Waste as the Artful Excess of Natural Selection

This thought-experiment consists of a series of letters between Feral Susan (Susan Nordstrom), Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee, and Emu Girrl (Margaret Somerville), Nepean River, Emu Green in Western Sydney. In this thought experiment, we move in the realm of litter’s inanimate manifestations that tell their own stories of movement and flow, stories of the river. They are stories of the inhuman within the human. Plastic and waste call us back to our rivers, the Nepean and Mississippi to (re)think with waste. Waste creates with, and on us, moves us from its affective production of disgust and aggression, to embrace its proliferation as Artful excess. Our thought experiment with waste materializes transformative becomings that generate past-present-future affective residues of wonder about the materialities of litter and rivers

Psychic distance : antecedents, retail strategy implications and performance outcomes

The authors propose a conceptual model of the psychic distance&ndash;organizational performance relationship that incorporates organizational factors (international experience and centralization of decision making), entry strategy, and retail strategy implications. The findings suggest that when entering psychically distant markets, retailers should adopt low-cost/low-control entry strategies and adapt their retail strategy to a greater extent than in psychically close markets. However, the authors find that such strategic responses have an adverse effect on performance. They find that international experience, psychic distance, entry strategy, and retail strategy adaptation are significant drivers of organizational performance and factors that determine critical success in international retailing.<br /

Prediction of Opioid-Induced Respiratory Depression on Inpatient Wards Using Continuous Capnography and Oximetry: An International Prospective, Observational Trial.

BACKGROUND: Opioid-related adverse events are a serious problem in hospitalized patients. Little is known about patients who are likely to experience opioid-induced respiratory depression events on the general care floor and may benefit from improved monitoring and early intervention. The trial objective was to derive and validate a risk prediction tool for respiratory depression in patients receiving opioids, as detected by continuous pulse oximetry and capnography monitoring. METHODS: PRediction of Opioid-induced respiratory Depression In patients monitored by capnoGraphY (PRODIGY) was a prospective, observational trial of blinded continuous capnography and oximetry conducted at 16 sites in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Vital signs were intermittently monitored per standard of care. A total of 1335 patients receiving parenteral opioids and continuously monitored on the general care floor were included in the analysis. A respiratory depression episode was defined as respiratory rate ≤5 breaths/min (bpm), oxygen saturation ≤85%, or end-tidal carbon dioxide ≤15 or ≥60 mm Hg for ≥3 minutes; apnea episode lasting \u3e30 seconds; or any respiratory opioid-related adverse event. A risk prediction tool was derived using a multivariable logistic regression model of 46 a priori defined risk factors with stepwise selection and was internally validated by bootstrapping. RESULTS: One or more respiratory depression episodes were detected in 614 (46%) of 1335 general care floor patients (43% male; mean age, 58 ± 14 years) continuously monitored for a median of 24 hours (interquartile range [IQR], 17-26). A multivariable respiratory depression prediction model with area under the curve of 0.740 was developed using 5 independent variables: age ≥60 (in decades), sex, opioid naivety, sleep disorders, and chronic heart failure. The PRODIGY risk prediction tool showed significant separation between patients with and without respiratory depression (P \u3c .001) and an odds ratio of 6.07 (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.44-8.30; P \u3c .001) between the high- and low-risk groups. Compared to patients without respiratory depression episodes, mean hospital length of stay was 3 days longer in patients with ≥1 respiratory depression episode (10.5 ± 10.8 vs 7.7 ± 7.8 days; P \u3c .0001) identified using continuous oximetry and capnography monitoring. CONCLUSIONS: A PRODIGY risk prediction model, derived from continuous oximetry and capnography, accurately predicts respiratory depression episodes in patients receiving opioids on the general care floor. Implementation of the PRODIGY score to determine the need for continuous monitoring may be a first step to reduce the incidence and consequences of respiratory compromise in patients receiving opioids on the general care floor

Ethics, empathy and fear in research on violent conflict

The discussion of ethics in the social sciences focuses on ‘doing no harm’ and ‘giving back’ to research participants, but does not explore the challenges of empathy and fear in research with participants in political violence and war. Drawing on 180 in-depth interviews on the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992-1993 collected over eight months between 2010 and 2013 primarily in Abkhazia, but also Georgia and Russia, I argue that researchers can come to empathize with some but fear other participants in past and present violence. These emotional responses can influence researchers’ ability to probe and interpret interviews and respondents’ ability to surpass strong positions to explore dilemmas of participation in violence. By empathizing with not only ‘victims’ and ‘non-fighters’ as I had expected based on my pre-existing moral-conceptual categories, but also participants in the war, I found that individuals adopted multiple overlapping roles and shifted between these roles in the changing conditions of violence. In contrast, failing to empathize with and fearing those who continued to participate in violence at the time of my interviews limited my ability to fully appreciate the complexity of their participation, but shed light on the context of violence in contemporary Abkhazia. This analysis shows that reflection on the role of empathy and fear in shaping our interactions with research participants can help advance our understanding of participation in violence and this difficult research context

Guilty of Loving You: A Multispecies Narrative

We recognized the urgency of our shared multispecies inquiry, with the recent death of one of the cats, Amelie. In the intense singularity of death, we became very aware of how we tune and tend together—everyday practices in which humans (themselves animals) and animals live and perceive together—and how these practices shape our everyday lives. These practices are acts of multispecies survival in which we learn how to live and die together. We weave our multispecies living–dying together with the theories of Haraway and Rautio. Writing together as we disrupt the categories between humans and animals, human-centered philosophical concepts, and human-centered narrative inquiry. In so doing, we offer an evocative multispecies narrative that tells a different story, a becoming with multiple species in naturecultures

Makers-Philosophers-Researchers: Experimentations with (Dis)placements

In 2017, a graduate class became something otherwise. It became an experimental place in which experiences poured through students rather than providing students ready-made experiences. It became a space to encourage the play of difference that challenge our ideas about race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and so on as frictional events (Puar, 2012). It became a space in which students came to know themselves differently, even subjectify themselves in different ways through experience. By attending to the delicacies of social, material, aesthetic, cultural, historical, and disciplinary forces, the class became a generative space of producing knowledge differently, knowledge that changes us as it much as it changes disciplines (Manning, 2016). It became a space to write and do scholarship differently so as to stay close to the ground to attend to “the sensed social-material-aesthetic atmospherics resonant in a scene, the threshold onto worlds of expressivity in a problematics” (Berlant &amp; Stewart, 2019, p. 34). This Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology special issue offers five experimentations that materialized from such a course

Losing my Religion: Bodily Confessions of an Organism Trying to Make a Body without Organs

This article is a script of a performance at the 2018 PhEmaterialism conference in London, UK. In this script, I offer a series of bodily confessions, experimental tales of making a Body without Organs (Deleuze &amp; Guattari, 1987) on the neoliberal academic stratum.&nbsp; Each tale moves between the stratifying forces of the neoliberal academy that seek to organize my organism and experimentations that seek to produce different and more freeing organizations for my organs.&nbsp; Each tale talks back to the priests of the neoliberal academy by telling what happens to an organism, my organism-my body, as I try to make a Body without Organs. To situate the script, I provide a lengthy appendix that details narrative reflexivity (Spry, 2011) decisions about the script and performance.&nbsp; Like any performance piece, the piece is to be viewed, heard, and experienced, rather than read.&nbsp; Performance pieces are not and should not be read as typical journal articles. They are their own genre of writing that eschews traditional notions of writing.&nbsp; With this in mind, this appendix provides narrative reflexivity about the performance (Spry, 2011) for readers who may need it

Good, Bad, and Hopefully Not the God Trick: Technological Systems in Qualitative Inquiry

This article is a tangle of threads made possible by theoretical and practical snags in my work with qualitative inquiry technology. One snag pulls at the term “technology” and its etymology to think about technology as a creative system used in the production of knowledge. That snag leads to a study of early anthropological work and technology to better understand the history that feeds into qualitative inquiry. And another snag considers who and what is involved in the making of technological tools used in research. These unraveling snags entangle together to consider technology as an open-ended system consisting of a variety of tools used to create political, cultural, and social realities. Such thinking offers a space to contemplate how technological advances have shaped qualitative inquiry’s past, present, and future. The forceful snags studied in this article begin to ask the question, “Can we think of qualitative inquiry without technology?