Julia Rodriguez

Several studies have explored differences between North American and European doctor patient relationships. They have focused primarily on differences in philosophical traditions and historic and socioeconomic factors between these two regions that might lead to differences in behaviour, as well as divergent concepts in and justifications of medical practice. However, few empirical intercultural studies have been carried out to identify in practice these cultural differences. This lack of standard comparative empirical studies led us to compare differences between France and the USA regarding end-of-life decision-making. We tested certain assertions put forward by bioethicists concerning the impact of culture on the acceptance of advance directives in such decisions. In particular, we compared North American and French intensive care professional's attitudes toward: (1) advance directives, and (2) the role of the family in decisions to withhold or withdraw life-support

Grappling with problematics of status and hierarchy, recent literature on the history of the human sciences in Latin America has gone through three overlapping phases. First, the scholarship has reflected a dialogue between Latin American scientists and their European colleagues, characterized by the “center/periphery” model of scientific diffusion. Next, scholars drew on postcolonial theory to undermine the power of the “center” and to recover the role of local agents, including both elites and subalterns. In the wake of numerous studies embracing both models, the way has been cleared to look at multiple dimensions simultaneously. Histories of the human sciences in the complex multicultural societies of Latin America provide an unusually direct path to integration. Moreover, this dynamic and multilayered approach has the potential to address ambivalences about authority and power that have characterized previous analyses of the production and application of knowledge about the human condition

Es escasa la investigación sobre las competencias necesarias para educar eficazmente en los primeros años de vida, y sobre los factores que influyen en la adquisición de una identidad docente de calidad para trabajar en Educación Infantil (EI). Los resultados de la presente revisión integradora apuntan que (1) el profesorado excelente de EI atiende a la diversidad de su alumnado, (2) las comunidades de práctica contribuyen a la adquisición de una identidad docente excelente, y (3) ciertas deficiencias en los programas de formación docente y determinados factores contextuales obstaculizan un desempeño docente excelente.

ArgumentThe border in turn-of-the-century Argentina was a place of heightened anxiety. State officials ignored the nation's vast land borders and focused on the port, located in the capital city of Buenos Aires, which attracted nearly six million European immigrants in the decades after 1870. Federal authorities were seeking to attract new immigrants and yet they were terrified that opening their gates would allow entry among the potential citizenry a new category of “toxins” dangerous to the national body. The authorities hired physicians as gatekeepers to identify desirable and undesirable traits that went beyond the definition of communicable disease. Science and medicine appeared to provide a means of legitimating a variety of attempts by the state to control the makeup of the population; in reality, the state's power to inspect immigrants for disease, racial toxins, social upheaval, and political instability was minimized by realistic decisions to open borders and by a weak and limited ability to control the influx of people. Alongside calls for immigrant selection there coexisted a strong trend in political discourse that sought to build a unified, homogenous national culture by accepting and assimilating the foreign masses. Both approaches, however, had similar goals – the material progress of the nation, the advancement of Argentina's “civilization,” and the erasure of traces of “foreignness” among the new population.