Two States of Emergency: Ebola 2014

Andrew Lakoff revisits the received wisdom that the WHO was slow to respond. Slow to respond to what exactly

Timeline: Ebola 2014

The timeline of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, compiled by Andrew Lakoff

What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?

ARC Working Paper No.

Introduction: Ebola’s Ecologies

Andrew Lakoff, Stephen J. Collier and Christopher Kelty ask what the 2014 Ebola outbreak tells us about the history of pandemic preparedness and the blindspots of global health security today

Managing learning trajectories: the case of 14-19 mathematics

In this paper we explore how mathematics department leaders manage curriculum (what is taught), teaching (how it is taught) and learner progression (what results) for 14-19 year olds. The background to the study is a range of national, and international, concerns about participation rates in university entrance level mathematics. Given the recommendation of the Smith Report (2004) that new pathways models be developed for 14-19 mathematics, this paper explores some of the strategies employed, and issues faced, by schools as they seek to maximise attainment and participation in mathematics. Following a thematic analysis of data from interviews with heads of department in fifteen schools we look in more depth at one school to see how it manages the mathematics learning trajectories of young people. The theme of performativity is all pervasive

Predicating from an early age: edusemiotics and the potential of children’s preconceptions

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8:15; Pietarinen in Signs of logic, Springer, Dordrecht, 2006; Stjernfelt in Diagrammatology. An investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology and semiotics, Springer, Dordrecht, 2007) and relational logic. Constructivism was traditionally developed within psychology and sociology and, therefore, some incompatibilities can be expected between these two schools. While acknowledging the differences, we explain that constructivism and semiotics share the assumption of realism that knowledge can only be developed upon knowledge and, therefore, an epistemological collaboration is possible. The semiotic analysis performed confirms the constructivist results and provides a further insight into the teacher-student relation. Like the constructivist approach, Peirce’s doctrine of agapism infers that the personal dimension of teaching must not be ignored. Thus, we argue for the importance of genuine sympathy in teaching attitudes. More broadly, the article also contributes to the development of postmodern humanities. At the end of the modern age, the humanities are passing through a critical period of transformation. There is a growing interest in semiotics and semiotic philosophy in many areas of the humanities. Such a case, on which we draw, is the development of a theoretical semiotic approach to education, namely edusemiotics (Stables and Semetsky, Pedagogy and edusemiotics: theoretical challenge/practical opportunities, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2015)

Decoding Brain Activity Associated with Literal and Metaphoric Sentence Comprehension Using Distributional Semantic Models

Recent years have seen a growing interest within the natural language processing (NLP)community in evaluating the ability of semantic models to capture human meaning representation in the brain. Existing research has mainly focused on applying semantic models to de-code brain activity patterns associated with the meaning of individual words, and, more recently, this approach has been extended to sentences and larger text fragments. Our work is the first to investigate metaphor process-ing in the brain in this context. We evaluate a range of semantic models (word embeddings, compositional, and visual models) in their ability to decode brain activity associated with reading of both literal and metaphoric sentences. Our results suggest that compositional models and word embeddings are able to capture differences in the processing of literal and metaphoric sentences, providing sup-port for the idea that the literal meaning is not fully accessible during familiar metaphor comprehension

“A Massive Long Way”: Interconnecting Histories, a “Special Child,” ADHD, and Everyday Family Life

Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class families carried out in Los Angeles, California, this article draws on interview and video-recorded data of everyday interactions to explore illness and healing as embedded in the microcultural context of the Morris family. For this family, an important aspect of what is at stake for them in their daily lives is best understood by focusing on 9-year-old Mark, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In this article, we grapple with the complexity of conveying some sense of how Mark’s condition is experienced and relationally enacted in everyday contexts. Through illuminating connections between lives as lived and lives as told, we explore the narrative structuring of healing in relation to Mark’s local moral world with the family at its center. We examine how his parents understand the moral consequences of the child’s past for his present and future, and work to encourage others to give due weight to his troubled beginnings before this child joined the Morris family. At the same time, we see how the Morris parents act to structure Mark’s moral experience and orient to a desired future in which Mark’s “success” includes an appreciation of how he is accountable to others for his actions. Through our analyses, we also seek to contribute to discussions on what is at stake in everyday life contexts for children with ADHD and their families, through illuminating aspects of the cultural, moral and relational terrain that U.S. families navigate in contending with a child’s diagnosis of ADHD. Further, given that ADHD is often construed as a “disorder of volition,” we seek to advance anthropological theorizing about the will in situations where volitional control over behavior is seen to be disordered

An Uncertain Dominion: Irish Psychiatry, Methadone, and the Treatment of Opiate Abuse

This paper investigates some productive ambiguities around the medical administration of methadone in the Republic of Ireland. The tensions surrounding methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) are outlined, as well as the sociohistorical context in which a serious heroin addiction problem in Ireland developed. Irish psychiatry intervened in this situation, during a time of institutional change, debates concerning the nature of addiction, moral panics concerning heroin addiction in Irish society and the recent boom in the Irish economy, known popularly as the Celtic Tiger. A particular history of this sort illuminates how technologies like MMT become cosmopolitan, settling into, while changing, local contexts