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Sentience and the science-policy nexus: replies to Wandrey and Halina, and Bayne
No full textThe edge of sentience is a book about what we should do when a decision problem forces us to draw a pragmatic line between the sentient and the non‐sentient. The commentaries from Wandrey and Halina and from Bayne analyse both my precautionary framework and my claims about specific cases. My responses start with the case of large language models (LLMs), zoom out to general issues about the science–policy relationship, then zoom in again on the case of fetuses
From the intercellular to the extraterrestrial – the need for interdisciplinary spatial study
No full textThere is a critical need to reframe the future study of socio-spatial relations. Current constructs connected to specific disciplinary traditions are often constrained by one-dimensional approaches. The purpose of this article is to share and provoke new forms of socio-spatial study premised on interdisciplinary exchanges. Lefebvre proposes that to discuss space is to analyze the interactions of material environments, mentalities, and social practices. But such enquiries demand myriad analytical tools, and we contend that the study of space requires a reconfiguration of disciplinary parameters, including a willingness to reach across methodological boundaries. We offer two illustrative case studies. One understands the social inhabitation of space as something microscopic and occurring within our cells. The other uses anthropological research to understand how non-Western cultures conceptualize so-called “outer” space in relational terms. Our approach offers new perspectives on socio-spatial relations and a wider understanding of how humans interact with and within space
Crops, claims and the politics of risk in India’s agricultural insurance programme
No full textThis paper examines the dynamics of the Pradhan Mantri Faisal Bima Yojana, a state-subsidized and privately operationalized agricultural insurance programme in India. While promoters of such index-based insurance programmes maintain that it functions as a tool of income stabilization and climate adaptation for rural communities, critics argue that it facilitates the individualization of risk and erosion of social networks of support. Drawing on ethnographic research in central India, this paper instead shows that insurance produces a complex mutuality of interest that binds agriculturalists together in uneven but significant ways. In the context of increasing climatic uncertainty and declining state investment in agriculture, it is retooled into an object of political negotiation and claim-making, reshaping relations between cultivators and the state. Focusing on the specific form of index insurance, I show how it can abstract from concrete and diverse experiences of crop loss but in doing so, constructs a collective unit of risk and responsibility. Examining the constitutive tensions of the insurance form – between public and private, individual and collective – this paper draws attention to the potentiality of insurance as a fraught space of collective redress within a climate-changing Indian countryside
Decarbonising residential heating: local conditions and spatial spillovers driving heat pump uptake
No full textAir source heat pumps are the principal means of decarbonising residential heating. What drives local uptake of heat pumps? We present and examine a unique, highly disaggregated, spatial-temporal dataset for heat pump diffusion across Great Britain at the local authority level from 2010 to 2020. We find average total installed cost of 1075 £/kW and a negative learning rate of −3.3 %, with most installations in owner-occupied houses. Using spatial econometric models, we investigate how local conditions drive heat pump installations. We find early adopting local areas tend to be rural, off the gas grid, with prior use of solid fuel or oil for heating, and participate in renewable and community energy projects. Early adopting areas benefit from a combination of more readily accessible properties, low-carbon energy skills, and local supply chains. We find robust evidence of spatial spillover effects that show early adopting areas serve as deployment test beds, indirectly stimulating deployment in contiguous areas. We reason that spatial spillovers are driven by installer availability and local supply chains materialised around installation activity. We estimate for every three heat pumps installed, one heat pump is subsequently installed in a neighbouring local authority with less advantageous conditions. This implies an important policy trade-off for low-carbon heat between maximising effectiveness (incentivise early adopters) and widening equality of access (support later adopters). Concerted policy action to tackle fragmented supply chains and skills shortages which inflate installation costs of heat pumps relative to gas boilers is also urgently needed
Critical Feminist Justpeace: Grounding Theory in Grassroots Praxis. By Karie Cross Riddle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 272p
No full textEngland's two tier care system deepens social care inequalities
No full textAnders Bach-Mortensen and colleagues examine how increasing reliance on out-of-pocket payments for adult social care has created a quality divide
Capturing pregnancy recognition trajectories: a critical reflection of new quantitative measures tested in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Zambia
No full textThe experiences and timings of pregnancy recognition trajectories have significant impacts on pregnancy-related care. Understanding individuals' contextually informed trajectories is crucial to their reproductive rights and service delivery needs. While many studies take pregnancy recognition as a starting point, capturing the complexities and nuances of these trajectories has received much less attention. This paper critically reflects on new approaches to capturing pregnancy recognition trajectories in two studies conducted between 2018 and 19, one in Nigeria with women aged 18 and over (n = 394), and a three-country study with adolescents aged 10-19 in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zambia (n = 313). Pregnancy recognition trajectories were complex and involved multiple physical, material, and psychological recognition factors. Adolescents in the three-country study cited predominantly between two and four factors that led to their pregnancy recognition, with a range of one to seven factors. In the Nigerian study, 43.4% of respondents named two factors that led them to recognise they were pregnant, with a range of one to five factors. As pregnancy recognition is the starting point for many public health actions and interventions, it is imperative that future survey tools better capture this complex and poorly understood process. Our analyses suggest that questions should include response categories that capture physical, material, and psychological contributors to pregnancy recognition, including open-ended responses to capture heretofore unidentified aspects of this process. Questions on the duration of time between recognition factors would be beneficial, as well as an understanding of what factors were most important to an individual when recognising a pregnancy
