It is a bewildering entity, consisting of hard - and software, depending on infrastructures that need huge amounts of energy and water. It defies clear definition, yet seeps into every corner of our lives. Big Tech warns of existential risks while pursuing Artificial General Intelligence, AGI. However, real challenges today lie in how AI threatens to substitute rather than augment human capabilities.
This essay examines the deployment of an AI-based interdisciplinary approach. It has proven spectacularly successful, as exemplified by AlphaFold2's breakthrough in protein folding. This approach operates frictionlessly, combining knowledge domains with remarkable efficiency and speed. It seems to vindicate a technocratic dream of problem-solving without the messiness and time needed for human deliberation. Yet, when this artificial interdisciplinarity enters the social world, it encounters what it seeks to eliminate: friction.
Friction, however, is not an obstacle to overcome but an essential feature of human existence. The physical world requires friction for movement; the social world needs it for creativity, conflict resolution, and meaningful cooperation. Certainly, too much friction can bring havoc, and too little can lead to a standstill. But as AI continues its co-evolutionary trajectory with humanity, we must resist the seductive promise of a frictionless world run by automated efficiency.
Instead, we need to cultivate a humanistic culture of AI interdisciplinarity - one that bridges sciences and humanities while preserving human curiosity, deliberation, and epistemic diversity. Bringing friction back means taking the time to reconsider shared goals, acknowledging conflicts, and maintaining spaces for genuine human creativity. Only by embracing friction can we ensure that AI augments rather than diminishes what makes us human.
Social work practice may be conceptualised in a variety of ways. Sometimes practice is referred to as ‘methods’. Some social work texts have tended to refer to different levels of practice: micro methods, including methods for working with individuals, such as casework, counselling and case management; methods for working with couples and small groups, such as family group conferencing, mediation and group work; and macro methods, which are more collective methods of practice, such as advocacy, community development, policy development and analysis, research and social action. Practice is also sometimes referred to in terms of the processes that characterise it from beginning to end – for example, engagement, assessment, intervention, termination and evaluation. This tendency to conceptualise practice in terms of ‘processes’ is mostly relevant for micro methods, and some have argued that this conceptualisation represents the imposition of ‘corporate management techniques’ and a ‘case management approach’ onto social work.
Louise Farrenc grew up in Paris during the Revolutionary period that saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of different monarchies in France. These political changes impacted the Parisian musical scene and influenced Farrenc’s career and that of her friends and colleagues. Farrenc began her career as a virtuoso pianist-composer writing popular works like sets of variations on opera melodies and folksongs, but at the end of the 1830s, she changed her musical path. In the 1840s, like many composers in Central Europe at the time, she abandoned the virtuoso music of her youth to write chamber music with and without piano as well as three symphonies. She became known as a composer of serious music, an upholder of “German” traditions in France, and critics wrote about her compositions as representing the best new music of France. Her Nonet for Winds and Strings provides a culmination of the work she had done up to that point as a composer and performer devoted to finding a “middle way” between the Classical and Romantic traditions.
Chapter 2 studies Scottish responses to English claims, illustrating a shift in Scottish views of independence from parallel demonstrations of imperial sovereignty via historical narratives to more radical notions of consensual acknowledgment of equivalence. My discussion moves from political texts such as the Instructiones for Scottish lawyers at the papal curia, The Declaration of Arbroath, and John Ireland’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, to Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, to two romances, John Barbour’s The Bruce and the anonymous Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain, and ends with John Mair’s Historia Maioris Britanniae. While some texts assert Scottish independence through existing sovereignty discourse, others, such as Gologras and Gawain, innovatively focus on mutual recognition freed from precedent. The fact that this obscure romance features one of the earliest recorded expressions of what we would call the modern doctrine of recognition reveals the benefits of comparative study across disciplines.
An introduction to the broad subject with a graphical outline of the fundamental equations to be encountered is presented. The reader is informed of any necessary mathematical prerequisites and the structure of the notation to be used is explained.
Humanism, conceived as a worldview concerning, among other things, how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, and science, conceived as a family of forms of inquiry into the world, are deeply interwoven over our intellectual and cultural histories. This chapter considers their co-evolution as a prelude to the present, reviewing formative aspects of Renaissance humanism and deepening associations of values central to the Enlightenment with precursors to modern science, en route to an arguably peculiar situation today. While some past, humanist conceptions of the aim of science seem intimately connected to the idea of making a better world – one featuring better and more widespread human and planetary flourishing – contemporary thinking seems largely devoid of normative discussions of what science itself is for. This chapter offers reflections on a possible return to a humanist conception of the role and promise of science.
This chapter explores an overlooked aspect of Bloomsbury’s contradictory relationship to embodiment, materiality, and empire: their simultaneous embrace of early twentieth-century nudity and their condemnation of undress when it is expressed by the lower classes and colonial subjects. By focusing on the Studland beach photographs archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, this chapter considers the wider cultural context regarding nude images, both in terms of historical representation and practices of nakedness asks. Ultimately, the chapter asks: how might we understand Bloomsbury’s fascination with both photography and nudity at a time when nakedness and race together influenced colonial thinking and civilizing imperatives? The chapter argues that a consideration of Bloomsbury’s relationship to nude photography cannot be severed from the history in which whiteness is the normative racial marker for early twentieth-century Britons.
Florence was known in the Renaissance for its cutthroat competition and hypercritical environment, which sustained the city’s reputation for superb craftsmanship and innovative design. Yet many of its most successful artists worked for long periods outside the city. Vasari states that, to make a reputation at home, an artist had to travel abroad, to execute highly visible and well-compensated projects commissioned by prestigious patrons. Ambrogio Lorenzetti was “called outside his homeland to honor another; and if by chance [that other place] is more noble in customs, mind and ability, he, once unhappy, is filled with joy in seeing himself awarded, embraced and largely honored.”
Theories of representative democracy emphasize the importance of electoral pledges for informed voting and government accountability. Recent studies have highlighted citizens’ tendency to impose electoral punishments when parties fail to fulfill their pledges. However, conditions under which citizens consider non-fulfillment acceptable have received little attention. Specifically, multiparty government makes it less likely that an individual party fulfills its pledges, but whether citizens take such obstacles into account when evaluating the acceptability of non-fulfillment has remained largely untested. We theorize that both the coalition negotiation context and the negotiation outcome influence citizens’ evaluations. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two vignette experiments in Finland and Germany. The results revealed that, regardless of their opinion about the substance of a pledge, voters were more accepting of unfulfilled pledges when party or coalition characteristics created obstacles to fulfillment. The findings suggest that voters possess a nuanced understanding of the constraints of coalition government.