Annie Sandrussi

This paper examines how public health promotion in colonial Australia figures the maternal body as an instrument for the production of whiteness for the perpetuation of the colonial state. In the context of a paradox between the institutional valuing of motherhood and institutional practices of systemic child removal and violence against women and mothers, I argue that public health promotion should be understood as a mechanism for the production of the white maternal body. I first establish the coloniality of public health promotion, arguing that its purpose is the production of bodies for the sake of colonial futurity, and that it so functions as a racializing code. Next, I offer a genealogical account in which the emergence of maternal subjectivity is shown to be the product of the colonial struggle for power; the white maternal body is thus produced through a schema of colonial mechanisms, among them the naturalization of sex, the feminization of the domestic sphere, the institutional establishment of the nuclear, heteroromantic family, and the British colonial notion of private property. I finally analyze how the white maternal body is subsequently materialized through the body’s own existential-temporal capacity for habituation.

Moral hazard occurs when the presence or promise of a new technology or policy reduces incentives for responsible behaviour, because the consequences of risky behaviour are perceived to be reduced, transferred, or mitigated. Moral hazard risk has been widely empirically investigated in the case of geoengineering for climate change, but other novel technologies have not been subject to such scrutiny. Ever since de-extinction was announced to the public as a viable possibility with modern biotechnology, a series of commentators have argued that the promise of de-extinction will create a moral hazard. The thought is that extinction has been perceived as permanent. Any change in this belief, such as the idea that species can be brought back, potentially undermines the motivation for current conservation efforts. This is an empirical claim that we investigate. Our study assesses the public's support for conservation in scenarios that promise the use of de-extinction to address actions that are likely to cause extinction. We did not find that people were more likely to accept the extinction of a species if its de-extinction was promised in the future. We did, however, find an association between extinction acceptance and judgments that de-extinction could successfully resurrect species. The findings of this study represent a crucial step in assessing the risks novel biotechnology creates.

Some theorists have argued that novel food objects spur ontological debates and are thus grounds for the disruption of problematic normative ontologies. In this paper, I take up this claim to consider how disputes about milk and alternatives, among them synthetic milk, manifest certain ontological commitments. Through a political approach to ontology, I argue that the disruption of hegemonic ontologies can afford novel ethical considerations otherwise concealed from view. Drawing on ecofeminist critique of dairy, and feminist critiques of biocapitalism, I show how debates about milk and alternatives reinscribe an ontology of living and natural bodies as resources for the accretion of capital, and the way that ontologies of sex, gender and nature function within these debates. I argue that the actual materiality of milk is concealed through industrial processes, as well as public discourse. I then offer an alternative materialist ontology of milk, on the basis that an emphasis on the materiality of mammalian milks, including human, can unveil ethical considerations otherwise concealed in conceptual debates about milk; I articulate this materiality as a relational materialist ontology, building on existing distinctions between substance and relational ontologies of food. I argue that the effect of this commitment to materiality is the provision is to counter a principalist approach to the ethics of milk by taking milk’s materiality as a paradigm for reflecting on the necessity of situatedness for any such ethics.

The problem of empathy has been typically founded on subjectivist theories of human being. Empathy was adopted into philosophy by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who interpreted it as the solution to the problem of the foreign ego. Among phenomenologists, whose discipline is foundational to the concept of empathy, there is contention about the notion of empathy as an account of human being with one another. The 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger was particularly critical of the basis of the problem of empathy, because of its foundations on a supposed misrepresentation of human selfhood. The very problem of empathy is a central motif in phenomenology because it seeks to address the peculiar immediacy of the knowledge of other minds, as distinct but alike entities; yet, empathy is met with challenges particular to a subject-oriented framework, where there is posited to be the private, inner psychical life of the Self that is distinct from the Other. This chapter suggests that the notion of empathy is better based on approaches to human selfhood that by-pass the traditional subject-object binary. Specifically, I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to overcome ego theories of the self provides an ideal framework for positing empathy as a phenomenon of interpersonal understanding. This is juxtaposed against Husserl’s notion of empathy as constitutive of the relation of egos. I argue that Heidegger’s notion of the Self as arising out of everyday human ‘Being-with’ (Mitsein) renders obsolete the problem of empathy as it has been typically posed, so that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (‘Being-there’) allows thinking about the formation of selfhood as a reciprocal and communal process and thus overcomes the solipsistic challenges to interpersonal understanding.

In response to Shawn Loht’s 2017 project delineating a Heideggerian phenomenology of film, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, I examine how productive Loht’s Dasein-centric account of the film viewer might be for considering diverse film-viewer experiences. Starting from Loht’s premise that the film–viewer relation is the constitutive ground of filmic disclosure, I raise two concerns regarding Heidegger’s account of Dasein that might obscure an account of the diversity of film viewers and associated heterogeneity of filmic disclosure: Dasein’s lack of concreteness with respect to lived experience, and Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment and bodily difference. I firstly argue that Dasein’s lack of concreteness is productive for theorising the diversity of film viewers by discussing the concept of Dasein through formal indication, a Heideggerian notion that Loht draws upon in order to account for filmic disclosure. I then examine a key objection, that Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment limits the productivity of a Dasein-centric account of film viewers for theorising diversity. I refer to Katharina Lindner’s interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world in a queer phenomenology of film, set out in “Questions of Embodied Difference: Film and Queer Phenomenology” (2012), to suggest a pathway for how Dasein’s being-in-the-world might offer an account of film viewing that takes into consideration the embodiment of diverse viewers.