Travels without a donkey : the adventures of Bruno Latour

The writings of Bruno Latour have invigorated empirical inquiry in the social sciences and in the process helped to redefine their character. In recent years the philosophy of social science that made this inquiry possible has been deployed to a different end, namely that of rethinking the character of politics. Here I suggest that in the pursuit of this goal, inflated claims are made about that philosophy, and some basic theoretical tools are asked to do a job for which they may not be best equipped

Maternal mortality, stillbirths, and neonatal mortality: a transition model based on analyses of 151 countries

BACKGROUND: Maternal mortality, stillbirths, and neonatal mortality account for almost 5 million deaths a year and are often analysed separately, despite having overlapping causes and interventions. We propose a comprehensive five-phase mortality transition model to improve analyses of progress and inform strategic planning. METHODS: In this empirical data-driven study to develop a model transition, we used UN estimates for 151 countries to assess changes in maternal mortality, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths. On the basis of ratios of maternal to stillbirth and neonatal mortality, we identified five phases of transition, in which phase 1 has the highest mortality and phase 5 has the lowest. We used global databases to examine phase-specific characteristics during 2000-20 for causes of death, fertility rates, abortion policies, health workforce and financing, and socioeconomic indicators. We analysed 326 national surveys to assess service coverage and inequalities by transition phase. FINDINGS: Among 116 countries in phases 1 to 4 in 2000, 73 (63%) progressed at least one phase by 2020, six advanced two phases, and three regressed. The ratio of stillbirth and neonatal deaths to maternal deaths increased from less than 10 in phase 1 to well over 50 in phase 4 and phase 5. Progression was associated with a declining proportion of deaths caused by infectious diseases and peripartum complications, declining total and adolescent fertility rates, changes in health-workforce densities and skills mix (ie, ratio of nurses or midwives to physicians) from phase 3 onwards, increasing per-capita health spending, and reducing shares of out-of-pocket health expenditures. From phase 1 to 5, the median coverage of first antenatal care visits increased from 66% to 98%, four or more antenatal care visits from 44% to 94%, institutional births from 36% to 99%, and caesarean section rates from 2% to 25%. The transition out of high-mortality phases involved a major increase in institutional births, primarily in lower-level health facilities, whereas subsequent progress was characterised by rapid increases in hospital births. Wealth-related inequalities reduced strongly for institutional birth coverage from phase 3 onwards. INTERPRETATION: The five-phase maternal mortality, stillbirth, and neonatal mortality transition model can be used to benchmark the current indicators in comparison to typical patterns in the transition at national or sub-national level, identify outliers to better assess drivers of progress, and inform strategic planning and investments towards Sustainable Development Goal targets. It can also facilitate programming for integrated strategies to end preventable maternal mortality and neonatal mortality and stillbirths. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Why political ontology must be experimentalized, On ecoshowhomes as devices of participation

This paper contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy by proposing an experimental understanding of political ontology. It discusses why the shift from epistemology to ontology in STS has proved inconclusive for the study of politics and democracy: the politics of non-humans has been assumed to operate on a different level from that of politics and democracy understood as institutional and public forms. I distinguish between three different understandings of political ontology: theoretical, empirical and experimental. Each of these implies a different approach to the problem that non-humans pose for democracy. Theoretical ontology proposes to solve it by conceptual means, while empirical ontology renders it manageable by assuming a problematic analytic separation between constituting and constituted ontology. This paper makes the case for the third approach, experimental ontology, by analysing an empirical site, that of the ecoshowhome. In this setting, material entities are deliberately invested with moral and political capacities. As such, ecoshowhomes help to clarify two main features of experimental political ontology: 1) ontological work is here not so much relocated from theory to empirical practice, but distributed among actors and entities involved in them, and 2) normative variability does not just pertain to the enactment of things, but can be conceived of as internal to political objects. From these two features of experimental ontology something follows for democracy as an ontological problem. This problem does not dissolve in empirical settings, but these settings make possible its articulation by experimental means

Lines of Descent: Kuhn and Beyond

yesThomas S. Kuhn is famous both for his work on the Copernican Revolution and his ‘paradigm’ view of scientific revolutions. But Kuhn later abandoned the notion of paradigm (and related notions) in favour of a more ‘evolutionary’ view of the history of science. Kuhn’s position therefore moved closer to ‘continuity’ models of scientific progress, for instance ‘chain-of-reasoning’ models, originally championed by D. Shapere. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate around Kuhn’s new ‘developmental’ view and to evaluate these competing models with reference to some major innovations in the history of cosmology, from Copernicanism to modern cosmology. This evaluation is made possible through some unexpected overlap between Kuhn’s earlier discontinuity model and various versions of the later continuity models. It is the thesis of this paper that the ‘chain-of-reasoning’ model accounts better for the cosmological evidence than both Kuhn’s early paradigm model and his later developmental view of the history of science

The Thyroid Hormone Receptors Modulate the Skin Response to Retinoids

[Background]: Retinoids play an important role in skin homeostasis and when administered topically cause skin hyperplasia, abnormal epidermal differentiation and inflammation. Thyroidal status in humans also influences skin morphology and function and we have recently shown that the thyroid hormone receptors (TRs) are required for a normal proliferative response to 12-O-tetradecanolyphorbol-13-acetate (TPA) in mice. [Methodology/Principal Findings]: We have compared the epidermal response of mice lacking the thyroid hormone receptor binding isoforms TRα1 and TRβ to retinoids and TPA. Reduced hyperplasia and a decreased number of proliferating cells in the basal layer in response to 9-cis-RA and TPA were found in the epidermis of TR-deficient mice. Nuclear levels of proteins important for cell proliferation were altered, and expression of keratins 5 and 6 was also reduced, concomitantly with the decreased number of epidermal cell layers. In control mice the retinoid (but not TPA) induced parakeratosis and diminished expression of keratin 10 and loricrin, markers of early and terminal epidermal differentiation, respectively. This reduction was more accentuated in the TR deficient animals, whereas they did not present parakeratosis. Therefore, TRs modulate both the proliferative response to retinoids and their inhibitory effects on skin differentiation. Reduced proliferation, which was reversed upon thyroxine treatment, was also found in hypothyroid mice, demonstrating that thyroid hormone binding to TRs is required for the normal response to retinoids. In addition, the mRNA levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines TNFα and IL-6 and the chemotactic proteins S1008A and S1008B were significantly elevated in the skin of TR knock-out mice after TPA or 9-cis-RA treatment and immune cell infiltration was also enhanced. [Conclusions/significance]: Since retinoids are commonly used for the treatment of skin disorders, these results demonstrating that TRs regulate skin proliferation, differentiation and inflammation in response to these compounds could have not only physiological but also therapeutic implications.This work was supported by grants BFU2007-62402 and SAF2008-00121 from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, RD06/0020/0036 and RD06/0020/0029 from the Fondo de Investigaciones Sanitarias and by the European Grant CRESCENDO (FP-018652).Peer reviewe

Heidegger and Blumenberg on modernity

The debate surrounding the way in which Heidegger and Blumenberg understand the modern age is an opportunity to discuss two different approaches to history. On one hand, from Heidegger's perspective, history should be understood as starting from how Western thought related to Being, which, in metaphysical thinking, took the form of the forgetfulness of Being. Thus, the modern age represents the last stage in the process of forgetfulness of Being, which announces the moment of the rethinking of the relationship with Being by appealing to the authentic disclosure of Being. On the other hand, Blumenberg understands history as the result of the reoccupation process, which means replacing old theories with other new ones. Thus, to the historical approach it is not important to identify epochs as periods of time between two events, but to think about the discontinuities occurring throughout history. Starting from here, the modern age will be thought of not as an expression of the radicalization of the forgetfulness of Being, but as a response to the crises of medieval conceptions. For the same reason, the interpretation of history as a history of the forgetfulness of Being is considered by Blumenberg to subordinate history to an absolute principle, without taking into account its protagonists' needs and necessities

Crime, media and the will-to-representation: Reconsidering relationships in the new media age

This paper considers the ways in which the rise of new media might challenge commonplace criminological assumptions about the crime–media interface. Established debates around crime and media have long been based upon a fairly clear demarcation between production and consumption, between object and audience – the media generates and transmits representations of crime, and audiences engage with them. However, one of the most noticeable changes occurring in the wake of the development of new media is the proliferation of self-organised production by ‘ordinary people’ – everything ranging from self-authored web pages and ‘blogs’, to self-produced video created using hand-held camcorders, camera-phones and ‘webcams’. Today we see the spectacle of people them, send them and upload them to the Internet. This kind of ‘will to representation’ may be seen in itself as a new kind of causal inducement to law- and rule-breaking behaviour. It may be that, in the new media age, the terms of criminological questioning need to be sometimes reversed: instead of asking whether ‘media’ instigates crime or fear of crime, we must ask how the very possibility of bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour.performing acts of crime and deviance in order to recordmediating oneself to an audience through self-representation might be bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour