This article contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of memory and historical justice studies by analyzing one, particularly troublesome kind of competitive comparison that sometimes happens in ...memory politics in the so-called age of apology. The article calls this kind of competitive comparison, “saming”. Saming involves the attempt, via far-fetched or otherwise wrongheaded comparison, to exploit the recognition of some well-known case of historical injustice. Further, saming involves pursuing this comparison in ways that both trivialize the original injustice and undermine the framework from which the recognition of that injustice derives. The article develops its arguments and analysis by studying Budapest’s House of Terror museum and two Canadian redress campaigns, which sought historical recognition for the wartime internments of persons of Italian and Ukrainian ancestry, respectively. Saming is a recurrent problem, ubiquitous and probably inevitable in memory politics because the recognition of historical injustice brings with it unavoidable and indeed often valuable incentives to comparison. Thus, the overall aim of this article is to analyze the threat of saming in order to better defend the cause of comparison in introspective collective remembrance.
Intraflagellar transport (IFT) proteins are well established as conserved mediators of flagellum/cilium assembly and disassembly. However, data has begun to accumulate in support of IFT protein ...involvement in other processes elsewhere in the cell. Here, we used synchronous cultures of Chlamydomonas to investigate the temporal patterns of accumulation and localization of IFT proteins during the cell cycle. Their mRNAs showed periodic expression that peaked during S and M phase (S/M). Unlike most proteins that are synthesized continuously during G1 phase, IFT27 and IFT46 levels were found to increase only during S/M phase. During cell division, IFT27, IFT46, IFT72, and IFT139 re-localized from the flagella and basal bodies to the cleavage furrow. IFT27 was further shown to be associated with membrane vesicles in this region. This localization pattern suggests a role for IFT in cell division.
Comparisons of survival between dialysis and nondialysis care for older adults with kidney failure have been limited to those managed by nephrologists, and are vulnerable to lead and immortal time ...biases. So we compared time to all-cause mortality among older adults with kidney failure treated vs. not treated with chronic dialysis. Our retrospective cohort study used linked administrative and laboratory data to identify adults aged 65 or more years of age in Alberta, Canada, with kidney failure (2002-2012), defined by two or more consecutive outpatient estimated glomerular filtration rates less than 10 mL/min/1.73m2, spanning 90 or more days. We used marginal structural Cox models to assess the association between receipt of dialysis and all-cause mortality by allowing control for both time-varying and baseline confounders. Overall, 838 patients met inclusion criteria (mean age 79.1; 48.6% male; mean estimated glomerular filtration rate 7.8 mL/min/1.73m2). Dialysis treatment (vs. no dialysis) was associated with a significantly lower risk of death for the first three years of follow-up (hazard ratio 0.59 95% confidence interval 0.46-0.77), but not thereafter (1.22 0.69-2.17). However, dialysis was associated with a significantly higher risk of hospitalization (1.40 1.16-1.69). Thus, among older adults with kidney failure, treatment with dialysis was associated with longer survival up to three years after reaching kidney failure, though with a higher risk of hospital admissions. These findings may assist shared decision-making about treatment of kidney failure.
This article addresses the historical justice dilemma: although critical memory is indispensable for accountability, efforts to use it are often hampered by the unjust relations and systems that ...caused the wrongs to which historical justice is compelled to respond in the first place. Contemporary authors tackle this problem by focusing on collective responsibility for structural injustice. This article takes a different tack. Studying closely the 2009–2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report, it argues that the structural turn may come at the expense of a focus on agency and may thus provide unwitting anonymity for wrongdoers while crimping our thinking about leadership and responsibility. Although this article strongly criticizes the TRC report, it tries to work constructively with it, developing an analysis that compensates for the report's unwitting invisibilization of perpetrators. Distilling portraits and analyses of wrongdoer agency that are latent in the TRC's postwar history volume, this article shows how we can develop the report as a resource of what I call retributive social accountability.
Once associated with the civic claims-making of feminists, antiracists, and LGBTQ2SIA+ activists, the Charter has found new life as a favoured symbol of far-right anti-lockdown protestors and ...conservative religious freedom advocates. This article argues that the political significance and sources of this apparent transformation go beyond the formal world of Charter challenges and jurisprudence on which Canadian political science Charter scholarship tends to focus. Instead, the article highlights the possible weakening of the postwar "never again " memory culture that made entrenching human rights seem a necessary response to Nazi genocide and an antidote to authoritarian backsliding at home. This memory culture is now a target of authoritarian and far-right actors, who resent the so-called age of apology and its emphasis on historical regret, and who appear to be bringing more truculent and less introspective understandings of rights and freedoms to Canadian Charter discourse. This far-right assault on the age of apology also coincides with a general trend of right-wing Charter warming among parliamentary Conservatives, who seem now to share a relatively unburdened and sometimes quite aggressive understanding of the exercise of constitutional rights. Above all, the article argues that we need to treat the historical consciousness and memory lessons that actors bring to their Charter invocations seriously --as a vital but often unnoticed everyday constitutionalism that revolves around what the article calls the mnemonics of rights.
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools is a novel foray into a genre previously associated with so-called “transitional” democracies from the post-Communist ...world and the global South. This basic fact notwithstanding, a systematic comparison with the broader universe of truth commission-hosting countries reveals that the circumstances surrounding the Canadian TRC are not entirely novel. This article develops this argument by distilling from the transitional justice literature several bases of comparison designed to explain how a truth commission’s capacity to promote new cultures of justice and accountability in the wake of massive violations of human rights is affected by the socio-political context in which the commission occurs; the injustices it is asked to investigate; and the nature of its mandate. It concludes that these factors, compounded by considerations unique to the Canadian context, all militate against success. If Canadian citizens and policymakers fail to meet this profound ethical challenge, they will find themselves occupying the transition-wrecking role played more familiarly by the recalcitrant and unreformed military and security forces in the world’s more evidently authoritarian states.
Against Legitimacy James, Matt
Les ateliers de l'éthique,
04/2012, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Francis Dupuis-Déri confronts the domestication of radical ideas in his superb and stimulating essay, “Global Protestors Versus Global Elites: Are Direct Action and Deliberative Politics ...Compatible?”, and leads to the intriguing claim that the legitimacy of radical anti-capitalist protest rests ultimately on its internally deliberative quality. This account, however compelling as it stands in many ways, seems to give undue predominance to legitimacy claims. The problem of democracy and global capitalism today is that the global justice movement’s designated constituency does not exist as an actor, for the simple reason that the majority of its putative members have yet to accept the problem forwarded by the global justice movement. People must be convinced to join movements against corporate control, democratic weakening, and income inequality ; fortifying legitimacy among the already committed does not seem to be helping.
PDF
