Marriage as a Message: Same-Sex Couples and the Rhetoric of Accidental Procreation

In his dissent in the 2003 case Goodridge v. Department of Health, Justice Robert Cordy of the Massachusetts Supreme Court introduced a novel argument in support of state bans on same-sex marriage: that marriage is an institution designed to create a safe social and legal space for accidental heterosexual reproduction, a space that is not necessary for same-sex couples who, by definition, cannot accidentally reproduce. Since 2003, every state appellate court considering a same-sex marriage case has adopted Justice Cordy\u27s dissent until the recent California Supreme Court decision In Re Marriage Cases. In case after case, courts have held that marriage allows states to send a message to potentially irresponsible procreators that marriage is a (normatively) necessary part of their procreative endeavor and that same-sex couples do not need marriage because they only procreate after considerable effort and forethought. This article examines the accidental procreation argument through the lenses of anthropological theory, history, literature, and constitutional law. We conclude that marriage has sometimes been used to channel male heterosexuality into reproduction, but to argue that this goal is the sine qua non of marriage is to vastly oversimplify its history in both law and culture. We then undertake a genealogy of the accidental procreation argument and speculate about its possible effects on the institution of marriage. We suggest that if courts continue to insist upon a definition of marriage that is so distinct from the actual practice of the institution, the law may actually be less and less influential in regulating intimate behavior

Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future

Booklet handout distributed at the VSMF Symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The event looks forward. Scholarship (universities, research, teaching, publishing) has been slow to take up the opportunities of this digital century. This is an opportunity to identify and build the future.EPSRC (Pathways to Impact Award). Unilever plc (Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics

Electronically Assisting Communication for Health Professionals

New information and computing technologies offer cost efficient and effective learning opportunities for health care professionals. The Assisted Electronic Communication project is prototyping, administering and evaluating a digital discourse system for health care professionals within an acute Hospital. Health care staff participating in the study are able to access and contribute to threaded, asynchronous discussions and themed information in the context of critical work documents. Early indications are that the system is viewed very positively, and seen as a way of critically engaging with new material that is getting closer to an idealized learning in the workplace

Inevitable Discovery - Law, Narrative, Retrospectivity

The place and status of narrative in the law and in legal studies strike me as uncertain and ambiguous. On the one hand, trial advocates know-have known, presumably, since antiquity-that success in the court of law depends upon telling an effective and persuasive story. The discipline of rhetoric originated essentially to teach courtroom practitioners how to do just that. And academic study sympathetic to law and literature has recently given considerable attention to narrative and its uses throughout the law, as institution and as praxis. On the other hand, one looks in vain in legal doctrine, and in judicial opinions, for any explicit recognition that narrative is a category for adjudication: that rules of evidence, for instance, implicate questions of how stories can and should be told. Recently, Justice David Souter evoked a concept of narrative integrity in one of his Supreme Court opinions - so far as I can tell, the first recognition that the literary and cultural category of narrative needs to be imported into legal thinking, and one that thus far has had no sequels. Legal scholarship first registered the importance of narrative through an attention to storytelling for oppositionists --the claim that narrative is an important tool for individuals and communities who need to tell the concrete particulars of their experience in a way normally excluded by legal reasoning and rule. More recently, Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner make the claim that [flaw lives on narrative. If the traditional supposition of the law was that adjudication could proceed by examining free-standing factual data selected on grounds of their logical pertinency, now increasingly we are coming to recognize that both the questions and the answers in such matters of \u27fact\u27 depend largely upon one\u27s choice (considered or unconsidered) of some overall narrative as best describing what happened or how the world works. If this seems convincing, even obvious to students of narrative, I do not believe that Amsterdam and Bruner\u27s we who think in terms of choice ... of overall narrative includes most judges, or many others who contribute to official legal doctrine. Those who expound what the law is do not overtly recognize narrative as an instrument in the process of legal adjudication

Exploring the Alcohol Deprivation Effect in Withdrawal-Seizure Prone and Withdrawal-Seizure Resistant Mice

The alcohol deprivation effect (ADE) refers to a temporary increase in alcohol intake following a period of alcohol deprivation. Repeated ADE studies (Sinclair & Senter, 1968, Melendez, 2006) have shown that there is an innate tendency to increase consumption when access to alcohol is limited, and the ADE is considered to be an animal model for relapse drinking. The present study is the first to examine the ADE in mice selectively bred for high and low susceptibility for withdrawal seizures, withdrawal-seizure prone (WSP) and withdrawal-seizure resistant (WSR) mice, and the purpose of it was to determine the presence or absence of a correlation between the genetic mechanisms that code for alcohol withdrawal severity and the tendency to increase alcohol consumption with limited access to alcohol. The two different genotypes demonstrated the ADE in two different deprivation schedules and across two different environmental conditions. Because no significant difference in response to intermittent access was found between the WSP and WSR mouse lines, it can be concluded that the phenotypic relapse-like increased drinking when access to alcohol is intermittent (i.e. the ADE) is a result of genetic mechanisms separate from the underlying genetics that code for withdrawal severity

CONTENT AND CONTEXT: OBJECTIVE FORMATION IN FYC ACTIVITY SYSTEMS

Context is key. We as First Year Composition (FYC) teachers focus on context when teaching the rhetorical situation as a reading and writing tool. Contexts influence the systems we teach within as well as how and why we teach, and determine students’ experiences and perspectives as writers. A required course, FYC acts as a contextual nexus: we help students bridge high school writing to college writing; we assign more generalized essays and research papers to prepare students for more discipline-specific genres in advanced writing courses; and we have activities that (un)intentionally develop “soft skills” in preparation for upper level courses or future professional work. When students take knowledge, skills, and experiences about writing from FYC contexts to future ones, they’re enacting the often practiced yet not overtly discussed phenomena of writing transfer. In addition to (un)knowingly employing writing transfer in FYC curricular design and teaching, we draw from a wide range of Composition scholarship. However, where do we start when considering what writing knowledge and skills students should learn in FYC contexts to use in future, unrelated contexts? To explore this curiosity, I conducted a qualitative research study of FYC administrators and teachers at three different universities in a major, midwestern, metropolitan city to answer my central research question: What influences writing program administrators and teachers when they form and communicate FYC objectives? Couching this research in scholarly discussions about writing transfer, and using Activity Theory as a methodology, I discovered—via interviews, observations, and artifact analysis—how and why administrators and teachers design FYC programs and personal pedagogy. My findings determined that administrators and teachers tend to consider more non-scholarly influences (e.g. labor, administrative expectations, empathy, etc.), yet rely on one or two specific scholarly approach. Likewise, the data reaffirmed how teachers enact transfer, although not in those terms, and valorize specific FYC objectives more than teaching all of them equally. I conclude this work on a discussion of King Beach’s Mediational Transition, a writing transfer scenario, that aids in learning by using simulated contexts in assignments and activities

Review of Realist Vision

In 1884, Emile Zola wrote the preface to the catalogue for a retrospective exhibition of Edouard Manet\u27s paintings. \u27Forget ideas of perfection and of the absolute\u27, the author implored: \u27don\u27t believe that something is beautiful because it is perfect, according to certain physical and metaphysical conventions. A thing is beautiful because it is living, because it is human\u27. While few today would dispute the intrinsic beauty of Manet\u27s works, Zola\u27s defense was necessary in its day; Manet\u27s oeuvre constantly defied physical and metaphysical conventions of the Salons, critics, and public and was commonly charged with depicting ugliness in an unaccomplished manner. In fact, the work of justifying realism\u27s aims is never done. Peter Brooks seeks to \u27make the case for realism\u27 in his excellent latest work, defending it against criticism which claims that \u27notions of representation that thinks of itself as an accurate designation of the world, are naIve and deluded\u27 (6). Central to his argument is the visuality of realist genres, and that his approach comprises fiction and painting is an indication of his commitment to viewing the realist project as spanning disciplinary boundaries. Brooks turns to the usual suspects to make his claims - Balzac, Zola, Eliot, Courbet, and Manet - but also extends his reading to Caillebotte, Henry lames, loyce, Proust, and others. It is a welcome and much-needed expansion that acknowledges that the arts evolve in relation to each other, and without particular regard for national or generic borders. Because of the intellectual generosity implicit in his approach, what results are readings that open up the canonical versions of these canonical realist texts, and expand the boundaries of the High-Realist genre itself. Part of his task is to defarniliarize the very strategies of realism; rhetorical or visual or narrative strategies that have become so ingrained in western art production and its analytical machinery that they seem transparent. Brooks achieves this effect by first accepting as a basis the idea which gives so many scholars pause: that no matter how sincere an artist\u27s intention to duplicate reality faithfully, the result will only ever be an exercise in pretense. Brooks moves away from the binary distinction of truth/falsehood and instead considers what is being made in the works. If all realist texts and images are efforts of pretending, Brooks notes that \u27it is how you pretend that counts\u27 (6; 229), and nineteenth-century realists \u27pretended\u27 with characters and environments of daily life - elements theretofore excluded from artistic realms. This rise of the common coincides with other surges (social, philosophical, industrial and scientific), resulting in a new way of seeing, and, as provided by realists, new objects to see

Report on Origins of Underperformance Education

A Commentary on The Origins of Underperformance in Higher Education: Proximal Systems of Influence by Michael Moscolo and Jose Castill