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To Affirm Difference or To Deny Distinction? The Competing Canons of Equality Law
No full textWhat are the global canons of constitutional equality analysis? Many scholars would say that there are none. National courts cannot seem to agree on whether the guarantee is formal or substantive, intersectional or discrete, open-ended or strictly textual. This Article takes a different tact. There are two budding strands of equality law reasoning: the categorical canons and the difference canons. The former prohibit pernicious distinctions in the law, while the latter affirm individual difference. The difference canons are the more cogent of the two. Categorical equality reasoning leads to underinclusive protection that is discordant with the actual experience of discrimination. Meanwhile, difference equality reasoning quashes budding social inequities before they fester into pernicious “isms.” Categorical courts thus ought to take a page from the difference canons
"Plasticane": Materially combining sugarcane and plastic to trace legacies of extraction and exploitation into the present to help imagine a livable future
No full textQuantifying the Association Between Family Homelessness and School Absence in Wales, UK
No full textUsing administrative data linkage, this paper sought to quantify the impacts of family homelessness on pupil absence from school. It addresses a gap in United Kingdom (UK) homelessness research, which draws predominantly on qualitative methods and where there is a greater focus on people who fall outside of the statutory system, i.e., single people living on the streets, rather than families. Education records for the academic years 2012/13 to 2015/16 relating to pupils aged 5 to 15 years old living in a coastal city in Wales, UK, were linked to data on households assessed by the statutory housing service operating across the same region. Analysis of mean half-day sessions absent from school, and Poisson panel regression were used to explore associations between absenteeism (authorised, unauthorised, and total), and whether pupils were living in a household making a statutory homelessness application, i.e., experiencing family homelessness. On average, in any given academic year, pupils experiencing family homelessness (PEFH) missed 5 days more of school than pupils not experiencing family homelessness (PnEFH). Adjusted regression analysis found that the rate of total absence was 7% higher amongst PEFH compared to PnEFH, whilst for unauthorised absence it was 13% higher. When a student experienced family homelessness, this led to an increase in their rate of total absences by 5%—adjusting for other factors—compared to when they were not homeless. Findings have implications for statutory education and housing provision, specifically the need for greater cross-disciplinary working to prevent and alleviate the harms caused when families experience homelessness
Articles, software, data: An Open Science ethological study
No full textBackground. Open Science seeks to render research outputs visible, accessible, reusable. The Open Science framework is currently evolving vigorously due, among others reasons, to the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation adopted in November 2021. In this context, it is relevant to better visualize and describe the relationships that hold among the direct protagonists of this changing landscape: research teams and their research outputs, namely: articles, software and data, as their comprehension will certainly contribute to foster better Open Science practices.Method. In this work we review and describe, through the information collected in a large number of bibliographic references, the current changing trends involving some essential, defining, characteristics and behaviors of the main components of the scientific production, namely, research teams and three kinds of research outputs they produce in many scientific areas. This comparative study is based, among others, in our recent work on the evolving concepts of research software, research data in the context of Open Science.Results. In this work we observe and document some key features in this evolving landscape such as the changing and extended roles of research team members; the need to develop a new citing and referencing culture for articles, but specially for research software and data; the rising relevance of open access (to publications, software, data) policies all over the world; the existence of some barriers and difficulties like the regulations concerning academic research close to industry, or other technological applications; the need to develop standards for the “right to be forgotten”; the need to consider the impact of Open Science costs for less favored communities, countries, institutions...Conclusions. This calls for the urgent need to observe and depict further this changing Open Science ecosystem, and to propose –as we have partially attempted in this work– new concepts to analyze this context as well as to contribute to ongoing research-on-research and to improve the implementation of Open Science practices, in order to foster better ways towards a sound, inclusive and fairer Open Science landscape
Editor's Corner December 2023
No full textThis issue has an article in a new publication format, namely HTML exported from a Jupyter Notebook using a Maple kernel. This issue also is the first to execute our new policy, which is to publish articles more nearly "as they come in" instead of waiting for everyone. The publication date is still a little late (first week of January 2024 instead of the final week of December 2023), and other papers may be added to this issue. But we wanted to get the papers that are ready, published
A New Dawn for Canadian Platform Workers? : Evaluating The Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act 2022
No full textIn December 2021, the Ontario government passed into law Bill 88, the Working for Workers Act, 2022. Among other developments, the Working for Workers Act, 2022 introduced the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, 2022 (the “Act”), establishing a number of rights for platform workers. This Article is a brief, non-exhaustive evaluation of the provisions of the Act, with particular emphasis on how it impacts the salient issues associated with the regulation of platform work. This Article concludes that, notwithstanding its limitations, the Act is a major step in the right direction towards effective regulation of the working conditions for platform workers
Plastic Like Jellyfish: Getting Intimate with Large and Small Scales of Being in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
No full textRuth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being considers bullying at different scales—from individual experience to international and interspecies relations. I will study how the novel portrays the great Pacific garbage patch in order to attend to waste—as bullied and rejected matter—and to further an ethics of entanglement where we are always in the process of being constituted through what we might want to reject. Entanglement is hard to conceptualize at a human scale because it largely exceeds its scope. I argue that this novel functions as a discursive instrument by which immense and minuscule scales of being—from the thousands of years it can take for plastic to biodegrade to the few months a jellyfish is expected to live—can be engaged with from the narrative’s human scale. This engagement allows readers to cultivate intimacy with and responsibility for what exceeds them rather than participating in a culture of bullying. I conclude by exploring the alternatives that the novel proposes to bullying which are the Zen Buddhist principle of not-knowing as well as practices of mourning for human and more-than-human losses
Flotsam and Jetsam.: A Beachwalk.
No full textThe time-based piece “Flotsam and Jetsam” is a stop-motion video that refers to a beach walk and shows hundreds of collected Plastic pieces at different paces floating, appearing and disappearing on the screen. The title refers to 17th-century sailing terminology for materials or goods floating on the water after wreckage or released to lighten a sinking ship. These terms reflect on the found plastic objects and their appearance as floating and stranded goods, the aftermath of the streams of consumer goods discharged into our oceans, disappearing into an unknown future calling out SOS into the world of petrocaptialism. The viewer is invited to discover plastic garbage metamorphosing during the process of stop-motion animation into mysterious forms but also familiar objects passing by. Through different paces, the found objects appear as uncanny, artificial creatures, haunting us and our entanglement with plastic.
https://vimeo.com/82698103
Contraception Access in Global Health Policies and Programs: A Critical Analysis of Sustainable Development Goal 3.7
No full text'No Long Shadows'
No full text‘No Long Shadows’ is a parafiction project developed between 2018 and 2020, made up of 4 photographic installations and an essay film. The project was built from an extensive body of research exploring historical connections between chemical science, military technology, and artistic production, with specific focus on the sordid history of the DuPont chemical company