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Law & Humanities Blog

New Titles From Hart Publishing; Twenty Percent Discount For Readers Of This Blog!

Posted: 30 Dec 2010 08:44 AM PST

Two new titles of interest from Hart Publishing:

Steve Greenfield, Guy Osborn, and Peter Robson, Film and the Law: The Cinema of Justice
Pub Date: Oct 2010; 9781841137254; Pbk; 392pp; £30 / €39 / US$30 / CDN$30

http://www.hartpub.co.uk/books/details.asp?ISBN=9781841137254

Paul Raffield, Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law

Pub Date: Oct 2010; 9781841139210; Hbk; 256pp; £50 / €65 / US$70 / CDN$70

http://www.hartpub.co.uk/books/details.asp?ISBN=9781841139210

Readers of the Law and Humanities Blog qualify for this DISCOUNT OFFER

Hart Publishing is delighted to offer these titles at 20% discount. To receive the discount please quote reference 'LHBLOG' when placing your order. If you are ordering online then please quote the reference in the special instructions field. The discount will not show up on your order confirmation but will be applied when your order is processed. All enquires should be directed to Hart Publishing Tel: 01865 517530; E-mail: mail@hartpub.co.uk; Website: http://www.hartpub.co.uk/

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Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Papers: Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 08:02 AM PST

Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness

9-11 June 2010
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Chicago, Illinois

This second international interdisciplinary conference* aims to explore the past, present, and possible future of comics in the context of the healthcare experience. Programs in medical humanities have long touted the benefits of reading literature and studying visual art in the medical setting, but the use of comics in healthcare practice and education is relatively new. The melding of text and image has much to offer all members of the healthcare team, including patients and families. As such, a subgenre of graphic narrative known as graphic medicine is emerging as a field of
interest to both scholars and creators of comics.

We are pleased to confirm two important keynote speakers: David Small, author of 'Stitches' and Phoebe Gloeckner, author of 'A Child's Life.'

We invite proposals for scholarly papers (15 minutes), poster presentations, and panel discussions (60 minutes), focused on medicine and comics in any form (e.g., graphic novels, comic strips, graphic pathographies, manga, and/or web comics) on the following—and related—topics:

graphic pathographies of illness and disability
the use of comics in medical education the use of comics in patient care
the interface of graphic medicine and other visual arts in popular
culture
ethical implications for using comics to educate the public
ethical implications of patient representation in comics by healthcare providers
trends in international use of comics in healthcare settings
the role of comics in provider/patient communication
comics as a virtual support group for patients and caregivers
the use of comics in bioethics discussions and education

We envision this gathering as a collaboration among humanities scholars, comics scholars, comics creators, healthcare professionals, and comics enthusiasts.

300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday, 28 February 2011 to submissions@graphicmedicine.org. Proposals may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. Please identify your presentation preference: 1)oral presentation; 2) poster presentation; 3) panel discussion; or 4)
workshop. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice, we will attempt to honor people's preferences, and We will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals submitted.

Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by 14 March 2011.

This event is co-sponsored by the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, and the Science, Technology and Society Program of Penn State University, and is supported by a grant from the Charles Schulz Foundation.

*Information about the 2010 conference, "Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels," in London, England can be found at www.graphicmedicine.org.

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UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Transcribe Bentham makes the New York Times

Posted: 27 Dec 2010 02:47 PM PST

UCLDH’s very own Transcribe Bentham project gets written up in the New York Times: Starting this fall, the editors have leveraged, if not the wisdom of the crowd, then at least its fingers, inviting anyone — yes, that means you — to help transcribe some of the 40,000 unpublished manuscripts from University College's collection that have [...]

Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Applications: New York Academy of Medicine History of Medicine Fellowships

Posted: 21 Dec 2010 09:51 AM PST

Applications are currently being accepted for the New York Academy of Medicine's two history of medicine fellowships for 2011-2012 : the Paul Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine and the Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health. For those who were familiar with the Helfand Fellowship in the past, please note that its focus has changed and read the description and application materials carefully.

Information about both fellowships can be found on the Now Accepting Applications page here: http://www.nyam.org/grants/

Questions about the fellowships and the application process may be directed to me (contact information below). Contact information also appears with the applications themselves.

Arlene Shaner
Assistant Curator and Reference Librarian for Historical Collections The New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029
Tel: 212-822-7313
Fax: 212-423-0273
Email: ashaner@nyam.org

__________________________________

(h/t H-SCI-MED-TECH)

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Law & Humanities Blog

Law and the Multiverse Scores With New York Times

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 10:05 AM PST

The blog Law and the Multiverse is featured in the New York Times.

Categorizing the Informant

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 09:56 AM PST

Michael Rich, Elon University School of Law, has published A Snitch, Not a Hero: Philosophical Lessons of Loyalty and Disloyalty in the World of Criminal Informants, as Elon University Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2010-11. Here is the abstract.

Without informants, policing as we know it would grind to a halt. In the arenas of drug enforcement and the battle against organized crime, the majority of prosecutions hinge on confidential informants, and informants are increasingly central in white collar crime prosecutions and anti-terrorism investigations. Yet society, to put it bluntly, hates informants. The epithets used to describe them – "snitch," "rat," "weasel" – suggest the reason: the informant, by assisting the police, is guilty of betrayal. But identifying the reason for society's disdain raises more questions than it answers. For instance, are all informants disloyal, or are only some? Are there governing principles that explain which informants are deemed to be disloyal? To whom are informants disloyal? What import does informant disloyalty have beyond the social stigma that informants bear? And these questions matter because betrayal, in the words of George Fletcher, is "one of the basic sins of our civilization." Yet, they have largely escaped the attention of legal scholars.

This Article remedies this oversight first by discussing the role of informants through the lens of the observations that philosophers have made about loyalty and disloyalty. The discussion reveals that loyalty and disloyalty are social constructs of normative expectations arising out of special relationships between individuals and other individuals or groups. And when an individual breaches these normative expectations, she commits disloyalty or betrayal. The Article applies these observations about loyalty and disloyalty to three informant situations. The first is the "typical" case of an accomplice-informant who assists police in apprehending and prosecuting her partners in crime. The second is that of communities with particularized norms against cooperating with the police, as exemplified by the "Stop Snitching" movement that has made significant headway in high-crime communities. The third situation is that of informants in "mainstream" society. The loyalty analysis of these three situations reveals interesting insights into why police have trouble obtaining civilian cooperation in high-crime communities and the limits of civilian identification with police objective in mainstream society. Finally, the Article considers these insights in light of existing scholarship about the relationship between civilian perceptions of police and willingness to cooperate. This consideration leads to a handful of policy proposals to enhance civilian cooperation with law enforcement and ultimately to the recognition that some level of reticence to cooperate with police, particularly in marginalized communities, is both inevitable and desirable.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

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UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

Claire Warwick on “culturomics”

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:11 AM PST

Claire Warwick gets quoted in The Guardian on a new project in which Harvard University and Google open millions of digitised books to quantitative analysis: Claire Warwick, director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at University College London, said that humanities researchers had been using the word-frequency techniques being described by Michel and Aiden for several [...]

Medical Humanities Blog

On AIDS, Academia, and the Politics of Global Health

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 08:19 AM PST

Johanna T.

Crane (University of Washington-Bothell & Office of History at NIH) has an excellent new article out in Behemoth (what a great name for "a journal on civilization") entitled Unequal Partners: AIDS, Academia, and the Rise of Global Health. Here is the Abstract:

The last decade has seen the proliferation of "global health" departments, centers, programs, and majors across top research universities in North America and Europe. This trend has been particularly pronounced in the United States, where it is connected to America's new role as a major sponsor of HIV treatment in Africa. This paper describes the rise of "global health" as a research, funding, and training priority within U.S. academic medicine, and the increasing desirability of "global health partnerships" with institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. Leading spokespersons emphasize that "partnership" with poor nations is central to the mission of global health, an ethic that distinguishes it from older, more paternalistic traditions of international health and tropical medicine. However, at the same time, the field of academic global health depends on steep inequalities for its very existence, as it is the opportunity to work in impoverished, low-tech settings with high disease burdens that draws North American researchers and clinicians to global health programs and ensures their continued funding. This paradox – in which inequality is both a form of suffering to be redressed and a professional, knowledge-generating, opportunity to be exploited – makes the partnerships to which global health aspires particularly challenging.

The article is recommended.

(h/t Somatosphere)

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Law & Humanities Blog

Representing Justice: A New Book on the Theme

Posted: 16 Dec 2010 02:04 PM PST

New book on Representing Justice by Judith Resnick and Dennis Curtis, published by Yale University Press. Pricey but beautiful. Review here from the New York Times. Website here.

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UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

QRator Project

Posted: 16 Dec 2010 09:17 AM PST

UCLDH has a new project, small, but hopefully perfectly formed. We are working with UCL Museums and Collections and CASA on a project Called QRator. With the help of UCL's Public Engagement Unit Innovation Seed funding the QRator project is exploring how handheld mobile devices, QR codes and interactive digital labels can create new models for public [...]

Medical Humanities Blog

Call for Papers: Disability and Native American/Indigenous Studies

Posted: 16 Dec 2010 08:41 AM PST

Call for Papers: Disability and Native American/Indigenous Studies

Special Issue of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability (JLCDS)

Guest Editors, Siobhan Senier and Penelope Kelsey

In Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900-1950, a Nisga'a elder implores the historian Mary Ellen Kelm: "When we talk about the poor health of our people, remember it all began with the white man" (xv).

This special issue of JLCDS invites scholars to consider two interrelated phenomena: on the one hand, colonialism has produced indigenous disability and illness-through the depletion of traditional sources of food and medicine, enforced containment in boarding schools and substandard reservation housing, trauma, poverty and so on. On the other hand, colonial discourse also pathologizes Native people-construing them as genetically prone to certain illnesses, for instance. Given these colonial phenomena, scholarship is particularly welcome that considers how Native people indigenize the famous disability-rights call, "nothing about us without us"-bringing tribally situated responses, adaptations, and resistance to disability and illness.

JLCDS seeks essays that conjoin the methodologies and content of Disability Studies with Native American/Indigenous Studies. The texts under consideration can range from literature and film, in any genre, to non-print and non-alphabetic media. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

Tribally specific understandings/representations of illness and disability;Applications of Disability Studies to indigenous texts;
Applications of indigenous methodologies to disability literature;
Colonization, medicalization, and the construction of disability;
Indigenous nationalisms, feminisms, and Two-Spirited resistance to the
non-Native construction of disability;
Illnesses/disabilities more emic to the American Indian experience (i.e., tuberculosis, diabetes, PTSD, Split Feather syndrome);
Environmental degradation and racism and community health;
Representations of substance abuse and other community health concerns in colonial contexts;
Representations of indigenous disability vis-à-vis nation or community.

Proposals and queries should be sent to Siobhan.Senier@unh.edu and
Penelope.Kelsey@colorado.edu

Proposals are due by March 15, 2011, and proposal selections will be made by May 30, 2011. Completed essays for those selected are due October 1, 2011, and articles will be selected in December of 2011.

Dr. David Bolt
Lecturer, Disability Studies
http://www.hope.ac.uk/boltd
Director, Centre for Culture & Disability Studies ccds.hope.ac.uk
Editor, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/121628
Email: boltd@hope.ac.uk
Telephone 0151 291 3346
Postal address@ Faculty of Education, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool,
L16 9JD

____________________________________________________

I have had the privilege of having some contact with Native American communities in connection with health and illness, and I have virtually always come away deeply affected. I submit that most anyone who works on the social determinants of health, law/policy and chronic illness, inequities, stigma, etc., could not help but feel something similar. For a particularly well-done snapshot of some of these matters, I recommend episode 4 of Unnatural Causes, entitled Bad Sugar.

This sounds like an important CFP, and I very much look forward to reading the theme issue when it comes out.

(h/t H-DISABILITY listserv)

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Law & Humanities Blog

Court Citation of Foreign Legal Opinions

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 07:34 AM PST

Martin Gelter, Fordham University School of Law and the European Corporate Governance Institute, has published Language, Legal Origins, and Culture before the Courts: Cross‐Citations between Supreme Courts in Europe as Fordham Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1719183. Here is the abstract.

Should courts consider cases from other jurisdictions? The use of foreign law precedent has sparked considerable debate in the United States, and this question is also controversially discussed in Europe.

In this paper and within the larger research project from which it has developed, we study the dialogue between different European supreme courts quantitatively. Using legal databases in Austria, Belgium, England and Wales, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, we have hand-collected a dataset of transnational citations between the highest courts of these countries, in total searching 636,172 decisions decided between 2000 and 2007. In the present paper we show that citation of foreign law by supreme courts is not an isolated phenomenon in Europe, but happens on a regular basis. We found 1,426 instances in which these courts have cited the supreme courts of the other nine countries. The majority (1,077) of these citations have been made for purely comparative reasons. We also undertook regression analysis in order to understand the differences between the cross-citations. Whether such citations take place and in what quantity depends on the particular legal culture and its relationship to others. Austria and Ireland, which stand in an asymmetric relationship with Germany and England respectively, seem to be particularly receptive to foreign influence on their legal systems. But even controlling for these outliers, we have been able to identify that the population of the cited country and a low level of corruption, native languages and language skills, legal origins and families, and cultural and political factors all matter for which courts are likely to be cited. More specifically, knowledge of the language of the cited court appears to be a more important factor driving cross-citations than legal traditions, culture or politics. Thus, to facilitate a transnational market of legal ideas, it can be suggested that courts should strive to make their decisions available in languages that possible readers understand. Download the paper from SSRN at the link. Read More... Law & Humanities Blog

Medical Humanities

Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 12:52 AM PST

Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness conference

9-11 June 2011
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Chicago, Illinois

This second international interdisciplinary conference* aims to explore the past, present, and possible future of comics in the context of the healthcare experience. Programs in medical humanities have long touted the benefits of reading literature and studying visual art in the medical setting, but the use of comics in healthcare practice and education is relatively new. The melding of text and image has much to offer all members of the healthcare team, including patients and families.

As such, a subgenre of graphic narrative known as graphic medicine is emerging as a field of interest to both scholars and creators of comics.

We are pleased to confirm two important keynote speakers: David Small, author of 'Stitches' and Phoebe Gloeckner, author of 'A Child's Life'.

We invite proposals for scholarly papers (15 minutes), poster presentations, and panel discussions (60 minutes), focused on medicine and comics in any form (e.g., graphic novels, comic strips, graphic pathographies, manga, and/or web comics) on the following—and
related—topics:

graphic pathographies of illness and disability
the use of comics in medical education
the use of comics in patient care
the interface of graphic medicine and other visual arts in popular culture
ethical implications for using comics to educate the public
ethical implications of patient representation in comics by
healthcare providers
trends in international use of comics in healthcare settings
the role of comics in provider/patient communication
comics as a virtual support group for patients and caregivers
the use of comics in bioethics discussions and education

We also welcome workshops (120 minutes) by creators of comics on the process, rationale, methods, and general theories behind the use of comics to explore medical themes. These are intended to be "hands-on" interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular
skills with regard to the creation or teaching about comics in the medical context.

We envision this gathering as a collaboration among humanities scholars, comics scholars, comics creators, healthcare professionals, and comics enthusiasts.

300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday, 28 February 2011 to submissions@graphicmedicine.org. Proposals may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. Please identify your presentation preference: 1) oral presentation; 2) poster presentation; 3) panel discussion; or 4) workshop. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice, we will attempt to honor people's preferences,
and we will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals submitted. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by 14 March 2011.

This event is co-sponsored by the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, and the Science, Technology and Society Program of Penn State University, and
is supported by a grant from the Charles Schulz Foundation.

*Information about the 2010 conference, "Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels," in London, England can be found at https://icex.imperial.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?C=7da46656c8974ac48845176b332ba77f&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.graphicmedicine.org. Read More... Medical Humanities

Law & Humanities Blog

Law and the Superwhatever

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 02:24 PM PST

Check out the new blog Law and the Multiverse, all about supervillains, superheroes and law. Shades of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

Quiz For the Day

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 02:16 PM PST

Bored? Tired of grading? Take this Fictional Lawyers Quiz.

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Law & Humanities Blog

New Books Of Interest

Posted: 10 Dec 2010 06:53 AM PST

Joe B. Fulton, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

Gregory J.

Hampton, Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, Vampires (Lexington Books, 2010).

Tyrone Kirchengast, The Criminal Trial in Law and Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Richard Terry, The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature From Butler to Sterne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Taking "Harry Potter" Seriously

Posted: 10 Dec 2010 06:46 AM PST

A book by Shira Wolosky on the meaning of Harry Potter. From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Medical Humanities Blog

On Milk Banks & Islamic Bioethics

Posted: 10 Dec 2010 07:00 AM PST

Mohammed Ghaly (Univ. of Leiden) has a fascinating new article out in Bioethics entitled Milk Banks Through the Lens of Muslim Scholars: One Text in Two Contexts. Here is the Abstract:

When Muslims thought of establishing milk banks, religious reservations were raised.

These reservations were based on the concept that women's milk creates 'milk kinship' believed to impede marriage in Islamic Law. This type of kinship is, however, a distinctive phenomenon of Arab tradition and relatively unknown in Western cultures. This article is a pioneer study which fathoms out the contemporary discussions of Muslim scholars on this issue. The main focus here is a religious guideline (fatwa) issued in 1983, referred to in this article as 'one text', by the Egyptian scholar Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī who saw no religious problem in establishing or using these banks. After a number of introductory remarks on the 'Western' phenomenon of milk banks and the 'Islamic' phenomenon of 'milk kinship', this article analyses the fatwa of al-Qaradāwī'one text' and investigates the 'two contexts' in which this fatwa was discussed, namely, the context of the Muslim world and that of Muslim minorities living in the West. The first context led to rejecting the fatwa and refusing to introduce the milk banking system in the Muslim world. The second context led to accepting this system and thus allowing Muslims living in the West to donate and receive milk from these banks. Besides its relevance to specialists in the fields of Islamic studies, anthropology and medical ethics, this article will also be helpful to physicians and nurses who deal with patients of Islamic background.

I had the great good fortune of meeting (and arguing with) Mohammed Ghaly at a conference held at the ZiF while I was in residence there over the past summer. Ghaly is a gentleman and a scholar, and his work is particularly erudite and insightful.

If you like Ghaly's article, do take a look at his recently published book on Islam & Disability, which is, IMO, one-of-a-kind as an English-language work.

Read More... Medical Humanities Blog