Stuart J. Murray

The core claim of Barbara A. Biesecker’s Reinventing World War II is that the return of World War II to American public culture between 1985 and 2005 was less nostalgia than hegemonic infrastructur...

This candid perspective written by scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds is intended to advance conversations about the realities of peer review and its inherent limitations. Trust in a process or institution is built slowly and can be destroyed quickly. Trust in the peer review process for scholarly outputs (i.e., journal articles) is being eroded by high-profile scandals, exaggerated news stories, exposés, corrections, retractions, and anecdotes about poor practices. Diminished trust in the peer review process has real-world consequences and threatens the uptake of critical scientific advances. The literature on “crises of trust” tells us that rebuilding diminished trust takes time and requires frank admission and discussion of problems, creative thinking that addresses rather than dismisses criticisms, and planning and enacting short- and long-term reforms to address the root causes of problems. This article takes steps in this direction by presenting eight peer review reality checks and summarizing efforts to address their weaknesses using a harm reduction approach, though we recognize that reforms take time and some problems may never be fully rectified. While some forms of harm reduction will require structural and procedural changes, we emphasize the vital role that training editors, reviewers, and authors has in harm reduction. Additionally, consumers of science need training about how the peer review process works and how to critically evaluate research findings. No amount of self-policing, transparency, or reform to peer review will eliminate all bad actors, unscrupulous publishers, perverse incentives that reward cutting corners, intentional deception, or bias. However, the scientific community can act to minimize the harms from these activities, while simultaneously (re)building the peer review process. A peer review system is needed, even if it is imperfect.

Density‐dependent feedback is recognized as important regulatory mechanisms of population size. Considering the spatial scales over which such feedback operates has advanced our theoretical understanding of metapopulation dynamics. Yet, metapopulation models are rarely fit to time‐series data and tend to omit details of the natural history and behavior of long‐lived, highly mobile species such as colonial mammals and birds. Seabird metapopulations consist of breeding colonies that are connected across large spatial scales, within a heterogeneous marine environment that is increasingly affected by anthropogenic disturbance. Currently, we know little about the strength and spatial scale of density‐dependent regulation and connectivity between colonies. Thus, many important seabird conservation and management decisions rely on outdated assumptions of closed populations that lack density‐dependent regulation. We investigated metapopulation dynamics and connectivity in an exemplar seabird species, the Northern gannet (Morus bassanus), using more than a century of census data of breeding colonies distributed across the Northeast Atlantic. We developed and fitted these data to a novel hierarchical Bayesian state‐space model, to compare increasingly complex scenarios of metapopulation regulation through lagged, local, regional, and global density dependence, as well as different mechanisms for immigration. Models with conspecific attraction fit the data better than the equipartitioning of immigrants. Considering local and regional density dependence jointly improved model fit slightly, but importantly, future colony size projections based on different mechanistic regulatory scenarios varied widely: a model with local and regional dynamics estimated a lower metapopulation capacity (645,655 Apparently Occupied Site [AOS]) and consequently higher present saturation (63%) than a model with local density dependence (1,367,352 AOS, 34%). Our findings suggest that metapopulation regulation in the gannet is more complex than traditionally assumed, and highlight the importance of using models that consider colony connectivity and regional dynamics for conservation management applications guided by precautionary principles. Our study advances our understanding of metapopulation dynamics in long‐lived colonial species and our approach provides a template for the development of metapopulation models for colonially living birds and mammals.

As a critical counter-reading of Michel de Certeau’s classic text, The Practice of Everyday Life, this essay argues that today, in the age of neo-liberal biopolitics, it is death that is quotidian. While “life” itself now figures as the paratactical and memetic ruse of our dominant order, the essay problematizes conventional forms of tactical resistance, claiming that resistance is often complicitous and has been co-opted in advance. It is death that must henceforth inform our struggles to make (a) life in the ruins. Examples of racialized deaths suggest a rhetorical agency, and a rallying cry, for political protest and resistance beyond the tactics of a progressive embourgeoisement.

This paper opens with first‐hand accounts of critical care medical interventions in which detainees, in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are brought to the emergency department for treatment. This case dramatizes the extent to which the provision of ethical and acceptable nursing care is jeopardized by federal law enforcement paradigms. Drawing on the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this paper offers a theoretical account of the power dynamics that inform the health care of patients who find themselves caught in the custodial scaffolding of a vast immigration and detention apparatus. It offers an analysis of the display of sovereign and biopolitical power over the lives (and deaths) of detainees (Foucault), as well as the ways these individuals are reduced to “bare life” under the political pretext of an emergency or “state of exception” (Agamben). Our purpose here is both theoretical and practical: to better understand the often hidden agency or impersonal “will” exercised by the immigrant detention system, but also to equip clinicians in these and cognate facilities (e.g., prisons) with the critical tools by which they might better navigate incommensurable paradigms (i.e., care vs. custody) in order to deliver the best care while upholding their ethical duties as a care provider. This is all the more pressing because hospitals are not sanctuaries and given the incursion of federal law enforcement agents, nurses may find themselves conscripted as de facto agents of the state.

Stuart J. Murray shares this essay in response to the 2020 COVID-19 / coronavirus pandemic. Biopolitics—the “politics of life itself”—is a form of governance that represents both the medicalization of politics and the politicization of medicine. But biopolitics is not only about “life.” Within this nexus, theories of biopolitics are useful when we must critique the relation between the co-constitutive state powers that act “to make live” and “to let die.”

Very few studies have focused on the role pornography plays in influencing and modelling sexual desire on the basis of race and ethnicity. Using sexual script theory as an analytic tool, the purpose of this empirical study was to explore indicators of the racialisation of desire based on a sample of gay male pornography users in Québec (Canada) (n = 974). Because gay male pornography use is widespread, and because it is not simply used for the purposes of education and validation but also influences sexual norms and cultural scripts in a social context where sexual racism seems prevalent, this study offers a new perspective on a timely phenomenon. Based on our findings, the final nested linear regression model demonstrates that higher levels of racialised desire attributed to gay male pornography use were associated with the following: being at least 55 years old; having a yearly income of less than $45,000 CAD; using interracial gay male pornography; not primarily using gender-diverse gay male pornographic content (heterosexual, bisexual, transsexual); having higher levels of perceived pressure to conform; having a higher preference for bareback pornography; and having higher levels of acquired sexual knowledge.

Human enhancement technologies raise serious ethical questions about health practices no longer content simply to treat disease, but which now also propose to “optimize” human beings’ physical, cognitive and psychological abilities. These technologies call for a reassessment of our relationship to health, the human body and the body's organic, identity and social functions. In nursing, such considerations are in their infancy. In this paper, we argue for the relevance of critical phenomenology as a way to better understand the ethical issues related to human enhancement technologies (HET). In so doing, we seek to problematize HET and assess their influence on the future development of nursing science and practice. It is difficult to anticipate the concrete effects of HET, we suggest, because these practices reconfigure the meaning of normativity and disorient our conventional ethical landscape. In this context, we argue that the later work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault invites a critical perspective into how techno‐scientific discourses modify our relationship to care, to health and to our own social and corporeal identities. Despite the traditional philosophical opposition between phenomenology and critical theory, we maintain that a hybrid critical phenomenological approach opens new ways to assess the integration of technology and practice. Our analysis understands HET as a process of “hybridization” between technological objects and human subjects. Critical phenomenology thus effectively questions anthropocentric definitions of technology, challenges the dichotomy between curative treatment and enhancement and, finally, prompts valuable reflection on the implications of HET for nursing theory and practice.