‘Framing the project’ of international human rights law: Reflections on the dysfunctional ‘family’ of the Universal Declaration

Full text embargoed until November 2013.The task of ‘framing the project’ of international human rights law is daunting to say the least. First, there is the sheer enormity and complexity of the international human rights law ‘project’: adequately mapping the subject and its key related issues is impossible in a whole book, let alone a short chapter. Secondly, it is daunting because of the sense of epistemic responsibility involved. Every framing inevitably involves selection – if not pre-selection – through the conscious (and/or unconscious) placing of focus upon features or factors considered to be significant and/or valuable. As Gitlin puts it, framing is a way of choosing, underlining and presenting ‘what exists, what happens and what matters’. In this sense, the founding document (or as Entman might put it, the inaugural ‘communicating text’) of international human rights law (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR) functions as a particularly potent form of framing, for it selects aspects of perceived reality, making them not just salient but symbolically central to the entire philosophical, moral, juridical order designated by the term ‘international human rights law’

YouTube birth and the primal scene

Motherhood has recently re-emerged as ‘material’ for artistic practice, and as a viable subject of academic research that both recognizes and extends earlier feminist assertions that the maternal is a key site for the anxious psychosocial negotiations of identity, subjectivity, equality, ethics and politics. Additionally, pregnancy and birth have graphically entered the public domain. Hundreds of thousands of short films of live birth, for instance, circulate around the globe on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, some with followings of many million viewers. Yet, how might we understand the desire to perform and spectate birth? ‘YouTube birth’ raises questions about performing and spectating birth in digital culture, and the meaning of watching our own birth with a mass public of millions of viewers. In this paper I explore these questions through revisiting the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘primal scene’. The primal scene is the Freudian articulation of the crucial role of infantile sexual and violent fantasies in structuring psychic life, linked to the loss of, or denial of, the material/maternal body as source or origin. Although within feminist scholarship the primal scene as a theoretical concept is radically out of date, it may be productive to revisit primal fantasies in the digital age, and the ways digital technologies shift our relation to ‘analogue’ notions of place, scene, birth, origin and loss. Exploring the continued place of psychoanalysis in helping to understand issues to do with origin, reproduction and temporality, I ask both what psychoanalysis might have to offer our understanding of performing and watching birth, and how a psychoanalytic configuration of the primal scene may itself need to change in relation to digital primal fantasies and technologies that function through fungibility and loss-less-ness

Judgment and imagination in Habermas' theory of law

Political Philosophy and Ethic

Pigmentation Pathway Evolution after Whole-Genome Duplication in Fish

Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) have occurred repeatedly in the vertebrate lineage, but their evolutionary significance for phenotypic evolution remains elusive. Here, we have investigated the impact of the fish-specific genome duplication (FSGD) on the evolution of pigmentation pathways in teleost fishes. Pigmentation and color patterning are among the most diverse traits in teleosts, and their pigmentary system is the most complex of all vertebrate groups

Rapid Transition towards the Division of Labor via Evolution of Developmental Plasticity

A crucial step in several major evolutionary transitions is the division of labor between components of the emerging higher-level evolutionary unit. Examples include the separation of germ and soma in simple multicellular organisms, appearance of multiple cell types and organs in more complex organisms, and emergence of casts in eusocial insects. How the division of labor was achieved in the face of selfishness of lower-level units is controversial. I present a simple mathematical model describing the evolutionary emergence of the division of labor via developmental plasticity starting with a colony of undifferentiated cells and ending with completely differentiated multicellular organisms. I explore how the plausibility and the dynamics of the division of labor depend on its fitness advantage, mutation rate, costs of developmental plasticity, and the colony size. The model shows that the transition to differentiated multicellularity, which has happened many times in the history of life, can be achieved relatively easily. My approach is expandable in a number of directions including the emergence of multiple cell types, complex organs, or casts of eusocial insects