Mobbing and suppression: footprints of their relationships

Aims: Two important processes involving the exercise of power are mobbing and suppression of dissent. These are examined, compared and contrasted with the aim of expanding the understanding of organisational and professional negative dynamics. Methods: The characteristic features and patterns of mobbing and suppression of dissent are examined. Areas of overlap and difference are noted and discussed. Results: Dissent is a challenge to a dominant group or set of ideas, and often met with various reprisals, such as ostracism, harassment and censorship: dissenters are frequently subject to mobbing. However, there are some different processes involved. Some targets of mobbing are chosen because they are different, not because they are challenging an orthodoxy. Some forms of suppression do not involve mobbing: a dissident researcher might be denied jobs and have publications and grant applications rejected, but not be subject to any personal abuse. The result is that individuals or ideas may be marginalised without the usual features of mobbing. Mobbing and suppression of dissent overlap with reprisals against whistleblowers. Some whistleblowers are mobbed or suppressed. However, suppression can occur without whistleblowing, for example when researchers obtain results unwelcome to powerful groups. Conclusion: A greater understanding of processes of suppression can assist mobbing researchers understand the wider dimensions of power used by groups against opponents. Mobbing sometimes is used to suppress. They both share many strategies, but nonetheless they are different

Investigating the origin of AIDS: some ethical dimensions

The theory that AIDS originated from contaminated polio vaccines raises a number of challenging issues with ethical dimensions. The Journal of Medical Ethics dealt with a submission about the theory a decade ago; subsequent developments have raised further issues. Four areas of contention are addressed: whether the theory should be investigated, whether anyone should be blamed, whether defamation actions are appropriate and whether the scientific community has a responsibility to examine unorthodox theories

Inclusivity and the (un)civil paradox : critiquing and needing civility in the public sphere

Scholars have turned toward Deliberative Democracy in recent decades in part because of its potential for including more voices in decision making processes that affect an increasingly diverse polity. Inherent in Deliberative Democracy’s models, though, are what can be understood as prescriptions of certain types of civility, as consensus is posited as only happening under particular circumstances. Valuing radical inclusion, this study investigates historical negative effects of civility policing before exploring a more agonistic approach’s potential for the inclusion of all voices, especially those previously marginalized.Englis

"Science in a democracy" : the contested status of vaccination in the Progressive Era and the 1920s

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a heterogeneous assortment of groups and individuals articulated scientific, political, and philosophical objections to vaccination. They engaged in an ongoing battle for public opinion with medical and scientific elites, who responded with their own counterpropaganda. These ideological struggles reflected fear that scientific advances were being put to coercive uses and that institutions of the state and civil society were increasingly expanding into previously private realms of decision making, especially child rearing. This essay analyzes the motivations and tactics of antivaccination activists and situates their actions within the scientific and social climate of the Progressive Era and the 1920s. Their actions reveal how citizens of varied ideological persuasions, activists and nonactivists alike, viewed scientific knowledge during a period of swift and unsettling change, when the application of biologic products seemed to hold peril as well as promise

Science as a weapon of mass distraction (the virus warfare).

none3openBarbara Osimani; Maria Laura Ilardo; Pasqualina CastaldoOsimani, Barbara; Ilardo, MARIA LAURA; Castaldo, Pasqualin

Politics During and After Covid-19: Science, Health and Social Protest

Covid-19 represented a total social fact, especially for that part of the world (the so-called Global North and in particular its wealthier component) which is less used to face dramatic crises able to affect fundamental rights and provoke health threats on a daily basis. While acknowledging its enormous impact on individual biographies, political systems and socio-economic equilibria around the planet, however we contrast those interpretations that have tended to naturalize the pandemic event, reading it as unpredictable, unique, disconnected from the dynamics that guide the (mainstream) Western lifestyle and mode of production. On the contrary, the genesis and above all the management of Covid-19 are the result and the mirror of broader dynamics linked to modernity, colonialism, capitalism, in one word of the Capitalocene. For this reason, it is even more correct to speak of a syndemic, to underline the environmental determinants of health, and the social and economic inequalities (re)produced by Covid-19. We therefore consider that interpreting the pandemic/syndemic (and its governance) as a state of exception is at least partial, being instead more useful to identify its unveiling function, able to make some latent or less visible dynamics manifest. Based on such premises, we focus on some nodes of the syndemic governance, highlighting how this contributed to give continuity and accelerate typical dynamics of a neoliberal governance and worldvision. We deal in particular with four key issues: the treatment of "science" by the media; the political history of "public health" and its relationship to the modern state; the construction of legitimate dissent vs. the constructed irrationality of "conspiracy theory"; the outcomes of social protests and in particular their pathologization in the mediatic and public debate. These are also among the main topics which are critically discussed in the thirteen papers that compose this Special Issue, from a variety of disciplinary fields, and with diverse epistemological perspectives and methodological tools

Dissent and heresy in medicine: models, methods, and strategies

Understanding the dynamics of dissent and heresy in medicine can be aided by use of suitable frameworks. The dynamics of the search for truth vary considerably depending on whether the search is competitive or cooperative and on whether truth is assumed to be unitary or plural. Insights about dissent and heresy in medicine can be gained by making comparisons to politics and religion. To explain adherence to either orthodoxy or a challenging view, partisans use a standard set of explanations; social scientists use these plus others, especially symmetrical analyses. There is a wide array of methods by which orthodoxy maintains its domination and marginalises challengers. Finally, challengers can adopt various strategies in order to gain a hearing