Medical Humanism in the Posthuman Era: A Critical Examination of its Past, Present, and Future.

This paper explores the historical and contemporary significance of medical humanism and its potential value in medical education. Medical humanities emerged as a response to the issues arising from science-driven modern medicine, most notably the marginalization of the individual in medical practice. Medical humanism has evolved to become a guiding ideology in shaping the theory and practice of medical humanities. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about significant changes in medical humanities, challenging the foundations of humanism beyond medical humanism. The rise of posthumanism raises fundamental questions about humanism itself. The climate crisis, driven by human greed and capitalism's exploitation of nature, has led to the emergence of viruses that transcend species boundaries. The overflow of severely ill patients has highlighted the classic medical ethics problem of "who should be saved first" in Korea, and medical humanism is facing a crisis. Various marginalized groups have also pointed out the biases inherent in medical humanism. With this rapidly changing environment in mind, this paper examines the past and present of medical humanism in order to identify the underlying ideology of medical humanism and its future potential in medical education. This paper assumes that there are two axes of humanism: human-centeredness and anthropocentrism. Medical humanism has historically developed along the axis of human-centeredness rather than anthropocentrism, emphasizing the academic inquiry into human nature and conditions, as well as the moral element of humanity. Furthermore, this paper discusses the challenges that medical humanism faces from post-human centeredness and post-anthropocentrism, as well as the recent discourse on posthumanism. Finally, the implications of this shift in medical humanism for the education of the history of medicine are briefly explored.

After the End of the World: How to Orient Yourself in Thinking and in Life from Now On?

If the Covid-19 pandemic sets the tone for our present condition, it is "only” the last revelator of the failure of modern civilization. The "developed” world is facing, in particular, an unprecedented regressive turn: the profound political, ethical, and civilizational setback that we are seeing and living;the destruction of the human in us. From within this civilizational bankruptcy, this essay strives to project an answer to the question (Beckettian question par excellence): How to continue? How can we orient ourselves in thinking and in life from now on, after the ruin of faith in man, postulated by humanisms? A good guide: the correspondence between Freud and Einstein, Why war? This outlines an anamnesis of the assumptions of all humanism. The human constitutively carries within himself "something” that exceeds him and that, as such, is not human. This excess is inescapable;rather, it requires a "work,” the "work of culture, Kulturarbeit,” a "care,” and a "cure” (the cura sui). Outlining a turnaround movement (retournement) from the bankruptcy of modernity, Freud thus opens the way for what really concerns us: a thought of after-humanism. It is here that we find Lacan's seminar on the "Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” built around the figure of Antigone—one that does not give up on his desire, which is faithful to unconditional desire. Civil disobedience. Tragic conception of ethics. This essay makes, by the way, some observations on the state delinquency that is devastating Brazil today. And it leaves a question: How to explain, in a Republic, the unbelievable impunity of a notorious genocide and ecocide placed at the top of the state, openly involved with organized crime? What to conclude from this banality of evil? And the lack of consequent indignation of the so-called progressive forces? This attests to the structural lack, in that "psychic apparatus” called "Brazilian civilization,” of a true "work of culture.” This lack goes perfectly hand in hand with the obscurantist propensity of global neoliberalism in crisis. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

Household curricula during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A collective biography

Households with school‐aged children worldwide were affected by school closures caused by COVID‐19. Using a sociomaterial orientation and collective biography methodology, this study examined the household curricula of diverse families in Ontario, Canada with children in pre‐school through Grade 12. It found two distinct curricular phases to the pandemic, each with its own networked constituents, movements, and effects. Phase I involved learning at home during the lockdown in Spring and Summer 2020;Phase II involved online and face‐to‐face learning in the Fall of 2020. The constituents involved in curriculum making in Phase I were expansive and unexpected. Multiple timescales, modes, languages, and knowledge disciplines assembled to (re)configure households as learning spaces that produced novel opportunities for children's knowing, doing, and being. The makeup and movements of the Phase II assemblages were more of a return to the normalized boundaries of implemented school curricula that demarcated subject areas, languages, learning/play, learning/assessment, and body/mind. Concerned with questions of equity in/through curriculum, this study suggests a curriculum paradigm that foregrounds learners' and teachers' engagement with sociomaterial lifeworlds and their ethical relationship building with the more‐than‐human and the world. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Navigating (Post-)Anthropocenic Times of Crisis: A Critical Cartography of Hope

Departing from the (post-)Anthropocenic crisis state of today's world, fuelled by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, various post-truth populist follies, and an apocalyptic WW3-scenario that has been hanging in the air since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this article argues for the possibility – and necessity – of an affirmative posthumanist-materialist mapping of hope. Embedded in the Deleuzoguattarian-Braidottian (see Deleuze and Guattari 2005 [1980];Braidotti 2011 [1994]) methodology of critical cartography, and infused with critical posthumanist, new materialist, and queer theoretical perspectives, this cartography of hope is sketched out against two permacrisis-infused positionalities: nostalgic humanism and tragic (post-)humanism. Forced to navigate between these two extremes, the critical cartography of hope presented here explores hope in nume-rous historico-philosophical (re-)configurations: from the premodern ‘hope-as-all-too-human', to a more politicised early modern ‘hope-as-(politically-)human' – representing hope's first paradigm shift (politicisation), and from a four decades-long neoliberal redrawing of hope as ‘no-more-hope' – hope's second shift (depoliticisation) – to a critical (new) materialist plea to de-anthropocentrise and re-politicise hope – hope's third and final post-Anthropocenic shift (re-politicisation). By mapping these (re-)configurations of hope, a philosophical plea is made for hope as a material(ist) praxis that can help us better understand – and counter – these extractive late capitalist, neoliberal more-than-human crisis times. © Edinburgh University Press.

Design Thinking, Soft Skills Development, and the Digital Society

The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced changes that had been taking place over the past decade. These changes were triggered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The 4IR does affect the industry and the human being as we know it. In this way, it is not hard to envision a society where technology is so developed and integrated into our lives that it increases humanity's capacity and threshold for human intelligence, cognition, and physical abilities. This research proposes a teaching–learning framework for the techno-humanist ecosystem by developing the demanded soft skills with the design process methodology. The first step of this research is to understand the essential elements to conceptualise a framework. To reach this objective, we started with a systematic review of the literature to analyse, and the second item is understanding the evolution of job offer asking for soft skills. We are investigating soft skills, design thinking and digital humanism, and the job market evolution. Then, considering the state of the art, this research will study how those ideas converge and affect each other. Finally, the primary outcome of this research will be a visual matrix representing the point of junction of these concepts. It will help to build the initial elements of a framework of a teaching–learning model that can help adapt to and face the challenges of a human-digital society. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Study on Model of Psychotherapy Narration Focused on Mental Well-Being for Stress Management in the Elderly

Psychological well-being is vitally important for the quality of life of the elderly and is only increasing in importance with the rapidly increasing elderly population worldwide. Emerging elderly problems include a deterioration in physical function, loss of friends or spouse, reduced social participation, and reduced economic ability. Hence, the importance of coping with and managing stress in the elderly is also rapidly increasing. This study proposed psychotherapy narration was designed to assist elderly mental well-being by combining person-centered therapy, positive psychology, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Extending from current mainstream psychotherapeutic methods, postmodern psychotherapeutic techniques based on various psychological theories or techniques have begun to be more widely applied. However, almost no previous studies have developed a systematic psychotherapy narration for the elderly. Therefore, this study developed a postmodern psychotherapeutic narration and confirmed its aspects by analyzing elderly satisfaction regarding the corresponding emotion. This satisfaction analysis study found the value of the psychotherapy-narrative model according to the elderly's stressful situations and emotions. This study can be an initial model of postmodernist-psychotherapy narration for the elderly. Therefore, based on the model of this study, future-oriented development and research on the diversity of the elderly and the effects of each narration are important. The future of this study will give mental self-sustainability to clients who need psychotherapy.

Thinking through the disruptive effects and affects of the Coronavirus with feminist new materialism

The disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure practices. Pursuing this line of thought our article draws upon the insights of feminist new materialism as intellectual resource for considering what the coronavirus "does" as a gendered phenomenon. We turn to this body of feminist scholarship as it enables us to attune to what is happening, what remains unspoken and to pay attention to "the little things" that may be lost in a big crisis. Writing through the complexity of embodied affects (fear, loss, hope), we focus on the challenge to humanist notions of "agency" posed by these shifting timespace relations of home confinement, restricted movement and altered work-leisure routines. We explore the tensions arising from "home" as an historical site of gendered inequality and a new site of enhanced capacity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Interspecies cosmopolitanism: Non-human power and the grounds of world order in the Anthropocene

Cosmopolitanism claims to be the most just and inclusive of mainstream approaches to the ethics and practice of world order, given its commitment to human interconnection, peace, equality, diversity, and rights, and its concern with the many globalised pathologies that entrench injustice and vulnerability across borders. Yet it has largely remained oblivious to the agency, power, and value of non-human life on a turbulent and active Earth. Without rejecting its commitments to justice for human beings, the article challenges its humanism as both morally and politically inadequate to the situation of the Anthropocene, exemplified by the simultaneous crises of climate change, mass extinction, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In answer, the article develops new grounds and principles for an interspecies cosmopolitanism, exploring how we can reimagine its ontological foundations by creating new grounding images of subjectivity, existential unity, institutional organisation, and ordering purpose. These, in turn, can support political and institutional projects to secure the rights of ecosystems and people to flourish and persist through an increasingly chaotic epoch of human dominance and multispecies vulnerability across the Anthropocene Earth.

The aesthetics and multiple origin stories of climate activism

The goal of climate activism is to tell the story about the connections between the local and planetary effects of climate change on people. Ethnography of its narrative devices and visual images helps get after the struggles and sometimes missed opportunities in making these connections possible. Such analyses are only more critical in a moment when what looks and feels like climate inaction has been recalibrated by unanticipated risks such as pandemics. While early Covid-19 travel bans and quarantines provided a well of antidotes and images of 'nature coming back and recolonising human environs', they also revealed the systematic ways in which climate activism is linked to health, food and housing activism. The political potential of climate activism may therefore be in its capacity to tell stories that emphasise those earthly politics and its gatherings, once seemingly on the fringe but central to its future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Interrogating higher education's responses to international student mobility in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, international higher education and student mobility have faced tremendous pressure and challenges. To address COVID-induced challenges and stress, higher education institutions and host governments undertook responses. This article has humanistically looked into the institutional responses of host universities and governments to international higher education and student mobilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Informed by a systematic literature review of publications released between 2020 and 2021 in a wide range of academic sources, we argue that many of these responses were problematic and did not adequately maintain student well-being and fairness; instead, international students were treated to some extent with poor services in the host countries. To situate our comprehensive overview and propose ideas for forward-thinking conceptualisation, policy, and practice in higher education in the context of the ongoing pandemic, we engage with the literature on ethical and humanistic internationalisation of higher education and (international) student mobilities.

Caregiver, keep the desire to take care

Le travail des aides-soignants est insuffisamment valorisé, même si leurs compétences sont mieux reconnues. La relation avec les patients ou résidents comme avec les membres de l'équipe est la source principale de satisfaction au travail. Pourtant, cela ne semble pas suffire pour fidéliser les soignants. © 2022 Elsevier Masson SAS

Earbuds, smartphones, and music. Spiritual care and existential changes in COVID-19 times.

Rooted in a Durkheimian functionalist reading of religion, in this article, we present and discuss the results of a scoping study of on-line sources on the delivery of spiritual care during the COVID-19 pandemic in England. Spiritual care highlights the bond between healthcare and religion/spirituality, particularly within the growing paradigm of holistic and humane care. Spiritual care is also an area where the importance of the physical presence of receivers and providers is exceptionally important, as a classic anthropological understanding of the religious ritual would maintain. Three themes were found, which speak to changes brought about by the pandemic. These revolve around disembodiment, solitude, and technology in spiritual care, of religious and non-religious nature. A fourth theme encapsulates the ambivalence in the experience of spiritual care delivery, whereby distant and virtual care could only partially compensate for the impossibility of physical presence. On the one hand, we draw from anthropology of the ritual and phenomenology to make the case for the inalienability of intercorporeality in being there for the other. On the other hand, relying on digital religious studies and post-human theories, we argue for an opening up to new ways of conceptualising the body, being there, and being human.

Limitation of Human Rights and Freedoms in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: International Legal Aspects

The aim of the work is to study the institution of restriction of human rights and freedoms in the face of an emergency danger to human health, the legal grounds and limits of such restrictions in the doctrine of international law. The empirical basis of the study was the norms of international treaties and other legal acts, as well as materials from foreign periodicals. In the course of the study, the corresponding special-legal methods were applied: formal-legal, comparative-legal, hermeneutic. The author came to the conclusion that international law allows in some cases the restriction of human rights and freedoms, including in the presence of a serious threat to public health. The institution of human rights and freedoms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is undergoing a major transformation, which may result in the emergence of a new paradigm of human rights. Many states that are the founders of the European humanism, which appeared to be a fundament of modern international law, but, under the influence of the pandemic, they are gradually moving away from its basic principle of recognizing a person as the highest value, implemented through the idea of autonomy and universality of the individual. Some modern states are actively cultivating other values and principles compared to European humanism, in which the public (collective) good, in particular, the health of the whole society, is a priority, while limiting the autonomy of human person and individual rights. Arbitrary introduction by states of restrictions on human rights and freedoms, bypassing international law, and in particular ignoring the recommendations of the World Health Organization, a specialized international body authorized to ensure public health at the global level, undermines the international legal order and creates additional difficulties in the fight against the pandemic. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the study substantiated the criteria for restricting human rights and freedoms in the face of a global threat to public health in a pandemic. Such restrictions must be proportionate to the threat and scientifically justified. When introducing restrictions, arbitrariness or discrimination is excluded;restrictions must be limited in time and must not prejudice the democratic functioning of society. The practical significance of the study is that significant contradictions were identified between the proper (formal) procedure for restricting human rights and freedoms established by international law and the actual practice of subjects of international law. Overcoming these contradictions is possible only through strict observance of the norms and principles of international law. Significant changes in the political and legal essence of the modern state are revealed. The model of the state that developed in the Modern Times is undergoing a major transformation: the concept of a social contract based on the limitation of state power in the interests of the individual is increasingly giving way to the unlimited right of state intervention in private life.

Philosophical Management of Stress based on Science and Epicurean Pragmatism: A Pilot Study

In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we created and implemented from November 2020 to February 2021 a monthly educational pilot program of philosophical management of stress based on Science, Humanism and Epicurean Pragmatism, which was offered to employees of 26 municipalities in the Prefecture of Attica, Greece. The program named "Philosophical Distress Management Operation System” (Philo.Di.M.O.S.) is novel and unique in its kind, as it combines a certain Greek philosophical tradition (Epicurean) that concurs with modern scientific knowledge. The program was designed to be implemented in a period of crisis;therefore, it used a fast-paced, easy to learn and practice philosophical approach to stress management, based on cognitive psychotherapy. The philosophical approach to stress management has the advantage that it can be offered to most people, regardless of age and educational level. The pilot program was effective in achieving its objectives, shown by statistical comparisons of the trainees' responses to anonymous questionnaires before and after the month-long training. The successful Philo.Di.M.O.S. program, thus, based on a solid scientific and philosophical basis, offers a paradigm of stress management during crises and could be useful in Greece and internationally. © 2022, Christos Yapijakis, Evangelos Protopapadakis, George P. Chrousos.

Digital Humanism and a Quantitative Analysis of Users Behavior in Virtual Exhibitions during the Pandemic Context

The paper highlights the importance of promoting and valorizing cultural heritage collections from cultural institutions, such as art galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, using the most recent I&CTs (Information and Communication Technologies), as well as identifying behavior patterns of visitors inside virtual exhibitions in order to provide them personalized content. The paper's objective is to highlight the influence of modern I&CTs in the cultural field, and the advantages provided by new tools, such as virtual exhibitions, in accessing, promoting, and valorizing cultural collections, especially in pandemic situations. Digital transformation is happening not only in cultural institutions but also in human beings. The concept of Digital Humanism is very popular and developed together with the COVID-19 pandemic evolution. © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Neo-humanism and COVID-19: Opportunities for a socially and environmentally sustainable world.

A series of crises, culminating with COVID-19, shows that going "Beyond GDP" is urgently necessary. Social and environmental degradation are consequences of emphasizing GDP as a measure of progress. This degradation created the conditions for the COVID-19 pandemic and limited the efficacy of counter-measures. Additionally, rich countries did not fare much better during the pandemic than poor ones. COVID-19 thrived on inequalities and lack of cooperation. In this article, we leverage on defensive growth theory to explain the relationships between these factors, and we put forward the idea of neo-humanism, a cultural movement grounded on evidence from quality-of-life studies. The movement proposes a new culture leading towards a socially and environmentally sustainable future. Specifically, neo-humanism suggests that prioritizing well-being by, for instance promoting social relations, would benefit the environment, and enable collective action to address public issues. This, in turn, would positively affect productivity and health - among other behavioral outcomes - and thereby instill a virtuous cycle. Such a society would have been better endowed to cope with COVID-19, and possibly even prevented the pandemic. Neo-humanism proposes a world in which the well-being of people comes before the well-being of markets, in which promoting cooperation and social relations represents the starting point for better lives, and a peaceful and respectful coexistence with other species on Earth.

Pedagogy and new humanism at the time of Covid

Schools, society as a whole, have been deeply affected by the emergence of Covid19. The shift to distance teaching and learning has exacerbated many pre-existing vulnerabilities and inequalities in education systems. This paper argues for the urgency for school systems to accept new challenges in training, organising inclusive environments towards the promotion of collective social and critical capacities, in synergy with the digital within a school that broadens its horizons, its classrooms, capable of bringing in human riches, assuming the richness of the student as a unique and unrepeatable subject who develops thanks to the relationship with the other, capable of transformative resilience, which looks at the human becoming by virtue of the encounters of places, including virtual ones, that are experienced in the course of life. A school pervaded by a new humanism, the only true wealth. © HEAd 2022. All Rights Reserved.

The Biopolitical Turn of the Post-Covid World: Leftist and Neoliberal Insights of Puzzling Biopolitics

As the 21st century became shaped by the matters of public health, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed that it is a trap to believe that we have to choose between the medicalisation of politics and the politicisation of medicine. My thesis is that models of good governance in the post-pandemic world must be shaped by leftist principles, values and practices, in order to ensure not the reopening, but the reconstruction of public life, which needs more than ever overcoming social inequalities and political polarisations, whereas liberal principles should be implemented in order to fix standards of economic performance and efficiency after applying mechanism of recovery. Governments as well as electoral spheres are reticent to biopolitical incursions, historically associated with panoptic systems. I claim that it is time to plead for positivising biopolitics as political humanism. My research will expose twelve themes for disseminating biopolitics as political humanism, focused on sensitive key-domains such as labour, social cohesion, security, infodemia, domestic life and good governance.

Personal Journey through Memory in Ukraine (Letter to the Editor)

The images of destruction in Ukrainian cities that we continue to see on television every day, and the dramatic reports done by journalists, reminded me of a visit I made to that tormented country more than 20 years ago that I want to share with this brief note. In particularly, I remember taking part in a series of meetings with Ukrainian colleagues in two cities, Lviv and Kiev as part of an initiative promoted by the Vicariate of Rome, in the person of His Excellency Monsignor Lorenzo Leuzzi which involved professors from the Catholic University such as myself, and from the University of Tor Vergata both from Roma, Italy. Obviously, colleagues from the University of Lviv participated, and Prof. Krcmery was also present representing at that time the University of Trnava, Slovakia. The title of the conference was 'Humanism in Medicine'. The meetings were held on the occasion of the apostolic visit of Pope St. John Paul II which took place in June 2001. I still have vivid memories of that unforgettable trip and the meetings I had with Ukrainian colleagues. The topics either dealt with the ethical and scientific aspects of responsible childbirth, the use of stem cells in medicine and theology, the ethical aspects of human genetics and lastly, medical culture as an opportunity for teaching humanism. Indeed, I was a speaker in this last session (see photo). I also enclose both the bilingual program, in English and Ukrainian, with the complete list of speakers and the poster advertising the event. The opening prayer was given by His Eminence Cardinal Harchbishop Marian Yavorsky.

Leaving home: Safer spaces beyond the neoliberal family

The instruction to #StayHomeStaySafe during the Covid crisis was for many women and girls as much a threat to life as the virus itself. Domestic violence not only escalated during lockdown but the routes to safety that many had come to rely on were no longer available. This chapter argues that the rupture created by Covid-19 offers a space in which we can radically re-evaluate how we understand the relationship between gender, violence and concepts like 'home' and 'family'. Taking a critical posthumanist approach, Debra Benita Shaw proposes that we need to take into account the symbiotic relationship between bodies and architecture and how the objects that we interact with in everyday life enable a perpetuation of ontological ideals. In this way, she suggests, we can begin to formulate a radical critique of the social structures that make a place for gender based violence to exist. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)