Search results

Many people who have reached the age of majority still qualify as financial dependents of their parents, and may be registered as dependents on their parents' medical schemes. This poses a practical conundrum, because major persons enjoy complete autonomy over their bodies to choose healthcare services as they please, including informational determination. However, their sensitive health information may end up being disclosed in the accounts rendered to their parents, as main members of medical schemes, thereby breaching their informational privacy, medical confidentiality and possibly also damaging personal relationships. On the other hand, medical schemes must ensure that they strictly manage the business of their hospitalisation to ensure that they can adhere to their contractual and legal medical insurance obligations. Both major but financially dependent patients and medical schemes have good legal grounds to defend their respective positions. In this article, we will analyse and clarify the applicable legal and ethical grounds by considering medical confidentiality, the Protection of Personal Information Act, the Consumer Protection Act and the Medical Schemes Act and rules. We shall conclude with recommendations to accommodate the interests of both parties.

An essay for Amateur Cities on the potentially radical politics of rendering software. The tools are difficult but they are multiplying, Google Sketchup is becoming more sophisticated as a free alternative to other engines. Beyond traditional rendering platforms, Minecraft has already proven its worth as an educational and imaginative platform, allowing players to stretch the bounds of the rules of the universe. It is not clear what a radical utopian rendering culture would look like, nor exactly how these things would act outside of the existing culture of architectural renderings, developing things not to appeal to developers or critics. Sascha Pohflepp's recent work with physics engines, provokes thoughts of a Dr Morel-style world where rendering technology frees us from the bounds of the physical universe rather than constructing more visions of monoliths and shopping centres. Imaging these worlds in the context of cheapening immersive and virtual realities opens up massive possibilities for radically reforming reality and constructing radically different spaces.

Kuwaiti sculptor Sami Mohammed in his reflective show 'Displacement' moves from creating monochrome bronze sculptures that display specific regional catastrophes, toward offering thirty multi-hued contemporary paintings based on the notion of displacement in a global setting. He images the effects of globalization. Sami transitions his work to this "polyglot" culture in which his consciousness links the dissimilarities to synthesize the immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer - the dominant figures of contemporary culture. He reflects on aspects such as "altermodernity," constituting a "translation-oriented" modernity. His intervention, in kaleidoscopic styles and techniques, defines fragments of "medium-space-time." He maps these as he wanders through continents and locations while he positions himself in translatable moving and affected environments. The global stage turns into a platform for an interchange of multitude portrayals of the world, in which Sami's translation of ideas and imageries play a crucial role in dialogue that will give rise to a new shared intelligibility.

This essay takes on the task of reflecting on the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro/a/x, a sociopolitical identity, falls in and out of AfroLatinidad in Latin American and hispanic Caribbean diasporas. In particular, the author is concerned with re-centering Blacknesss in AfroLatinidad in response to the depoliticized usage of this identity. Through a focus on diaspora, movement, and the embodied fact of Blackness, the author argues that when thinking about negro (Black) and negritud (Blackness) from a transnational Spanish Caribbean context, we should remember that AfroLatinidad, or Black Latinidad, is first and foremost about Black lives, embodied experiences, movement, translatability, and untranslatability.

This article examines reworkings of Alice in Wonderland in works by postwar authors writing in German. While writers of both genders use Lewis Carroll's fictional character to question the expressive capacities of language, Rose Ausländer, Sarah Kirsch, Elisabeth Plessen, and Angelika Mechtel optimistically interpret her protean character as essential to poetic creativity and psychological autonomy. H.C. Artmann and Jürg Federspiel, by contrast, associate Alice with a postmodern loss of coherence in identity and narrative form. (CM)

This article analyzes debates over the Site C Dam on the Saaghii Naachii/Peace River in northeastern British Columbia (BC), Canada. After heated debate over the past several decades, construction on the CN$10 billion hydroelectric project—the largest in the province's history—recently commenced. The article focuses on debates over the analysis and adjudication of cumulative effects, and concomitant treaty rights infringement, within the environmental review process. The shortcomings of the regulatory review process used to assess cumulative effects are analyzed in two ways: first, by a conventional academic assessment, and second, by a Dunne-Za teaching of the interrelationships between land, water, and animals in the dam-affected region. Through juxtaposing these two modes of analysis, the article engages with scholarship in political ecology and Indigenous political theory.

This theoretical exploration describes the social and technical features that, together, play a role in the resilience of deviant ideas in contemporary society. It argues, specifically, that two distinct but inter-related spherical processes together contribute to the social persistency of deviant information. The first of these spherical phenomena relates to the fragmentation of the dominant public discussion sphere. The second spherical process of interest relates to information spheres, and specifically as it pertains to a widening of the sphere of legitimate controversy (i.e., the society-wide determination that a topic or object of conversation is worthy of debate). This article argues that these two spherical entities—the constellation of dominate and counter discussion spheres and the information sphere—have a mutualistic and interactive relationship with one another, and that understanding this relationship provides critical insight into the social resilience of deviant information.

This article unpacks the concept of rendering to explain how disposal produces value out of waste materials. Rendering draws attention to the management of meaning attached to waste materials, showing how cultures of environmental sustainability and market capitalism shape their valorisation during disposal. To illustrate this, I draw on ethnographic data from research on the operation of corpse disposal in England. This research reveals three mechanisms of rendering: (1) quantification where economic rationale is entangled with the legal-rational authority of environmental metrics; (2) containment where specific spaces of disposal and the movement between them shape the flow of meaning; and (3) the often hidden labour techniques that become a part of the value of the waste. Rendering provides a fuller account of disposal as a production process, which should be at the heart of sociological work that speaks to the often unbalanced relationship between environment and capitalism.