By Kees Schuyt

The growing attention for scientific integrity is part of a wider culture of professionalization and accountability − which appears to signal that integrity is no longer self-evident as a core value of professional conduct. Examples abound. But what is scientific integrity? Why does it matter? What are the issues, and what is at stake? What do we know about the nature and scope of violations of scientific integrity? In this book, Kees Schuyt explores the concept of integrity, describes various cases of fraud and other types of dishonest behaviour in research practice, and offers a reflective and pragmatic framework for handling transgressions against the rules of academic research. Drawing on a wide variety of historical examples, Schuyt looks into matters ranging from the codification of scientific integrity to the difference between misconduct, questionable practices, and honest errors, and the uses and abuses of the notion of plagiarism. Last but not least, he considers how the norms and values of academic research can best be transmitted to students and new generations of researchers.

Leiden; Boston: Leiden University Press, 2019. 183p.

By Carlos Alberto Sánchez

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible.

Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2020. 171p.

Edited by Trudie Knijn and Dorota Lepianka

Justice and Vulnerability in Europe contributes to the understanding of justice in Europe from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. It shows that Europe is falling short of its ideals and justice-related ambitions by repeatedly failing its most vulnerable populations.

Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. 288p.

By John Stuart Mill.

“There are few circumstances among those which make up the present condition of human knowledge, more unlike what might have been expected, or more significant of the backward state in which speculation on the most important subjects still lingers, than the little progress which has been made in the decision of the controversy respecting the criterion of right and wrong.” Reprinted From 'Fraser's Magazine' Seventh Edition.

London. Longmans, Green, And Co. 1879. 71p.

By Francis Bacon.

“But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men take in finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural, though corrupt love, of the lie itself.”

A Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint. London (1696) 169p.

By Adam Smith.

Adam Smith didn’t just think about money and markets. He was also much taken with the moral sentiments of humans, what drove them to be human. This books shows that he saw much more to humans than simply “self interest” the one instinct that dominates his Wealth of Nations. This book in contrast is a pioneering essay on human psychology, good and bad.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. 1759.

By S, Giora Shoham.

This book is one of the great 20th century classics on the historical, cultural and social role of stigma in societies everywhere, but especially Western Society. Shoham, his erudition on display like no other, explores what it means to be stigmatized and how society becomes differentiated between "us" and "them." The case study on Jean Genet, famous playwright and infamous thief, is an essay of genius, surpassing, some say, Sartre's Saint Genet. You will think about crime, criminals, the police who chase them and the judges who judge them in a very different light after you've read this book.

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers 2013. .

By Jolanta Sikorska-Kulesza.

Prostitution in the Kingdom of Poland in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Julita Mastalerz. “Relevant literature portrays the 19th century as a period of an unprecedented development of prostitution. Brothel houses and streetwalkers were an integral part of capitalist urban landscape. According to contemporaneous observers of social life, women rendering paid sexual services in European metropolises such as London, Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg were counted by the thousand, or even hundreds of thousand, and were regularly availed of by married and single men.”

Peter Lang (2020) 358p.

Edited by Sally Sheldon And Kaye Wellings

In a debate where seemingly even the most basic empirical claims are disputed, this book offers a clear and succinct account of the relevant evidence. Where does public opinion stand with regard to the permissibility of abortion? What would be the likely impact of decriminalisation on women’s health? Would it remove unnecessary restrictions on best clinical practice resulting in the improvement of services, or would it rather amount to dangerous deregulation, removing essential safeguards against harmful practice? And what lessons can we learn from the experience of other countries regarding the role played by criminal prohibitions on abortion and the likely impact of their removal?

University of Bristol Press. (2020) 112 pages.

Edited by Lora Anne Viola and Pawel Laidler.

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, provide greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, sociohistorical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific sociopolitical contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust—rather than trust—can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the interrelationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 282p.

By Loren Daniel Glass and Charles Francis Williams.

Over the course of the nineteenth century in both Europe and the United States, the state usurped the traditional authority of the church in regulating sexual expression and behavior. In the same century philosophers of classical liberalism identified that state function as a threat to individual liberty. Since then, liberalism has provided the framework for debates over obscenity around the globe. But liberalism has recently been under siege, on the one side from postmodern thinkers skeptical about its andro- and ethnocentric assumptions, and on the other side from religious thinkers doubtful of the moral integrity of the Enlightenment project writ large. The principal challenge for those who conduct academic work in this realm is to formulate new models of research and analysis appropriate to understanding and evaluating speech in the present-day public sphere. Toward those ends, Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism contains a selection of essays and interventions by prominent authors and artists in a variety of disciplines and media. These writings, taken as a whole, put recent developments into historical and global contexts and chart possible futures for a debate that promises to persist well into the new millennium.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011. 181p.

By Patrick W. Galbraith.

Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood. Based on ongoing fieldwork in the Akihabara neighborhood of Tokyo, specifically a targeted subproject from 2014 to 2015, this book explores how and to what effect lines are drawn by producers, players and critics of bishōjo games. Focusing on interactions with manga/anime-style characters, these adult computer games often feature explicit sex acts. Noting that the bishōjo, or “cute girl characters,” in these games can appear quite young, legal actions have been taken in a number of countries to categorize and prohibit the content as child abuse material. In response to the risk of manga/anime images encouraging underage sexualization, lawmakers are moved to regulate them in the same way as photographs or film; triggered by images, the line between fiction and reality is erased, or redrawn to collapse forms together. While Japanese politicians continue to debate a similar course, sustained engagement with bishōjo game producers, players and critics sheds light on alternative movement. Manga/anime-style characters trigger an affective response in interactions with their creators and users, who draw and negotiate lines between fiction and reality. Interacting with characters and one another, bishōjo gamers draw lines between what is fictional and what is “real,” even as the characters are real in their own right and relations with them are extended beyond games; some even see the characters as significant others and refer to them using intimate terms of commitment such as “my wife.” This book argues for understanding the everyday practice of insisting on lines, or drawing a line between humans and nonhumans and orienting oneself toward the drawn lines of the latter, as demonstrating an emergent form of ethics. Occurring individually and socially in both private and public spaces, the response to fictional characters not only discourages harming human beings, but also supports life in more-than-human worlds. For many in contemporary Japan and beyond, interactions and relations with fictional and real others are nothing short of lifelines.

Stockholm, SWE: Stockholm University Press, 2021. 358p.