I had been eagerly anticipating the release of Sarah Richardson’s meticulously researched The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021) for several years, and I was not disappointed. A leading feminist scholar of the history and philosophy of science, Richardson traces the scientific history of the idea that pregnant people’s bodies control the future health, character, and […]
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CFP Special Issue on Mutual Aid Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal KIEJ
The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (KIEJ) is an interdisciplinary journal, publishing papers that explore ethical and social issues in ways that are at once practically engaged and conceptually rich. KIEJ invites submissions on the topic of Mutual Aid. Mutual Aid refers to a network of community members who seek to improve the living conditions […]
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Book Reviews
Danielle Spencer, Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity, Oxford University Press, 2020
Danielle Spencer’s book, “Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity,” does many things. It is a work of autotheory, putting Spencer’s own embodied narrative in constant conversation with the testimony of others along with a remarkably diverse set of critical and theoretical approaches. In the book, Spencer coins a new term, “metagnosis”, which occurs when […]
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Book Reviews
Joshua D. Mezrich, When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon, HarperCollins, 2019
Joshua Mezrich is a practicing transplant surgeon who draws on his experiences, and those of his patients, to provide a “here’s where we’re at” moment in the story of transplant medicine. In so doing, he explains what it is like to practice while telling the stories of his patients, donors, and the pioneering surgeons who […]
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Book Reviews
Firmin DeBrabander, Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society, Cambridge University Press, 2020
In “Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society,” Firmin DeBrabander proposes that the stakes associated with the loss of personal privacy are even higher than is generally acknowledged. Personal privacy is a compelling issue, and his review of it is engaging and accessible. He is successful in demonstrating that powerful forces—corporations, governments, and […]
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Book Reviews
Françoise Baylis, Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing, Harvard University Press, 2019
What kind of world do we want to live in? It’s rare that we ask this question of ourselves, and even rarer that we get to do so with others. In Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing, Françoise Baylis encourages us to keep this question in the forefront of our minds […]
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Book Reviews
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, NYU Press, 2020
THE STRAIGHTS ARE NOT OKAY. The tragedy of heterosexuality is this: modern straightness dooms once-hopeful, loving couples to share dull, frustrating, and lonely lives together. After all, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and what’s a heterosexual to do about it? Against this dismal state of affairs, Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality […]
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Book Reviews
Maneesha Deckha, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders, University of Toronto Press, 2021
Animals as Legal Beings is a new and important monograph-length treatment on the inadequacies of both a property and a personhood approach to the legal status of nonhuman animals. In line with decades of literature arguing for the abolishment of the property status of animals, Professor Maneesha Deckha, Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at […]
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Book Reviews
Jeremy Snyder, Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us—and Makes Us Vulnerable, Oxford, 2020
Snyder’s book ‘Exploiting hope’ is as relevant as ever. His book is about the hope of desperate individuals seeking treatments that cannot (yet) be found in conventional medicine. The book engages with hope in the setting of phase I cancer trials, stem cell interventions, right-to-try laws and crowd funding, offering a new language to explain […]