Entangling Reciprocity With the Relational in Narrative Inquiry.

In this article, we develop, through drawing forward fragments of our experiences, a concept of reciprocity as always situated within the relational ontology of narrative inquiry. Reciprocity is most commonly understood within a transactional sense, an exchange of goods. We show important aspects of reciprocity in narrative inquiry, including the importance of intentionally creating and responding to spaces where reciprocity occurs and can be sustained over time and place, and the potential reciprocity holds to change who we, and those with whom we work, are. As we reconsider the ways in which reciprocity is not understood as a transaction in a relational methodology, new questions about the entanglement of reciprocity and recognition emerge. We understand that recognition does not necessarily have to be reciprocal, but recognition is necessary to compose a space where reciprocity can live in our ordinary interactions with others.

Corrigendum: Studying Brains. What could neurometaphysics be to NeurotechEU?

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1155547.].

Studying brains what could neurometaphysics be to NeurotechEU?

NeurotechEU has introduced a new conceptual hierarchy for neuroscientific research and its applications along 8 different core research areas, including the so-called 'neurometaphysics'. This paper explores this concept of neurometaphysics, its topics and its potential approach. It warns against an endemic Cartesianism in (neuro)science that somehow seems to survive explicit refutations by implicitly persisting in our conceptual scheme. Two consequences of this persisting Cartesian legacy are discussed; the isolated brain assumption and the idea that activity requires identifiable neural 'decisions'. Neuropragmatism is introduced as offering the promise of progress in neurometaphysics, by emphasizing that (1) studying brains interact organically with their environment and (2) studying brains requires an attitude of continuous learning.

Inteligência artificial e saúde: ressituar o problema / Artificial intelligence and health: resituating the problem / Inteligencia artificial y salud: reubicar el problema

Diante dos avanços recentes da inteligência artificial, a presente nota de conjuntura busca recolocar questões fundamentais que emergem nesse contexto. Deslocando-se tanto das leituras salvacionistas quanto apocalípticas, argumentamos que a perda do privilégio do excepcionalismo humano pode ser uma oportunidade para repensar a inteligência a partir de uma perspectiva relacional e co-produzida entre humanos e outros-que-humanos. Tal perspectiva, no entanto, deve ser acompanhada de um olhar atento às relações de poder que em grande medida definem os destinos da IA. Sobre esse aspecto, apontamos as implicações do modelo epistêmico e de negócios hegemônico da IA, um modelo preditivo-aceleracionista dominado por grandes empresas de tecnologia. Finalmente, destacamos alguns riscos envolvidos na inclusão de máquinas inteligentes no campo da saúde, bem como os perigos da subordinação de valores e direitos públicos a interesses comerciais, o que demanda uma atenção e um cuidado coletivos e permanentes na construção dos arranjos sociotécnicos e políticos de implementação da IA nesse campo

In the face of artificial intelligence recent advances, this note seeks to reassess fundamental questions that emerge in this context. Moving away from both salvationist and apocalyptic readings, we argue that the human exceptionalism privilege loss can be an opportunity to rethink intelligence from a relational and co-produced perspective between humans and other-than-humans. Such an angle, however, must be accompanied by a careful examination of the power relations that largely define the fate of AI. On this aspect, we reflect on the implications of the hegemonic epistemic and business model of AI, a predictive accelerationist one dominated by large technology companies. Lastly, we highlight the risks involved in the inclusion of intelligent machines in the fields of health and care, as well as the dangers of subordinating public values and rights to commercial interests, which demands attentive, collective and permanent care in the construction of sociotechnical and political arrangements for the implementation of AI in this field.

Ante los recientes avances de la inteligencia artificial, el presente informe busca plantear cuestiones fundamentales que surgen en este contexto. Alejándose tanto de las lecturas salvacionistas como apocalípticas, argumentamos que la pérdida del privilegio del excepcionalismo humano puede ser una oportunidad para repensar la inteligencia desde una perspectiva relacional y co-producida entre humanos y otros-que-humanos. Sin embargo, tal perspectiva debe ir acompañada de una mirada atenta a las relaciones de poder que en gran medida definen el destino de la IA. En este aspecto, señalamos las implicaciones del modelo epistémico y de negocios hegemónico de la IA, un modelo predictivo-aceleracionista dominado por grandes empresas tecnológicas. Por último, destacamos algunos riesgos de la inclusión de máquinas inteligentes en el campo de la salud, así como los peligros de subordinar valores y derechos públicos a intereses comerciales, lo cual requiere una atención y un cuidado colectivos y permanentes en la construcción de los ensamblajes sociotécnicos y políticos de implementación de la IA en este campo

The relational ontology of mobile touchscreens and the body: Ambient proprioception and risk during COVID-19.

In this article, we explore the tension between the significance of touch as a vital sensory modality of human experience and how, with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, proximity and (tactile) intimacy with other bodies in urban and domestic spaces becomes fraught with the risk of viral contagion. Informed by haptic media studies, the corporeal or sensory turn in contemporary theory, and phenomenology-informed mobile media studies, we examine the possible impacts for mobile device use of the risks of viral contagion associated with our routinized uses of haptic interfaces. We also examine the role and possibility of mobile haptics and the touchscreen in these contexts, and our capacity-via embodied and material metaphor-to extend corporeal reach through the mobile interface. Our contention is that, while the "stand in" for touch that mobile media offers may be perpetually incomplete, the "as-if" structure of habitual experience can play a significant role in narrowing the sensorial gap.

Relating to foetal persons: why women's Voices come first and last, but not alone in Abortion debates.

Abortion remains a controversial topic, with pro-life and pro-choice advocates clashing fiercely. However, public polling demonstrates that the vast majority of the Western public holds a middle position: being in favour of abortion but not in all circumstances nor at any time. The intuitions held by the majority seem to imply a contradiction: two early foetuses at the same point in development have different moral statuses. Providing coherent philosophical grounding for this intuition has proved challenging. Solutions given by philosophers such as Feinberg, Harman and Räsänen are complex and do not fully account for the lived experience of pregnancy loss. This article argues for a relational ontological construction of human personhood as the basis of foetal personhood. This approach takes seriously the literature of pregnancy loss and the lived experiences of pregnant persons. Focusing on the manner in which persons relate to early foetuses (especially pregnant persons), provides a coherent ground for distinct foetal value. Importantly, this approach is both simple and intuitive. Therefore, it can be more easily adopted by middle. To counter an implied equality of human relationality, the article argues for a clear hierarchy based on relational proximity that affirms pregnant persons? primary role in deciding the moral significance of foetal termination.

Challenges facing the clinical adoption of a new prognostic biomarker: a case study.

In this article, we show how a particular biomarker comes into being in an emergency department in a hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark. We explore the contextual becoming of this biomarker, suPAR, through interviews with nurses and physicians and through relational ontology. We find that as a prognostic biomarker suPAR is challenged in it becoming as an object for clinical practice in the emergency department by the power of diagnostic practices and the desire for experience-based scripts that quickly enable the clinician to reach the right diagnosis. Although suPAR is enacted as a promising triage strategy suggesting a low or high risk of disease, the inability to rule out specific diagnoses and producing the notion of secure clinical actions make its non-specificity and prognostic character problematic in clinical practices. Specific diagnostic criteria versus prognostic interpretation and non-specificity risk profiling challenges the way healthcare workers in an emergency department understand the tasks they are set to solve and how to solve them. We discuss how the becoming of suPAR is strengthened through enactments of specificity and engagement in triage strategies and we reflect on it's becoming through new diagnostic practices with the need to accommodate diagnostic ambiguity.

The work of conflict mediation: Actors, vectors, and communicative relationality.

Mediation is a widely used form of third-party conflict management for which research has primarily focused on the role of mediators. But how are the relations between disputing parties constituted in communication involving written texts, such as official letters or medical reports, during mediation sessions? To gain deeper insight into the communicative dynamics through which third-party disputes are created, sustained, and resolved, this article proposes a new theoretical perspective on mediation that illuminates how human beings and written texts can act as vectors for each other, i.e., how they can make important differences in mediation sessions because they carry or convey what someone or something else is saying, doing, thinking, or feeling and, thus, contribute to composing the nature of disputants' relations. The value of this vectorial perspective on mediation is subsequently demonstrated through an inductive analysis of video-recorded sessions that took place at an administrative tribunal in Canada. By showing how texts (or their absence) can act as (1) conjunctive vectors that contribute to highlighting disputants' compatibilities and help them find common ground, or (2) disjunctive vectors that contribute to highlighting their incompatibilities and obstruct their dispute resolution, this article advances the academic and professional literature on the role of communication in conflict mediation work, and reveals significant implications for the study and practice of conflict management in organizations as well as scholarship on relational ontologies.

Ecologies of Repair: A Post-human Approach to Other-Than-Human Natures.

This conceptual paper explores the theoretical possibilities of posthumanism and presents ecologies of repair as a heuristic device to explore the association modes of different entities, which, when confronted with the effects of human-induced destructive events, seek to repair the damage and transform the conditions of coexistence of various life forms. The central idea is that severe socio-environmental crisis caused by an intensification of industrial activity are conducive to observing new sociomaterial configurations and affective dispositions that, through the reorganization of practices of resistance, remediation, and mutual care, are oriented to generating reparative and/or transformative processes from damaged ecologies and communities. Crises constitute true ontological experimentation processes where the presence of other-than-human natures, and of artifacts or devices that participate in reparative actions, become visible. A post-human approach to nature allows us to use languages and methodologies that do not restrict the emergence of assemblages under the assumption of their a priori ontological separation, but rather examine their reparative potential based on the efficacy of situated relationships. Methodologically, transdisciplinarity is relevant, with ethnography and other engaged methods applied over units of observation and experience called socio-geo-ecologies. The relevant attributes of these socio-geo-ecologies, beyond the individual, community, or institutional aspects, are the specific geological characteristics that make possible an entanglement of interdependent relationships between human and non-human agents. The conceptual analysis is illustrated with empirical examples stemming from socio-geo-ecologies researched in Southern Chile.

Assembling and diversifying social contexts of recovery.

Recovery from drug use is receiving increased attention in critical drug studies. Researchers point out the importance of scrutinizing the term and its meanings anew in order to better understand drug use treatment policies and their effects on the individuals they target. Informed by relational ontological thinking, this article analyses a series of empirical accounts of recovery experiences, and offers a critical assessment of the social contexts of recovery. Qualitative data collected in Azerbaijan and Germany provide distinctive reports of the differentiated experiences of youth as they make and re-make sense of their recovery within specific recovery contexts. Discussions reveal how recovery advances in relations between human and nonhuman actors including spaces, bodies, affects, and practices. On the basis of this analysis, we argue that recovery may be framed as an emergent and dynamic context that becomes with and from drug use.

Relational Dependence in a Culture of Self-Creation: A Theological Query into the Health of the Medical World.

Half of the medical professionals in the United States are experiencing symptoms of burnout. From the perspective of theological anthropology, this dehumanizing aspect of the field is not reducible to ethical failures, for it is rooted in the radically new worldview known as self-creation. As an implicit denial of Christian understanding of creation, self-creation entails a rejection of relationality and dependence-both proper to the Revelation of Jesus Christ. This article proposes that this lost Christian patrimony is intimately connected to the increasingly unhealthy dependence we place upon modern medicine. Relying on theologian Joseph Ratzinger, we will come to see that a recovery of relational dependence is not only necessary for the salvation of man-but the very health of the medical world at large.

Caring for data: Value creation in a data-intensive research laboratory.

Drawing upon ethnographic observations of staff working within a research laboratory built around research and clinical data from twins, this article analyzes practices underlying the production and maintenance of a research database. While critical data studies have discussed different forms of 'data work' through which data are produced and turned into effective research resources, in this paper we foreground a specific form of data work, namely the affective and attentive relationships that humans build with data. Building on STS and feminist scholarship that highlights the importance of care in scientific work, we capture this specific form of data work as care. Treating data as relational entities, we discuss a set of caring practices that staff employ to produce and maintain their data, as well as the hierarchical and institutional arrangements within which these caring practices take place. We show that through acts of caring, that is, through affective and attentive engagements, researchers build long-term relationships with the data they help produce, and feel responsible for its flourishing and growth. At the same time, these practices of care - which we found to be gendered and valued differently from other practices within formal and informal reward systems - help to make data valuable for the institution. In this manner, care for data is an important practice of valuation and valorisation within data-intensive research that has so far received little explicit attention in scholarship and professional research practice.

Co-emergence and Collapse: The Mesoscopic Approach for Conceptualizing and Investigating the Functional Integration of Organisms.

The fall of reductionist approaches to explanation leaves biology with an unescapable challenge: how to decipher complex systems. This entails a number of very critical questions, the most basic ones being: "What do we mean by 'complex'?" and "What is the system we should look for?" In complex systems, constraints belong to a higher level that the molecular one and their effect reduces and constrains the manifold of the accessible internal states of the system itself. Function is related but not deterministically imposed by the underlying structure. It is quite unlikely that such kind of complexity could be grasped by current approaches focusing on a single organization scale. The natural co-emergence of systems, parts and properties can be adopted as a hypothesis-free conceptual framework to understand functional integration of organisms, including their hierarchical or multilevel patterns, and including the way scientific practice proceeds in approaching such complexity. External, "driving" factors - order parameters and control parameters provided by the surrounding microenvironment - are always required to "push" the components' fate into well-defined developmental directions. In the negative, we see that in pathological processes such as cancer, organizational fluidity, collapse of levels and dynamic heterogeneity make it hard to even find a level of observation for a stable explanandum to persist in scientific practice. Parts and the system both lose their properties once the system is destabilized. The mesoscopic approach is our proposal to conceptualizing, investigating and explaining in biology. "Mesoscopic way of thinking" is increasingly popular in the epistemology of biology and corresponds to looking for an explanation (and possibly a prediction) where "non-trivial determinism is maximal": the "most microscopic" level of organization is not necessarily the place where "the most relevant facts do happen." A fundamental re-thinking of the concept of causality is also due for order parameters to be carefully and correctly identified. In the biological realm, entities have relational properties only, as they depend ontologically on the context they happen to be in. The basic idea of a relational ontology is that, in our inventory of the world, relations are somehow prior to the relata (i.e., entities).

Thinking about Later Life: Insights from the Capability Approach.

A major criticism of mainstream gerontological frameworks is the inability of such frameworks to appreciate and incorporate issues of diversity and difference in engaging with experiences of aging. Given the prevailing socially structured nature of inequalities, such differences matter greatly in shaping experiences, as well as social constructions, of aging. I argue that Amartya Sen's capability approach (2009) potentially offers gerontological scholars a broad conceptual framework that places at its core consideration of human beings (their values) and centrality of human diversity. As well as identifying these key features of the capability approach, I discuss and demonstrate their relevance to thinking about old age and aging. I maintain that in the context of complex and emerging identities in later life that shape and are shaped by shifting people-place and people-people relationships, Sen's capability approach offers significant possibilities for gerontological research.

Conceptual Challenges in the Theoretical Foundations of Systems Biology.

In the last decade, Systems Biology has emerged as a conceptual and explanatory alternative to reductionist-based approaches in molecular biology. However, the foundations of this new discipline need to be fleshed out more carefully. In this paper, we claim that a relational ontology is a necessary tool to ground both the conceptual and explanatory aspects of Systems Biology. A relational ontology holds that relations are prior-both conceptually and explanatory-to entities, and that in the biological realm entities are defined primarily by the context they are embedded within-and hence by the web of relations they are part of.

Presupuestos ontológicos para la declaración universal de los derechos de la madre tierra / Ontoloical assummptions for the universal declaration of the mother earth'srrights

El Buen Vivir es una utopía que surge en Latinoamérica inspirada en las racionalidades de los pueblos indígenas, campesinos y afro del subcontinente la cual, a contracorriente de los discursos hegemónicos, está teniendo una enorme influencia en las discusiones mundiales sobre la gran crisis civilizatoria. Específicamente, en el presente artículo analizamos el proyecto de declaración universal de los derechos de la Madre Tierra, considerando las bases ontológicas que le dan sustento. El objetivo es comprender la pregunta que interroga por el sentido del ser a través de respuestas en torno a la relacionalidad con el todo, así como discutir la relevancia de considerar estas ontologías en un momento de la historia en donde nos estamos cuestionando por la continuidad de la vida humana en el planeta.

The "Buen Vivir" is a utopia that arises in Latin America inspired by the rationalities of indigenous peoples, peasants and afro-descendant people of the subcontinent which, against the current hegemonic discourses, is having a huge influence in global discussions about the civilization crisis. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the universal declaration of Mother Earth's rights draft , considering the ontological foundations that support it. The aim is to understand the question asks about the sense of being through answers around the relationality to the whole, as well as to discuss the relevance of considering these ontological assumptions in a moment of history in which we are challenged by the continuity of human life on the planet.