Offending White Men: Racial Vilification, Misrecognition, and Epistemic Injustice

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society

The Epistemological Power of Taste

It is generally accepted that sight—the capacity to see or to have visual experiences—has the power to give us knowledge about things in the environment and some of their properties in a distinctive way. Seeing the goose on the lake puts me in a position to know that it is there and that it has certain properties. And it does this by, when all goes well, presenting us with these features of the goose. One might even think that it is part of what it is to be a perceptual capacity that it has this kind of epistemological power, such that a capacity that lacked this power could not be perceptual. My focus in this essay is the sense of taste—the capacity to taste things or to have taste experiences. It has sometimes been suggested that taste lacks sight-like epistemological power. I argue that taste has epistemological power of the same kind as does sight, but that as a matter of contingent fact, that power often goes unexercised in our contemporary environment. We can know about things by tasting them in the same kind of way as we can know about things by seeing them, but we often do not. I then consider the significance of this conclusion. I suggest that in one way, it matters little, because our primary interest in taste is not epistemic but aesthetic. But, I end by suggesting, it can matter ethically

The Efficiency Of Nitrogen Utilisation In Growing Chicks

High levels of nitrogen excretion result in economic loss in farm animal production. Recent theories have proposed that there is a poor agreement between amino acid oxidation and the rate of protein synthesis. The overall objectives of three separate experiments were to quantify the growth, efficiency of feed and nitrogen utilisation and rate of lysine oxidation in growing chickens. The first experiment compared the growth and efficiency of nitrogen utilisation of birds given eight different dietary crude protein concentrations (130 - 300g/kg). Increasing dietary protein had no effect on weight gains (p>0.05) but an inverse relationship (p0.05) on the efficiency of nitrogen utilisation. The third experiment examined the response of growing chickens to a diet that varied only in lysine concentration (30-100g/kg of protein). The optimum lysine concentration for maximum growth was indicated to be 64g/kg CP and the optimum for maximum efficiency of nitrogen utilisation was also indicated at 64 g/kg CP. Therefore there was no evidence that maximum weight gain and maximum nitrogen retention occurred at different protein and lysine concentrations. Lysine oxidation increased with an increase in dietary lysine and there was evidence of a curvilinear response. A rapid increase in lysine oxidation was indicated at 55g/kg CP. This data therefore gives some support to the theory of increased oxidation of amino acids prior to the point of maximum protein retention in poultry

The effect of pronuclear transfer on human preimplantation development

Phd ThesisMutations in maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can cause a range of complex diseases for which there are currently no curative treatments. Using IVF based techniques involving nuclear genome transplantation, it may be possible enable women who carry mtDNA mutations to have a genetically related child without the risk of transmitting disease. The central aim of this project is to perform preclinical studies testing the safety and efficiency of pronuclear transfer (PNT). Surprisingly, the PNT technique developed using abnormally fertilised zygotes was detrimental to survival of normally fertilised zygotes. We tested the possibility that this might be due to the relatively accelerated development of normally fertilised zygotes allowing insufficient time for recovery following transplantation of the pronuclei. Switching the timing of PNT to shortly after pronuclei appearance (ePNT) rather than shortly before disappearance resulted in increased survival. Further modification of the enucleation and embryo culture media resulted in improved blastocyst quality. As part of the optimisation process, I tested the effect and reversibility of drugs that are used to inhibit the cytoskeleton of oocytes and zygotes in preparation for manipulations. Comparison of two compounds, which directly inhibit actin polymerisation, revealed marked differences in the reversibility. However, latrunculin B, which is rapidly reversed, has a detrimental effect on blastocyst development compared with latrunculin A, which is more potent and less readily reversible. Finally, I analysed single-cell RNA-sequencing data to determine whether gene expression in human blastocysts is altered by ePNT. This work was done in collaboration with Dr Kathy Niakan at the Francis Crick Institute. The findings indicate no detectable differences in global or lineage-associated gene expression between control and good quality ePNT blastocysts. Analysis of mitochondrial gene expression revealed high variability in the level of expression both within and between blastocysts. However, this variability was observed in ePNT and control blastocysts, and there was no detectable difference between them. In conclusion, this study has tested PNT in normally fertilised human zygotes for the first time; results indicate no detectable harmful effects of the ePNT procedure. We therefore conclude that it is likely to give rise to normal pregnancies.Wellcome Trust and NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centr

Turning Points: Stories of Passion and Leadership in the South Carolina Midlands

“Turning Points” captures the inflection points that define local community leaders’ identities and passions, whether life-altering experiences or fleeting moments of realization. Through examining the evolving life stories of community leaders in the South Carolina Midlands, this creative project explores how turning point experiences impact people’s leadership and personal development and profiles these stories in a photo book to effectively share these stories with a broad audience. Preliminary research was conducted on identity development, turning points, and emotional intelligence in relation to leadership theory and practice. This research informed interview questions that guided conversations with nineteen community leaders in the South Carolina Midlands centered on inflection points, passions, and leadership lessons. Regarding turning points that inspired a sense of purpose and passion in interviewees’ lives, participants fell into three major categories: 1) a significant experience greatly modified perspectives or goals, 2) an existing interest or passion was affected by external experiences, and 3) others encouraged or empowered them to take action. Second, when discussing their life’s passion, participants described their passion either 1) as specific objectives related to their work or 2) as general concepts that they pursued through various avenues. Finally, when looking at the characteristics and behaviors interviewees described that make up a good leader, the concepts of self-reflection, emotional intelligence, and challenging oneself became apparent commonalities. The authors hope that through archiving and creating a photobook of these Midlands leaders, others will also be inspired by these leaders’ actions and words

What is distinctive about the senses?

For the most part, philosophical discussion of the senses has been concerned with what distinguishes them from one another, following Grice’s treatment of this issue in his ‘Remarks on the senses’ (1962). But this is one of two questions which Grice raises in this influential paper. The other, the question of what distinguishes senses from faculties that are not senses, is the question I address in this thesis. Though there are good reasons to think that the awareness we have of our bodies is perceptual, we do not usually think of bodily awareness as a sense. So in particular, I try to give an account of what it is that is distinctive about the five familiar modalities that they do not share with bodily awareness. I argue that what is distinctive about vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell, is that perception in all these modalities has enabling and disabling conditions of a certain kind. These enabling and disabling conditions are manifest in the conscious character of experience in these modalities, and exploited in active perceptual attention— in looking, listening, and so on. Bodily awareness has no such enabling conditions. The five familiar senses having this distinctive feature, and bodily awareness lacking it is not a merely incidental difference between them.\ud Nevertheless, I do not claim that having these enabling conditions is necessary and sufficient for counting some faculty as a sense, or, correlatively, for something being an instance of sense-perception. Rather, we can see why it would serve certain (contingent) human interests for us to think of the faculties that involve these enabling conditions as instances of a single kind of thing, of which bodily awareness is not an instance

Absence experience in grief

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects’ descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief