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Ideas, in Motion:Twenty-five Years of Rethinking Relations and Knowledge at the COI
No full textThe Center on Organizational Innovation (COI) at Columbia University celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, and this essay reviews this quarter of a century of conceptual and methodological innovations at COI in the area of networks, communication, and knowledge. The content of these concepts has changed markedly, partly due to advances within interdisciplinary encounters, and partly due to fundamental changes in underlying social phenomena. COI scholars strived to understand such novel phenomena by methodological innovation with conceptual richness, engaging with temptations to adopt simplistic and atavistic imageries of sociation and agency in interdisciplinary fields. The fields of network science, knowledge networks, and online communications are three areas where COI research brought novel insights, that challenged dominant perspectives, marrying an ethnographer’s mindset with a broad range of quantitative methods. In addition to reviewing COI research achievements, I also outline key contemporary empirical puzzles, where perspectives from COI remain relevant and fruitful
Procreative Liability and Equality before the Law
No full textPallikkathayil argues that restrictions on abortion are inconsistent with the usual demands that states place on their citizens. States don't require their citizens to make their bodies available for the protection of other people's interests. Yet, when abortion is restricted, women who can be pregnant are less entitled than other citizens to decide on how their bodies are to be used; then, states fail to treat women as equal before the law. The argument is supposed to hold even if one assumes that fetuses at various stages of development are as morally considerable as (already born) children, and even if, moreover, fetuses have passive citizenship status – that is, if they have claims to state protection. Pallikkathayil's argument comes at excessive theoretical costs, ruling out (a) general duties to help others in the protection of vital interests via relatively non-burdening donation, e.g. of blood, and (b) plausible although demanding special duties of procreative parents. Nevertheless, I agree with Pallikkathayil's conclusion that existing legal restrictions on abortion violate the state's duty to treat its citizens as equals, and are hence illegitimate; namely, because they fail to hold all procreators - whether or not gestational - equally liable
