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What causes psychogenic amnesia?

The media love it. Films and novels fictionalise it. TV and newspapers want to follow a real patient around. They virtually always get it wrong (and the worst thing you can do for such a patient is put him/her on television). Psychogenic amnesia (also known as dissociative or functional amnesia) still intrigues and fascinates.

In 1926, Agatha Christie, the acclaimed novelist, disappeared for 11 days. Her home was in Berkshire; her car was found in Surrey; and she was discovered 11 days later in a hotel in Harrogate. She claimed amnesia for what had happened. The authenticity of her amnesia has been disputed, but the circumstances were typical of those that characterise a ‘fugue state’.

Many cases of psychogenic amnesia appear to migrate to central London, where they are often picked up by the police in central London parks or railway termini, and taken to St Thomas’s Hospital in its location opposite the Houses of Parliament. Harrison et al. (2017) have now reported 53 cases seen by Prof Kopelman and his team over the course of 20 years on a psychiatric receiving ward. This is by far the largest series of such patients to be described in recent times.

We found that there were four sub-groups of such patients. The first sub-group consisted of patients who, following a precipitating crisis, disappeared (rather like Agatha Christie) with loss of their sense of identity and memory, and travelled what were sometimes long distances. These patients are described as having a ‘fugue episode’, an expression derived from the Latin word ‘fuga’, meaning ‘flight’. These patients characteristically get better, either spontaneously or with therapeutic help – often within a few hours or days (we drew a cut-off point at four weeks).

Newspaper article about Archibald Christie and his wife Agatha Christie at Harrogate by Daily Herald (London) 15 December 1926, p. 1. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

A second group started out like the Fugue group (forgetting who they were, and sometimes travelling distances); although these patients rapidly ‘re-learned’ who they were, their amnesia persisted, much longer than four weeks. We have labelled this sub-group Fugue-to-Focal Retrograde Amnesia (F_FRA).

A third sub-group did not begin with a fugue-like episode, but had often suffered a very mild head trauma or neurological event just before their memory loss, which could not possibly account for their onset of Focal Retrograde Amnesia (FRA).

A final subgroup simply reported ‘gaps’ in their memories, which related, directly or indirectly, to stressful life events.

With regard to features of the amnesia, a person’s knowledge of who he/she was (personal identity) was lost only in the psychogenic cases, particularly the Fugue cases. The failure to recognise the family was most common in the psychogenic cases, particularly the two FRA subgroups, but occasionally happened in neurological cases. Interestingly, a history of past or precipitating head injury was actually more common in the psychogenic cases (just over 40%) than the neurological cases (10%). Factors like past or precipitating depression, relationship or family problems, financial or employment problems, occurred in all the groups, but were much more common in the psychogenic than the neurological cases or healthy participants.

With regard to performance on neuropsychological tests, we found that, during their amnesia, the psychogenic patients were mildly impaired on tests of new learning, particularly on word recall tests, compared with their scores three to six months later. However, their most devastating deficit was in remembering past facts about their lives or in recalling events they had experienced. The Fugue group performed particularly badly in trying to recall facts or events from any time period in their lives. The two FRA groups did badly on facts or events from childhood or their young adult life, but somewhat better for more recent events – this is the opposite pattern to neurological patients, who characteristically show relative sparing in remembering early memories, but do very badly on recent memories. However, after three to six months, the Fugue group had improved to normal in remembering facts about their past, and near-normal in remembering events from their past. The two FRA groups had also improved, but not so much as the Fugue group; and they still did better on recent memories, compared with earlier ones.

Taking all this together, it shows that the outcome in such cases is much better than generally assumed – at least if the cases are caught at an early stage in their disorder. The Fugue cases often recovered ‘spontaneously’ with very little or no specific treatment. The FRA cases had had a variety of treatments, including antidepressant medication. The pattern of results suggests that memory retrieval had been inhibited during the amnesia, perhaps because the patients had somehow been avoiding (consciously or subconsciously) thinking about stressful or traumatic events, and this in turn can induce forgetting, as recent experimental work has shown. The findings are also consistent with a ‘model’ in which a stressful life event or events at a time when a person is depressed (and sometimes suicidal) can trigger psychogenic amnesia, even if the person cannot then pinpoint what these stressors were. This psychogenic memory loss seems to happen more commonly in people who, for whatever reason, have had a past, brief episode of transient memory loss for a neurological reason, such as a very minor head injury. This latter factor may be the reason why these patients developed amnesia at a time of severe stress as opposed to some other psychogenic/functional disorder, such as non-epileptic seizures, psychogenic blindness, or various motor or sensory symptoms.

This remains a fascinating topic, but not necessarily in the way that the media envisage.

Featured image credit: ‘Memory’ by jarmoluk. CCO Public Domain via Pixabay.

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States of affairs: the prominence of the 50 state governments during the Trump presidency

Now that we have passed the 200-day mark of Donald Trump’s presidency and can take stock of elements of change and continuity in US policy-making in the new administration, it is important not to lose sight of the continued importance of state governments. Although developments in Washington, DC naturally attract significant attention, the fifty states continue to play a prominent and under-appreciated role in various policy areas. At the least, as scholars have shown, a full account of policy-making during the Trump administration, no less than in prior administrations, has to take account of the actions of state officials in adopting policies, challenging federal policies, and negotiating with federal officials about implementing policies.

State governments have long been policy pioneers in the US federal system, taking the lead in adopting measures that are in many cases later enacted at the national level. But state policy activism has accelerated in the 21st century in response to partisan polarization and gridlock at the national level. Democrats and Republicans are at relatively even strength in Washington. Even when one party holds the presidency and both houses of Congress, as Republicans currently do, the margins are generally narrow, with the minority party almost always holding enough seats in the senate (at least 41 out of 100) to mount a filibuster, thereby making it extraordinarily difficult to enact major legislation.

In most states, though, the executive and legislature are controlled by the same party, which in a number of cases holds a super-majority of legislative seats. Thirty-one states are currently characterized by unified party control of the executive and legislature — 25 are Republican dominated states and 6 are Democratic-dominated states. On issues where Congress fails to act, states often fill the policy vacuum whether boosting the minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, scaling back protection for labor unions, tightening restrictions on (or facilitating access to) guns, or adding (or relaxing) restrictions on abortion. Even when these and other policies are blocked in state legislatures, the availability of direct democratic institutions in half of the states makes it possible to achieve policy changes by putting them to a popular vote. Additionally, local governments have been active in enacting policies blocked at the federal and state level, such as increasing the minimum wage, even if state governments are increasingly pushing back by passing laws preempting local policy innovation.

State officials also continue to challenge federal policies, especially policies promulgated via executive orders or agency regulations, often by going to court. During the Obama presidency, Republican state attorney generals, most notably in Texas but also in other states, filed lawsuits challenging executive actions regarding immigration, environmental protection, and LGBT rights. In several high-profile cases, federal courts sided with state officials and issued rulings blocking enforcement of Obama administration policies, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan and the president’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA).

 It is important not to lose sight of the continued importance of state governments.

State lawsuits have continued into the Trump presidency, albeit with Democratic attorney generals now taking the lead in challenging federal executive and regulatory actions regarding education, environmental protection and immigration. This was on prominent display in the aftermath of the president’s executive order suspending admission of refugees and banning entry to the country from residents of various Middle Eastern countries. Although the US Supreme Court in June 2017 allowed a modified version of the president’s executive order to take effect, lower federal courts enjoined enforcement of the order for several months in response to lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of Washington, Minnesota and Hawaii.

State officials’ negotiations with federal officials about implementing federal policies attract less attention than state-filed lawsuits; but sometimes they are just as important in enabling states to chart their own path. Consider the role of states in implementing the Obama administration’s signature domestic policy, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which among other things calls for states to expand the range of low-income persons receiving health coverage through the joint federal-state Medicaid program. Nineteen states have chosen not to participate in the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Meanwhile, twenty-five states opted to expand Medicaid in the way set out in the ACA. But another half-dozen states engaged in extensive negotiations with Obama administration officials and secured waivers allowing them to expand Medicaid on their own terms, occasionally relying on innovative approaches not envisioned in federal law. These state-federal negotiations have continued during the Trump presidency, as state officials have sought and occasionally gained additional leeway in operating Medicaid programs and implementing other ACA requirements.

One lesson to be drawn from policymaking during the early part of the Trump presidency is that for all the attention understandably paid to actions taken by the president, Congress, and Supreme Court, and the ways Trump administration policies differ from Obama administration policies, state governments continue to play a prominent role, in the current administration no less than in prior years, in crafting, challenging, and shaping implementation of key policies.

Featured image credit: capitol building California by sarangib. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Mahler our contemporary

With various commemorations of the birthday of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) in July, the attention to this composer reinforces his continuing significance for modern audiences. Literary scholars have made cases for the ways in which Shakespeare’s works retain their relevance for modern audiences in such different works as Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1960) and Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare and Modern Culture (2009). Without going into the details involved with Shakespeare, a similar case can be made for Mahler’s music not only retaining its status for modern audiences but also having the potential to continue its appeal. With a composer like Mahler, the attraction to his music is no accident.

Research on Mahler offers some points of reference that reflect his continuing appeal. A recurring theme in Mahler studies is the idea of autobiographical implications in the extramusical ideas that Mahler explored. The lovelorn narrative of the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1885) draws on poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and as much as Mahler’s selections from those poems reflect personal choices, the fact that he wrote some of the verses brings the text closer to him. The anguish of spurned love and the desperation the lover feels comes through immediately in these vivid songs. When it comes to the anonymous narrator, is it Mahler himself or some version of himself that Mahler embodied in the music?

The fact that such questions are impossible to answer in any absolute sense contributes to the appeal of the music, which sometimes allows the narrator to merge with the listener. This is hardly unique to Mahler, but the appeal of this particular work intensifies when audiences hear it quoted in the opening and penultimate movements of his First Symphony (1888). The main theme of the first movement suggests a sense of energy through the intervals and rhythms, but the idea takes on additional meanings when listeners connect it to the second song of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, “Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld” (This morning I went into the field”) The self-quotation is part of other intertextual elements that add to the experience of the music. As much as listeners can focus on the development of the ideas within the Symphony itself, the connotations from the text of the song cycle contribute additional levels of meaning that suggest some programmatic ideas, and it is not difficult to read into the reference as the work shifts from struggle to triumph as the music progresses to the exuberant Finale of the First Symphony.

Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 4, preliminary sketch page “6” for movement 1, Chicago, IL: The Newberry Library. Case MS VM 1001 M21 S4 pg.2. Used with permission.

That stated, the shifting roles of programs with Mahler’s music also have an appeal for audiences. The work that modern audiences know as his Symphony no. 1 was known in some of its early performances as “Tone Poem,” a title that implicitly suggests a program connected to the musical structure.  While Mahler once sanctioned written program to accompany performances of the First Symphony, he eventually withdrew it, along with the programs for other works, including the Second Symphony. Mahler famously disavowed programs for his music: “Let every program perish.” Despite Mahler’s wishes, modern audiences often encounter some version of the narrative he once gave the First Symphony in program notes. In some ways this suggests a level of intellectual involvement on the part of the listeners who remind those unfamiliar with the work that those levels of meaning were part of the experience.

With or without a program, the music does not change and, in this sense, it does not lose its appeal. It is similar with his later works, which often did not have programs at their original performances and which can still suggest something more than the innovative structure he gave his works. His strategies are at times ingenious.

The Fourth Symphony (1901) culminates in a Song-Finale “Das himmlische Leben” (“Heavenly Life,” 1892) that quotes in part the choral movement of the Third Symphony (1896), the song “Es sungen drei Engel” (“Three angels were singing,” 1895), a piece that Mahler actually composed several years after he finished the other one. Beyond the interplay with the Third Symphony, Mahler used thematic ideas from “Das himmlische Leben” in all three of the movements that precede it in the Fourth Symphony. Here the fragments are sometimes so brief that they suggest the kind of motivic exploration found with Beethoven and the atomization sometimes associated with serial composers.

While modern audiences are sufficiently familiar with Mahler’s music to hear thematic ideas from the song in the first, second, and third movements, the audiences of Mahler’s day might not have benefited from such knowledge of his music. Yet that did not make the quotations unintelligible. Rather, they point to the ways in which such thematic fragments make the music seem familiar. Just as in literature, the idea of defamiliarization is a means to impart ideas organically in a work, Mahler’s musical deployment of this technique makes it possible to grasp the ideas. The short ideas eventually emerge in more extended ones, and he supports his strategy with a remarkably shifting orchestration that adds yet another level of appeal to the music.

Such appeal is hard to dismiss, with scorings that make use of chamber-music textures and sonorities that stand in stark contrast to the large forces on stage for his works. The timbres involve as rich a palette as the colorful scorings Schoenberg would explore in his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909) or some of Alban Berg’s early works. Anton Webern’s early tone poem Im Sommerwind is redolent of timbres that anticipate the innovations other twentieth-century composers would exploit in the decades after Mahler’s death. Yet Mahler stands at the center of these innovations, a composer who found ways to create very personal works that have an aural appeal through their connections with other music and also the craft the composer used in shaping them. At the anniversary of his birth, it’s useful not just to acknowledge his place in history but also to explore the ways his music makes Mahler our contemporary.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Classical Music, Concert’ by Pexels, CC0 Public Domain, via Pixabay.

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Supreme Court of Canada challenges the idea of state sovereignty

It has been a busy time for the Supreme Court of Canada. In a judgment on 23 June 2017, it ruled that Facebook Inc’s forum selection clause was unenforceable in a case involving the application of British Columbia’s Privacy Act. The long-term value of that judgment is, however, questionable given that the Court was split 4-3, with one of the judges (Abella J.) deciding against Facebook, doing so on a different basis to the other three who ruled against Facebook.

The more important decision was handed down on 28 June 2017 in the long-running dispute between Google Inc. and Equustek Solutions Inc., and it is not good news for anyone apart from for Equustek Solutions Inc.

The case has gained a considerable degree of international attention and the background to the dispute is generally well-known. The issue in the appeal was whether Google could be ordered (via an interlocutory injunction) to de-index (with global effect!) the websites of a company (Datalink Technology Gateways Inc., and Datalink Technologies Gateways LLC) which, in breach of several court orders, sell the intellectual property of another company (Equustek Solutions Inc.) via those websites.

“Officer Freelancer” by FirmBee. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

The majority of the Court ruled in favour of Equustek concluding that:

[S]ince the interlocutory injunction is the only effective way to mitigate the harm to Equustek pending the resolution of the underlying litigation, the only way, in fact, to preserve Equustek itself pending the resolution of the underlying litigation, and since any countervailing harm to Google is minimal to non-existent, the interlocutory injunction should be upheld. (para. 53)

This conclusion was reached via a belaboured journey through the quagmire of both legal and technical misunderstandings and half-truths. Most of those misunderstandings and half-truths are highlighted with commendable clarity in the dissenting judgment by Côté and Rowe JJ. who also stressed that:

In our view, granting the Google Order requires changes to settled practice that are not warranted in this case: neither the test for an interlocutory nor a permanent injunction has been met; court supervision is required; the order has not been shown to be effective; and alternative remedies are available. (para. 60)

The majority judgment represents a missed opportunity to take the law in a direction recognising the special features of the Internet, to take a step away from the present ‘hyper-regulation’ of Internet content, to recognise the role of geo-location technologies and to properly address ‘scope of jurisdiction’ issues.

However, what is worse, it sets a dangerous precedent that a court of any state may order Google to de-index with global effect, without any real effort to consider the effects this has in other countries or for the development of law in relation to the online environment. I would be most surprised if the hazardous step now taken by the Supreme Court of Canada does not result in a sharp increase in speculative actions directed at Internet intermediaries such as Google.

“Earth and Internet” by HypnoArt. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

Moreover, questions must be raised regarding how the majority approached the sovereignty of affected foreign states:

Google’s argument that a global injunction violates international comity because it is possible that the order could not have been obtained in a foreign jurisdiction, or that to comply with it would result in Google violating the laws of that jurisdiction is, with respect, theoretical. […] And while it is always important to pay respectful attention to freedom of expression concerns, particularly when dealing with the core values of another country, I do not see freedom of expression issues being engaged in any way that tips the balance of convenience towards Google in this case. (paras 44-45)

It is interesting to compare this nonchalant attitude to the ongoing discussion of when law enforcement agencies in one state may seek access to data held in another state. In the latter setting one often hears objections raised that such an access to data amounts to an unlawful interference with the sovereignty of the state where the data happens to be located. However, in the Equustek case, the Supreme Court of Canada made an order requiring an alteration to the data held in another country. It seems beyond intelligent dispute that this is much more invasive than is mere access to data.

I am not here seeking to advocate what approach to sovereignty is more appropriate, but one thing is sure; we cannot have it both ways.

Featured image credit : “Canadian Flag” by ElasticComputeFarm. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay .

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The life of Martin Luther [timeline]

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation and Martin Luther posting his ninety-five theses on the door of All Saints’ Church and other churches in Wittenberg, Germany. Whether he actually did post the theses publicly has long been disputed, however his influence on Christianity hasn’t. The timeline below, created from Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval, highlights a few key moments in the reformer’s life from his early start, to changing his name, and translating the New Testament into German.

Featured image credit: Martin Luther Pray Church of Our Lady by sharonang. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Sandy Denny and Schubert

“When the music’s playing, that’s when it changes, And no longer do we seem like total strangers. It’s all those words which always get in the way Of what you want to say”

So sang the great British folk artist Sandy Denny in her song ‘I’m a Dreamer’, published back in 1977. For me at least, Sandy was the greatest of all folk singers, with the uncanny ability to hack the emotional core of my being. I have written elsewhere about how music, in a way that spoken language rarely does, can affect arousal, stimulate our emotions and memories, and move our bodies. It can even subtly alter our physiological state, both internally by altering heart rate, levels of hormones and so on, and externally – resulting in goose bumps, chills, tears, etc. This is the universal power of music, a communication system that throughout our evolutionary history has played a critical role in enhancing trust, prosociality, and mutual cooperation.

Several weeks ago, while holidaying in Margaret River, a friend played some Sandy Denny songs in versions that I had never heard before – acoustic recordings of songs I knew well in other, more elaborate guises. I quickly bought the double CD and was much moved by many tracks, but especially by her demo recording of the song ‘No End’. It has a simple but beautiful piano accompaniment, in a gently rocking three plus five rhythm, a song bleak in content and yet so full of human warmth, empathy, and understanding. There are some lovely, unexpected chord changes, and one particular transition into a major key for some inexplicable reason reminded me of a beautiful, life-enhancing passage in the slow movement of Franz Schubert’s last unfinished symphony (numbered 10, not the well-known two movement unfinished symphony). And I stood there thinking, what on earth have these two people in common, except that they both reach into my soul, and both have the ability to write music that, in the words of the great American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein “can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable”.

This is the universal power of music, a communication system that throughout our evolutionary history has played a critical role in enhancing trust, prosociality, and mutual cooperation.

Of course, music appreciation is a very personal business, and I don’t expect many to see the Sandy Denny and Schubert link the way I do, but as I thought more about the two of them, more similarities emerged, perhaps spookily so. Sandy Denny was born 150 years after Schubert, and died 150 years after him; both were just 31 years old when they deserted us. In Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, written just before he died, he set the words of Wilhelm Müller to music.

He was apparently melancholy and depressed at this time, perhaps due to a venereal illness, and there is a great sense of longing, lost love, and despair in much of the music:

“The frost has overspread my hair with a hoary sheen. I believed I had already grown old, and was overjoyed. But soon it melted away, and my hair was black again. How I shudder at my youth – how far off the grave is!” (The Grey – or Hoary – Head).

Sandy also wrote about loneliness, insecurity, and the transience of existence:

“The naked tree of winter seems to stand so proud, lording the poor mortal as he goes. And the tears which well beneath his sombre shroud, will they fall with the shame of somebody who knows he can never be like the thought of a rose. Whose beauty remains even when the bloom goes?” (One More Chance).

Sandy Denny and Schubert seem to have lived a complete and mature lifetime in their brief 31 years. Those of us fortunate to enjoy a longer span of years will undoubtedly also experience loss of some sort, whether it be a lover, parent, partner, or child. Music has the unique capacity to induce feelings of nostalgia; our subjective responses to music enhance our memory and recollection of past events. This is because music activates specific sets of neural circuits in the brain, including regions known to be involved in memory processing and recall. That is one reason why music is increasingly being used to assist in the care of individuals with degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. Music helps people remember autobiographical details about their lives and encourages social interactions. As Oliver Sacks wrote in Musicophilia:

“Music is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly developed and esteemed. Its very ubiquity may cause it to be trivialized in daily life: we switch on a radio, switch it off, hum a tune, tap our feet, find the words of an old song going through our minds, and think nothing of it. But to those who are lost in dementia, the situation is different. Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while”.

Touch wood, my brain seems still to be functioning reasonably well, but if the time should come, may Sandy Denny and Schubert accompany me on my outward journey!

Featured image credit: Orchestra by Yanna Zazu. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark: an audio guide

In this Oxford World’s Classics audio guide, listen to Professor Jon Mee of Warwick University, the author of the introduction to this volume–discuss Mary Wollstonecraft’s travels, views on the sublime, and the role of women in eighteenth century society.

“If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.”

William Godwin, the author’s future husband, was not alone in admiring ‘Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’; Wollstonecraft’s most popular book during her lifetime. Not easy to categorize, it is both an arresting travel book and a moving exploration of her personal and political selves. With her baby daughter and a nursemaid, she travelled across the dramatic landscape and wrote sublime descriptions of the natural world, and the events and people she encountered.

Listen to this audio guide to learn more about Mary Wollstonecraft’s life: her family background, formative years, travel itinerary, and views on European politics after the French revolution.

 

Featured image credit: “Stockholm, Sweden” by tpsdave. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The weight of the world: social workers’ experiences of social suffering

Long-standing concerns around the bureaucratic and often unhelpful nature of children and families social work were brought to a head in Prof Eileen Munro’s (2011) review of child protection. Munro called for a shift in local authority cultures, away from compliance towards a greater focus on learning.

With colleagues, I recently completed a project involving social work academics and children and families social workers from neighbouring local authorities to try and facilitate such a shift in child protection cultures. In so doing, our work offered insights into existing practice cultures.

One strand of our work together involved reflective learning groups in which social workers introduced cases they were working on for group discussion. It quickly became apparent from these discussions that everyday social work practice is, to use Arlie Hochschild’s (1979) term ‘emotional labour.’

The strength of emotion presented in the groups evoked a picture of what the French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, in his collaborative book, The Weight of the World (2012) identifies as ‘social suffering’, whereby the everyday world of public service workers reflects the frustrations of a neo-liberal state that has abandoned principles of social welfare. Bourdieu argues that those who work within a neo-liberal state experience ‘all kinds of ordinary suffering (la petite misère)’, the everyday emotions that result from being confronted with clients’ distress.

Bourdieu also suggests that the left hand of the state (those who come face-to-face with poverty and its effects) has the sense that the right hand (the technocrats and managers) no longer knows, or, worse, no longer really wants to know what the left hand does. At any rate, it does not want to pay for it. This was evident from one of the participants in our group who felt that: ‘there’s never any acknowledgement that there aren’t enough resources – managers hide behind ‘scientific’ decisions (i.e. eligibility criteria) not to allocate resources.’

Organisational cultures were identified as being driven by fear. Participants described workplace cultures driven by fear and of resultant, risk averse practices. We were told of management directives, which resulted in distress and harm for a young mother; of disproportionate police-led responses to child protection allegations, which were more damaging to children than any harm they were purported to address. Being party to such practices, either through their place in the organisational hierarchy or because following procedure had just become so ‘taken for granted’, created additional distress for practitioners.

If this was an individual we’d be thinking about anxiety, depression – are we an anxious, depressed profession?

The centrality of fear in organisational cultures led one participant to question: ‘we’re hearing of fear, blame, helplessness, hopelessness – if this was an individual we’d be thinking about anxiety, depression – are we an anxious, depressed profession?’

This state of affairs was accentuated, according to more experienced workers, by what they thought to be a lack of political awareness among some more recent recruits to social work who were coming into the profession expecting to work within the system and not to challenge it, whereas more experienced workers may have started at a time where expectations were to challenge the system where it needed to be challenged.

But, it was not all hopeless. Bourdieu’s wider sociological project allows for some agency on the part of actors within a given field. The contradictions of neo-liberalism open up, he argues, a margin of manoeuvre, which can be used to de-stabilise bureaucratic structures and regulations and, in so doing, to defend bureaucracy against itself.

Indeed, we were told of small acts of resistance, involving social workers going the extra mile with clients. One participant drew on an Orwellian image from 1984, ‘where he’s got that little space where the camera doesn’t see him just behind the wall’, to identify spaces to practise more creatively beyond the managerial gaze.

The conclusion that might be drawn from our project is around the importance of recognising the emotional dimensions of social work in managerial climates, where the focus is an instrumental one of completing the task and not making mistakes. Offering workers opportunities to deconstruct current practice in order to better understand and thus to destabilise prevailing ways of thinking and practicing opens up possibilities of changing such cultures.

Featured image credit: Hard times by Nik Shuliahin. Public domain via Unsplash.

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ESIL Annual Conference: the responses of international law

In preparation for the European Society of International Law (ESIL) 13th Annual Conference, we asked some of our authors to reflect on this year’s conference theme ‘Global Public Goods, Global Commons and Fundamental Values: The Responses of International Law’. How should international law respond to the fundamental challenge of defining and regulating global public goods, global commons, and fundamental values?

James A. Green via the University of Reading. Used with permission.

International law scholarship has long struggled with the clash between the irresistible force of moral universalism and the immovable object of voluntarist sovereignty. However, ‘human good vs sovereignty’ represents unhelpful binary extremes. Holding any particular value to be ‘fundamental’, and especially then deriving legal consequence from that determination, risks engaging in an ‘eye of the beholder’ norm popularity contest. It is observable social fact that international law is not always derived from state will and that state power can be curtailed by it. The system ultimately represents an uneasy balance between various (at times) competing imperatives of state autonomy, communitarianism, moral value, practicality, and certainty. We should recognise that balance and look to promote fundamental values while acknowledging the limitations of the system. Uncritically and subjectively asserting ‘fundamental value’ is a voice into the void; ignoring fundamental values represents an unforgivable paucity of ambition for the project of international law.

– James A. Green, Professor of Public International Law

Dame Rosalyn Higgins via the University of Cambridge. Used with permission.

International law is not a neutral actor that responds to concepts. It is the authoritative process by which laws and norms are made and shared values are sought to be realised. It is there for the main actors—states, international organisations, and NGOs—to use imaginatively to protect and develop what is valued. Preeminent among such organisations, ever expanding in their number, is the United Nations: global in its membership and in the reach of its work. Part of its work is indeed to promote and develop international law, which it has done in a great variety of ways. Ideas that found their place in the Purposes and Principles of the Charter, and perhaps occasionally elsewhere in the Charter, have developed enormously through practice. Self-determination and human rights are examples. Yet other matters which found no mention in the Charter such as democracy, action against terrorism, protection of the environment, protecting international peace through peacekeeping, and bringing perpetrators of international crimes to justice, have been developed through practice to achieve a perceived common good. One of the major challenges today is to ensure that the UN, as it uses different mechanisms to realise values it wishes to protect, itself operates within the confines of international law.

– Dame Rosalyn Higgins DBE QC, Former President of the International Court of Justice

Jean d’Aspremont via the University of Manchester. Used with permission.

It is not difficult to fathom why the internationalist and managerialist spirit of the profession has constantly been translating itself into the invocation of notions like general interests, global values, and global commons. After all, international law, as an argumentative practice, has remained a continuation of the global conversation about how to mediate between the private and the public, the particular and the general, the individual and the universal. And yet, I have always been struck by how little suspicion international lawyers have shown towards the way in which these notions have been invoked and deployed, in international legal thought and international practice, in support of strategies of exclusion and domination. This is even more surprising given international lawyers’ contemporary self-proclaimed critical mindset. In this context, I believe that the pressing question for international lawyers meeting in Naples this year is not whether international lawyers can (or should) emancipate themselves from their internationalist and managerialist spirit and from the notions through which the latter manifest itself, but rather, whether the notions of general interests, global values, and global commons actually achieve what international lawyers claim they achieve in international legal thought and practice.

– Jean d’Aspremont, Professor of Public International Law

Lauri Mälksoo via the University of Tartu. Used with permission.

One age old concept is conspicuously missing in this list of suggested values-candidates: state sovereignty. I would argue that a number of non-Western countries see state sovereignty as such a fundamental value to be protected by international law. In the Western international law academia, state sovereignty is frequently construed as an obstacle to the realization of truly penetrating international law as ‘constitutional law of the mankind’. However, Russian textbooks of international law emphasize Article 2 of the UN Charter as locus where fundamental principles of international law are codified, and they interpret state sovereignty and non-intervention to be central values of international law contained there. Values such as human rights and protection of environment are often interpreted in the light of state sovereignty as in a way the most superior value of international law. The debate about fundamental values of the international community is also a debate between regions. Even notions like human rights or human dignity often have an interesting regional touch. These developments deserve to be studied too because they constitute part of the reality in the contemporary world.

– Lauri Mälksoo, Professor of International Law

Gregory S. Gordon via University of California Berkeley Law School. Used with permission.

In the twenty-first century, social media have become the virtual global commons for public communication. As a result, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have served as the crucible through which international law attempts to strike the right balance between regulating hate speech that can provoke violence and protecting legitimate free expression that can spur healthy public debate. Unfortunately, the law is often less effective at achieving this human rights equilibrium than the companies that operate the platforms themselves. As a practical matter, social media self-regulation in real time will always achieve results more effectively than direct intervention by the long-arm of the law. Reminders of that were on display recently when a black activist in the United States was bombarded with racist hate speech messages on Facebook after she used the same platform to express concern about racist tendencies at a national restaurant chain. When she complained to Facebook, the company not only failed to lock and/or remove the abusive content and accounts of the hatemongers, but shut down the activist’s account when she complained about the hate speech. Europe seems to be taking the right approach. In light of failed voluntary compliance measures undertaken by the major social media platforms, EU ministers recently approved regulations that will block hate speech on those platforms. While freedom of expression must still be respected and protected, effective social media regulations on a transnational scale will go a long way toward ensuring respect for fundamental values within the virtual global commons.

– Gregory S. Gordon, Associate Dean for Development/External Affairs

Professor Marten Breuer via University of Konstanz. Used with permission.

At first sight, the Council of Europe (CoE) might seem ill-equipped to enhance the protection of fundamental values at a truly global scale. Being a regional organization, its outreach seems to be a priori and inevitably restricted to the regional sphere. This assumption, however, stands in marked contrast with the Organization’s current practice. To begin with, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights is so rich that it cannot be overlooked by the international human rights dialogue. Besides this, the CoE has developed different techniques to transgress its regional boundaries: most CoE conventions are not restricted to the 47 CoE Member States but are open to membership of non-European States as well. By this means, European values may be ‘exported’ to other regions of the world.

– Marten Breuer, Professor of Public International Law

The qualities that contribute to the conclusion that a particular feature of international life is to be placed in the category of Global Public Goods seem to be the subject of general recognition and agreement (non-exhaustibility, non-exclusivity, etc.). What is less clear is: what then follows? If it is determined that X is a global public good, what can one then deduce from that: what can one say about X that one could not have said, absent that determination? If there is no such ‘added value’, then the usefulness of the concept seems limited to ease of reference. The topic, as defined, however seems to indicate, as its purpose, finding that element, that is to say “assess[ing] what is the inherent ‘plus’ of international adjudication at the international and domestic level”. Could this question be answered without invoking the GPG concept at all?

– Hugh Thirlway, former Principal Legal Secretary of the International Court of Justice

More articles on this year’s ESIL conference theme are available in our Journals Collection. All papers are freely available online until 30 October 2017. To stay connected throughout the conference, you can follow us on Twitter @OUPIntLaw and like our Oxford International Law Facebook page.

See you in Naples!

Featured image credit: “Napoli & Vesuvio” by Damirux. CC0 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Gunk as you never knew it

“Is everything entirely made up of atoms?…Or is everything made up of atomless ‘gunk’—as Lewis (1991: 20) calls it—that divides forever into smaller and smaller parts?” (Varzi 2014)

The thought that matter is divisible has both intuitive appeal and empirical justification, and is a widespread position amongst ancient and modern philosophers. The thought that matter is unlimitedly divisible on the other hand has intuitive appeal, but not empirical justification, which is why there are only few philosophers upholding this view; for instance, Aristotle. But the thought that matter is unlimitedly divided is neither intuitive nor empirically justifiable, and has been very rarely endorsed in the history of metaphysics; Leibniz is one of the few exceptions.

Yet, unlimited division is the keystone of two ancient metaphysical systems that in many other respects are different from one another: Anaxagoras’s and the Stoics’. Anna Marmodoro’s book argues that both Anaxagoras and the Stoics posited an unlimitedly divided bedrock of reality, and that they took this stance for metaphysical reasons, i.e. because this assumption does explanatory work that would have otherwise been left undone in their systems. This explanatory work includes, but is not limited to, the constitution of material objects, change, and causation.

Marmodoro argues for a novel interpretation of the puzzling and yet pivotal claim Anaxagoras makes, that there is a share of everything in everything. Anaxagoras takes this stance as a solution to Parmenides’ puzzle of change that vetoes that what is can come from what is not. The thrust of Anaxagoras’ reply to Parmenides is that anything can come out of anything because it was already in it. But how can everything be in everything?

The majority view among scholars is that Anaxagoras dictum was intended to express a relation of containment, such that every thing there is contains in its make-up all the basic elements of reality as the ingredients which constitute it. Marmodoro’s monograph aims at motivating a departure from this received interpretation of Anaxagoras, which has already been shown in the literature to be prey to many difficulties.

She argues that Anaxagoras solves the puzzle of change by conceiving of the basic elements of his ontology as being everywhere (rather that as being in everything). The elements can be everywhere because they are unlimitedly divided. This is the key metaphysical move that Anaxagoras makes. Ultimately in his system there is no region of space, no matter how small, that lacks any of the basic elements, which by recombination make up things. But if the elements are everywhere, i.e. at every spatio-temporal location, they are coextensive with each other. This is facilitated on Marmodoro’s interpretation by their unlimited division: being unlimitedly divided, they are neither atomic (for they would not be unlimitedly divided), nor lack extension (for they would be indivisible); rather, they converge on zero extension, and can thus be colocated in space. For Anaxagoras what is coextended are physical powers, the so called ‘opposites’, that compose stuff, by colocation. Thus Anaxagoras is not only the first ante litteram gunk lover in the history of metaphysics; he also puts forward an entirely new conception of gunk, where what is unlimitedly divided are instances of physical powers. Gunk as you never knew it!

Featured image credit: Black smoke. Image by Tookapic. Public domain via Pexels.

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