Rethinking plasticity: Analysing the concept of "destructive plasticity" in the light of neuroscience definitions.

As a multilevel and multidisciplinary field, neuroscience is designed to interact with various branches of natural and applied sciences as well as with humanities and philosophy. The continental tradition in philosophy, particularly over the past 20 years, tended to establish strong connections with biology and neuroscience findings. This cross fertilization can however be impeded by conceptual intricacies, such as those surrounding the concept of plasticity. The use of this concept has broadened as scientists applied it to explore an ever-growing range of biological phenomena. Here, we examine the consequences of this ambiguity in an interdisciplinary context through the analysis of the concept of "destructive plasticity" in the philosophical writings of Catherine Malabou. The term "destructive plasticity" was coined by Malabou in 2009 to refer to all processes leading to psycho-cognitive and emotional alterations following traumatic or nontraumatic brain injuries or resulting from neurodevelopmental disorders. By comparing it with the neuroscientific definitions of plasticity, we discuss the epistemological obstacles and possibilities related to the integration of this concept into neuroscience. Improving interdisciplinary exchanges requires an advanced and sophisticated manipulation of neurobiological concepts. These concepts are not only intended to guide research programmes within neuroscience but also to organize and frame the dialogue between different theoretical backgrounds.

The importance of rhythms for maintaining consent in diagnostic encounters to detect cervical cancer.

Diagnostic encounters can be seen as complex socio-material processes. Drawing on the new materialist ideas of Barad, we studied how an innovative technology became part of the intra-actions between different human and non-human materialities in a cervical cancer diagnostic process. While researching the development of a technology intended to improve cervical cancer detection, we carried out a series of observations of diagnostic encounters involving clinicians, patients and the device in a hospital. The intra-actions between the different materialities had rhythmic properties, repeated activities and timings that varied in intensity, for example, movements, exchanged looks, and talk that helped co-produce the diagnosis and maintain consent. Sadly, the device interfered with the rhythms, undermining the clinicians' desire to adopt it, despite it being more accurate at diagnosing ill health than previous assistive technologies. Studying rhythms as part of diagnostic encounters could help with the design and subsequent integration of novel technologies in healthcare, because they encompass relationships created by human and non-human materialities. Importantly, highlighting the role of rhythms contributes another way diagnostic encounters are co-produced between clinicians and patients, and how they can be disrupted, improving the understanding of how consent is maintained or lost.

Long-Acting Injectable Buprenorphine for Opioid Use Disorder: A Qualitative Analysis of Patients' Interpersonal Relationships during the First Year of Treatment.

Introduction: Long-acting injectable buprenorphine (LAIB) is a new treatment for opioid use disorder. Drawing upon new materialism and the concept of social capital, this article provides a focused analysis of how LAIB affects, and is affected by, patients' relationships with other people. Methods: Data derive from a longitudinal qualitative study. Twenty-six people (18 males; 8 females) initiating LAIB were recruited from England and Wales (2020/2021) and interviewed up to six times each over a year (125 interviews in total). Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded. Coded relationship data were summarized in Excel and analyzed via Iterative Categorization. Results: Core significant others who did not use substances offered participants important support with LAIB. Children and grandchildren provided motivation for LAIB, whilst other family relationships could be supportive and unsupportive. Participants wanted to avoid friends, peers and associates who might offer them substances, but valued sharing experiences with others in similar circumstances. Whilst some participants were unconcerned when treatment staff did not contact them, others were angry and upset. Those who did not continue LAIB or were lost from the study were more isolated at recruitment. Meanwhile, participants who remained on LAIB described increased sociability over time. Conclusions: Findings are consistent with ideas relating to new materialism (LAIB is part of an interacting network of material and non-material factors) and social capital (those with supportive relationships benefited more from LAIB). Interpersonal relationships need to be considered as part of routine care and should be reviewed with patients throughout the treatment journey.

Notes on [post]human nursing: What It MIGHT Be, What it is Not.

With this paper, we walk out some central ideas about posthumanisms and the ways in which nursing is already deeply entangled with them. At the same time, we point to ways in which nursing might benefit from further entanglement with other ideas emerging from posthumanisms. We first offer up a brief history of posthumanisms, following multiple roots to several points of formation. We then turn to key flavors of posthuman thought to differentiate between them and clarify our collective understanding and use of the terms. This includes considerations of the threads of transhumanism, critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism, and the speculative, affirmative ethics that arise from critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism. These ideas are fruitful for nursing, and already in action in many cases, which is the matter we occupy ourselves with in the final third of the paper. We consider the ways nursing is already posthuman-sometimes even critically so-and the speculative worldbuilding of nursing as praxis. We conclude with visions for a critical posthumanist nursing that attends to humans and other/more/nonhumans, situated and material and embodied and connected, in relation.

Materialistic happiness is negatively associated with meaning in life: A serial double mediation model.

BACKGROUND: Materialism refers to values that equate materialistic possessions with happiness and success. Gathering materialistic possessions is also central to materialists' life. Extant research has widely shown that materialism is detrimental to people's well-being, but its influences on meaning in life are less clear. In this article, we address two principal research questions within the framework of self-determination theory: First, we explore the association between varying dimensions of materialism and the perceived meaning in life; second, we investigate the factors that mediate the relationship between materialistic values and meaning in life. METHODS: Two cross-sectional online survey studies (Study 1: 190 Chinese participants; Study 2: 767 participants [mainly Caucasians] from Prolific) were conducted to test a hypothesized serial double mediation model, in which basic psychological needs satisfaction and subjective well-being were the two serial factors mediating the materialistic happiness to meaning in life relationship. RESULTS: Among the three materialism values, only materialistic happiness was negatively associated with meaning in life. Basic psychological needs satisfaction and subjective well-being serially mediated the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

Environmental Materialities and the History of Pandemics.

Over the last several decades, a growing group of environmental and medical historians have argued that engagement with the materiality of disease is critical to eroding the false boundaries between environment and health, and especially to the historical study of major epidemics and pandemics. This article evaluates the ways in which environmental and medical historians have engaged materiality when thinking through questions of infectious disease. It argues that far from eschewing cultural constructions of disease and analysis of medical systems, these works demonstrate that engagement with materiality in the study of disease articulates the stakes of medical regimes and practices of healing, and renders legible the multiple scales at which epidemics occur. Addressing key controversies in the use of sources, it provides examples of works that incorporate material objects, biological ideas and actors, and non-humans without falling prey to the extremes of "biological determinism" or "constructivism." It argues that commonalities in the methods employed by these works - utilization of scientific frameworks and data, multispecies analysis, attention to scale, and spatial thinking - reveal unseen and untold aspects of past pandemics. It concludes with a brief example of how these frameworks come together in practice through a case study on the history of enteric fever in Dublin, Ireland.

Another nursing is possible: Ethics, political economies, and possibility in an uncertain world.

Overtaxed by the realities laid bare in the pandemic, nursing has imminent decisions to make. The exigencies of pandemic times overextend a health care infrastructure already groaning under the weight of inequitable distribution of resources and care commodified for profit. We can choose to prioritise different values. Invoking philosopher of science Isbelle Stengers's manifesto for slow science, this is not the only nursing that is possible. With this paper, I pick up threads of nursing's historical ontology, drawing previous scholarship on the historical narratives nurses use to understand themselves. Peeling back nursing's myth to alternate points of origin allows me to consider alternate lines of flight, a speculative adventure in paths not taken but paths that exist nonetheless. I go on to examine what a collective ethic of nursing could be, when we make space for these alternate histories, considering the confluences and conflicts that enable nurses to care and those that inhibit them from doing so. The imperative for this lies in the central importance of the reproductive labour of nursing health care, which leads me to a critique of nursing's capitulation to the pressures of late stage capitalism. This is a problem with ethical and ontological implications both for nursing, and also for those who require nursing care, an imperative to think about the kinds of present/futures for health, care, and health care we might cocreate in collaboration and solidarity with the communities in which nurses are imbricated, shedding the trappings of neoliberalism. There is significant power in the vision and praxis of 28 million nurses and midwives worldwide. Our ethics can guide our imagination which can in turn create possibility. This kind of endeavour-that of dreams and imagination-leads us to what could be, if only we leap.

Death anxiety and older adults' vulnerability to fraud: the mediating role of materialism.

Death anxiety arousal, provoked by anticipating self-nonexistence, may be used as a fraud tactic by scammers on older adults; however, little is known about how it affects older adults' decision making when confronted with a scam and the mechanisms underlying these effects. This study used a questionnaire survey and experimental design to examine them. In Study 1, 307 older adults in China completed questionnaires. The results showed a positive link between death anxiety and vulnerability to fraud, partially mediated by materialism. In Study 2, 82 older adults in China were randomly assigned to the mortality salience group and control group to examine whether death anxiety arousal can increase older adults' vulnerability to fraud and the mediating role of materialism. The results indicated that death anxiety and materialism increase the risk of consumer products and services fraud; therefore, targeting these risk factors might protect older adults from fraud.

Ever more parents in polyamorous families: A new materialist typology of parenting practices and division of work.

An analysis of parents that are a part of polyamorous networks-networks of three, four, or even more residential or highly available parents-shows three types of parenting practices: poly-nuclear, hierarchical, and egalitarian parenting. Especially, the hierarchical and egalitarian parenting practices show novel divisions of care work and a transgression of gender norms. However, in-depth new materialist analysis of qualitative interviews also shows how parents are, in specific situations, pushed toward standard family models and thus unintentionally maintain traditional family structures and gender roles.

Development and Validation of Ikhlaas Scale for Pakistani Muslim Adults.

Ikhlaas refers to the capacity of having sincere intentions in both acts of worship (ibadah) dedicated to God and our dealings with others, as we strive to seek God's pleasure. The present research was primarily conducted to develop a psychometrically sound measure of ikhlaas and establish its construct validity. Using an exploratory sequential mixed methods design, it comprised two studies. Study 1 was conducted in three phases. In Phase 1, an initial set of 17 items for the Ikhlaas Scale (IS) was developed through the thematic analysis of Quranic verses, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions. Phase 2 was related to the translation and cross-language validation of scales. Phase 3 involved administering this item pool to a sample of Pakistani Muslim adults (N = 300) and conducting an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) that revealed a two-factor structure (item loading 0.45-0.89) for the 12-item IS, accounting for 43.65% of the variance. The first factor measured ikhlaas in worship (7 items), while the second factor measured ikhlaas in dealings with others (5 items). Ikhlaas had a significant positive correlation with taqwa and significant negative correlations with materialism, providing evidence for the convergent validity of the IS. In Study 2, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) conducted on a sample of Muslim adults (N = 702) confirmed the 12-item, two-factor structure of the IS observed in the EFA. Ikhlas was positively related to religious commitment and religious emphasis. In the final measurement model, the average variance extracted (AVE) of all constructs (ikhlaas, religious emphasis, and religious commitment) was > 0.50, the values of maximum shared variance (MSV) were lower than those of AVE, and the diagonal values of the square root of the AVE were higher than the intercorrelations. The heterotrait-monotrait correlation ratio (HTMT) ranged from 0.51 to 0.61, which testified to the discriminant validity of IS. Overall, the IS is a robust measure of ikhlaas that needs to be further studied for developing its nomological network across global Muslim populations.

Beyond sustainable consumption practices: Linking organic food consumption to hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.

The organic food industry has significantly gained currency due to consumers being increasingly health conscious. However, more insight is needed to decipher the impact of organic food consumption on consumer well-being. Quantitative methods using a cross-sectional design were applied to collect data from 578 organic food consumers residing in South Africa. The results revealed that organic food consumption plays a central role in providing pleasure, positive emotions, a sense of accomplishment and personal growth to consumers. Moreover, the findings indicate that consumers' health consciousness significantly influences the interplay between dimensions of well-being. These findings shed important light on the scholarly debate around the influence of sustainable consumption on well-being. The study also provides crucial insights into new strategies that actors in the organic food industry as well as policymakers will use to effectively promote sustainable consumption and a healthy lifestyle.

Theorising health equity research for people with intersex variance through new materialism.

Health inequalities impact sex-variant people in highly differentiated ways. This is evidenced in much academic and activist intersex research documenting the highly specific forms of inequalities arising from misrecognition, discrimination and human rights abuses inherent to pathologised accounts of non-normative bodies. Important theoretical work further interrogates the implications of sex variant subjectivities, identities and bodies for static or binary notions of both sex and gender. In this paper, we aim to contribute further to this scholarship. We draw upon feminist materialist and Deleuzean-informed understandings of materials or matter to rethink debates over sex-variant subjectivities, identities and bodies in relation to inequalities in health. We argue 'the turn to matter' and associated new materialist theories draw attention to the complex, dynamic relational assemblages and entanglements mutually constituting the affective, embodied and socio-material worlds of intersex people. Informed by these theories, we propose that inequalities can be more fully addressed through a new health equity research agenda that is co-produced with sex-variant people. This agenda will enable a fuller exploration of the unsettling but transformative capacities of intersex matters and meanings with the contextually specific understandings of equity in relation to health and health care.

Physiology, Vitalism, and the Contest for Body and Soul in the Antebellum United States.

In the early nineteenth century, physiology became an increasingly popular and powerful science in the United States. Religious controversy over the nature of human vitality animated much of this interest. On one side of these debates stood Protestant apologists who wedded an immaterialist vitalism to their belief in an immaterial, immortal soul - and therefore to their dreams of a Christian republic. On the other side, religious skeptics argued for a materialist vitalism that excluded anything immaterial from human life, aspiring thereby to eliminate religious interference in the progress of science and society. Both sides hoped that by claiming physiology for their vision of human nature they might direct the future of religion in the US. Ultimately, they failed to realize these ambitions, but their contest posed a dilemma late nineteenth-century physiologists felt compelled to solve: how should they comprehend the relationship between life, body, and soul? Eager to undertake laboratory work and leave metaphysical questions behind, these researchers solved the problem by restricting their work to the body while leaving spiritual matters to preachers. In attempting to escape the vitalism and soul questions, late nineteenth-century Americans thus created a division of labor that shaped the history of medicine and religion for the following century.

Telling a different story: Historiography, ethics, and possibility for nursing.

With this paper, I will interrogate some of the implications of nursing's dominant historiography, the history written by and about nursing, and its implications for nursing ethics as a praxis, invoking feminist philosopher Donna Haraway's mantra that 'it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.' First, I will describe what I have come to understand as the nursing imaginary, a shared consciousness constructed both by nurses from within and by those outside the discipline from without. This imaginary is fashioned in part by the histories nursing produces about the discipline, our historical ontology, which is demonstrative of our disciplinary values and the ethics we practice today. I assert that how we choose to constitute ourselves as a discipline is itself an ethical endeavour, bound up with how we choose to be and what we allow as knowledge in nursing. To animate this discussion, I will outline the received historiography of nursing and dwell in the possibilities of thinking about Kaiserswerth, the training school that prepared Nightingale for her exploits in Crimea and beyond. I will briefly consider the normative values that arise from this received history and consider the possibilities that these normative values foreclose upon. I then shift the frame and ask what might be possible if we centred Kaiserswerth's contested legacy as a training school for formerly incarcerated women, letting go of the sanitary and sanitised visions of nursing as Victorian angels in the hospital. Much energy over the past 250 years has been invested in the professionalisation and legitimation of nursing, predicated (at least in our shared imaginary) on the interventions of Florence Nightingale, but this is one possibility of many. I conclude with a speculative dream of the terrain opens up for nursing if we shed this politics and ethos of respectability and professionalism and instead embrace community, abolition and mutual aid as organising values for the discipline.

Mattering: Per/forming nursing philosophy in the Chthulucene.

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled 'What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?' examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra-activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany-including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter.

The myth of when and where: How false assumptions still haunt theories of consciousness.

Recent advances in neural sciences have uncovered countless facts about the brain. Although there is a plethora of theories of consciousness, it seems to some philosophers that there is still an explanatory gap when it comes to a scientific account of subjective experience. In what follows, I argue why some of our more commonly acknowledged theories do not at all provide us with an account of subjective experience as they are built on false assumptions. These assumptions have led us into a state of cognitive dissonance between maintaining our standard scientific practices on the one hand, and maintaining our folk notions on the other. I end by proposing Illusionism as the only option for a scientific investigation of consciousness and that even if ideas like panpsychism turn out to be holding the seemingly missing piece of the puzzle, the path to them must go through Illusionism.

The Vitruvian nurse and burnout: New materialist approaches to impossible ideals.

The Vitruvian Man is a metaphor for the "ideal man" by feminist posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013) as a proxy for eurocentric humanist ideals. The first half of this paper extends Braidotti's concept by thinking about the metaphor of the "ideal nurse" (Vitruvian nurse) and how this metaphor contributes to racism, oppression, and burnout in nursing and might restrict the professionalization of nursing. The Vitruvian nurse is an idealized and perfected form of a nurse with self-sacrificial language (re)producing self-sacrificing expectations. The second half of this paper looks at how regulatory frameworks (using the example of UK's Nursing and Midwifery Council Code of Conduct) institutionalize the conditions of possibility through collective imaginations. The domineering expectations found within the Vitruvian nurse metaphor and further codified by regulatory frameworks give rise to boredom and burnout. The paper ends by suggesting possible ways to diffract regulatory frameworks to practice with affirmative ethics and reduce feelings of self-sacrifice and exhaustion among nurses.

Franz Joseph Gall on God and religion: "Dieu et Cerveau, rien que Dieu et cerveau!"

Franz Joseph Gall's (1758-1828) doctrine of many faculties of mind with corresponding cortical organs led him to be accused of materialism, fatalism, and even atheism. Yet little has been written about the specific charges he felt forced to respond to in Vienna, while visiting the German States, or in Paris, where he published his books. This article examines these accusations and Gall's responses. It also looks at what Gall wrote about a cortical faculty for God and religion and seeing intelligent design in the functional organization of the brain. Additionally, it presents what can be gleaned about his private thoughts on God and organized religion. We conclude that Gall was sincere in his admiration for and belief in God the Creator, but that as an enlightened scientist was recognizing the need to separate metaphysics from the laws of nature when presenting his new science of man.

Working in a 'community-engaged' university during an era of reconciliation.

This duoethnography, informed by the new materialist turn, explores how educational work is materially reconfigured within university-community collaborations. Through our co-facilitation of two community-based Master of Education programs we, as White settlers, endeavoured to journey with Indigenous colleagues, community members, and students to respond to calls for transformative reconciliation. It is within these complex relational fields that we explore the shifting nature of our work as educators within a Canadian university. When educational work resides within community, it becomes a living relationship among people and place, requiring a new type of faculty expertise that disrupts the usual boundaries between disciplinary knowledge and the academic triad, and exceeds professional responsibilities. Through our MEd programs, we are coming to understand our work as educators as always a collaborative act in the making, and as a form of scholarly activism.

Associations of Buying-Shopping Disorder Symptoms with Identity Confusion, Materialism, and Socially Undesirable Personality Features in a Community Sample.

INTRODUCTION: While identity problems and materialistic value endorsement have been described as predisposing factors for buying-shopping disorder (BSD) in the literature, little empirical data are available on the role of socially undesirable personality features that may contribute to financial misconduct and manipulative interpersonal behaviors in BSD. The dark triad of personality refers to such offensive yet non-pathological personality traits and has been applied to addictive behaviors in the past. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the "dark triad" dimensions Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy predict symptoms of BSD above and beyond identity confusion and materialism, or moderate the relationship between materialism and symptoms of BSD. METHOD: The participants comprised a convenience sample (N = 272, 72.4% women) aged between 18 and 67 years. Assessment included standard questionnaires for BSD, identity problems, materialism, and the dark triad of personality. RESULTS: Zero-order correlations indicate a weak association between BSD and the dark triad dimensions Machiavellianism and narcissism, but not psychopathy. Results of a moderated regression analysis with BSD symptoms as a dependent variable revealed significant main effects for materialism, female gender, and a significant "narcissism by materialism" effect, after accounting for identity confusion/synthesis and the single dark triad traits. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that individuals with BSD attempt to address their narcissistic deficits via materialistic possessions. This assumption warrants further investigation in a clinical sample.