Browsing by Subject "responsibility"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Becoming Responsible: Conceptual Change in the Emergence of Tort Law
    (2015-12) Goltz, Caleb
    Classic conceptions of how law, politics, and morality relate to one another argue that moral and political goals drive legal innovation and practice. This dissertation argues that the classic conception is flawed because legal practices can supersede the moral and political goals they originally set out to accomplish and this has consequences for political and moral discourses. Through archival research in the little-investigated history of tort law, this project uncovers how the moral concept of responsibility developed in tandem with the legal technology of tort law and how the original asymmetries between the moral concept and the legal technology were leveraged by the legal profession to create a set of far reaching practices that governed independently of moral justification. My dissertation argues that through the legal evolution of the concept of responsibility, tort law acquired its present dual role as both codified law and social discipline.
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    Careful and Creative Craftwork: How CNMs Legitimize Risk and Responsibility Talk with Pregnant People with a BMI of 30 or Higher: A Critical Discourse Analysis
    (2021-05) Martin, Katherine
    Background: Society has placed an enormous amount of the responsibility for reducing risk during pregnancy on the pregnant people themselves. This neoliberal view of individual responsibility especially has affected pregnant people with a BMI of 30 or higher. They have endured many consequences from this, such as emotional distress, loss of autonomy, stigmatization, marginalization, and are blamed for the increased risk to the baby from their body size. Aims: I sought to learn how CNMs legitimize their talk about risk and to gain a critical understanding of how CNMs are reproducing and/or resisting societal discourses of risk and responsibility with pregnant people with BMIs of 30 or higher. Methods: Van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimation (authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization) provided the theoretical framework. In an outpatient clinic, I recorded and transcribed verbatim twelve prenatal appointments where CNMs were implementing a new risk-reduction guideline for patients with a BMI of 30 or higher in pregnancy. Using a critical discourse analysis approach influenced by van Leeuwen, Fairclough, and Gee, the transcripts were coded for van Leeuwen’s categories and subcategories of legitimation and then analyzed. Findings: CNMs predominantly used authorization to legitimize the introduction of the BMI guideline in the appointments. When the CNM would give the weight gain, diet, or exercise recommendations, the CNM would follow a similar sequence in their conversation to the other CNMs in the study. The sequence began with CNM stating the recommendation and then assessing for compliance. If the pregnant person was in compliance, there would be explicit praise. If not, either the pregnant person or the CNM would offer an explanation. Then, CNM would validate the explanation. When the CNMs discussed the risks or reducing the risks of having a BMI of 30 or higher, the CNM would most often use the legitimation category rationalization. Conclusions:. CNMs were both reproducing and resisting ideas of risk and responsibility when discussing the BMI guideline. The CNMs appeared aware of the moral weight of the conversation but did not stray from the guideline’s recommendations. CNMs carefully crafted their language to meet both the needs of their patients and the needs of the organization.
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    Negotiating Responsibility: Ethics of Choice and Care in Postsocialist Oncology Wards in Serbia
    (2023-04) Milic Kolarevic, Milica
    This dissertation problematizes the, often taken for granted, assumptions about individual agency in the realms of the body, disease and medicine. I show that ethics of care, as framed in contemporary Serbian postsocialist context, serves as a unique example of simultaneously coexisting ideas about the assumed neoliberal agency and imagined socialist obedience as both equally necessary for navigating the complex landscape of rapidly privatizing health care in Serbia. To this end, I elaborate concrete interactions occurring in Serbian oncology clinics in order to illuminate the intersections among state and global politics; politicaland legal transformations; and the formal and informal strategies patients and doctors employ on behalf of personal and collective interests. Here, there is a commitment to a complex understanding of ethics of care as people work to navigate the transition from socialism that embodies longstanding ideas about state and citizenship, marked by tropes of, respectively, patronship and obedience to an imagined neoliberal capitalist future articulated in terms of individual responsibility and agency. Finally, I show that the storytelling practice of using nostalgia and resignation as a backdrop for describing hope and hopelessness, marks one of the fundamental tools used to embody “Serbianness” - the skill of melancholic letting go and grieving the lost, both past and future, opportunities.