Search Results (30)

Cariño (care) should be central to equity-centered transformation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education. Yet, relational leadership practices that prioritize culturally grounded care—such as cariño—are often absent in STEM initiatives, leaving unexamined how Women of Color (WOC) enact these practices to advance equity for historically marginalized students. Employing a qualitative methodology grounded in Chicana Feminist Epistemology, in-depth interviews were conducted with five WOC leading a multi-institutional, federally funded STEM initiative. Analysis revealed four interrelated dimensions of what we are calling “Cariño Competence”: (1) relational attunement grounded in moral obligation, (2) protective action when project systems fail students, (3) boundary-setting as care and resistance to extractive labor, and (4) community-sustained resilience through networks of WOC leaders. The findings offer a data-driven theorization of Cariño Competence, capturing how WOC operationalize culturally grounded care as a strategic, protective, and resistive praxis. By centering students as the moral and epistemic anchor of leadership decisions, this study demonstrates how relational, culturally sustaining practices can humanize bureaucratic systems, buffer harm, and advance systemic transformation in STEM higher education. These insights contribute to scholarship on culturally responsive leadership and provide a practical framework for advancing equity, inclusion, and empowerment in higher education contexts. Full article

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into education across all sectors has prompted a proliferating body of scholarship addressing the ethical, social, and environmental implications of these technologies. This narrative literature review synthesises international empirical, conceptual, and policy literature published between 2022 and 2026 to trace the evolving story of ethical concerns surrounding GenAI in education. Drawing on the moral philosophy of consequentialism, particularly the utilitarian ethics of John Stuart Mill, the review analyses six interconnected domains of ethical concern: environmental sustainability and the carbon footprint of AI infrastructure; algorithmic bias, ideological encoding, and the reproduction of misinformation; user dependency and the erosion of learner agency; the displacement of critical and creative thinking; data privacy and surveillance; and the orientation of major GenAI platforms toward profit-driven and capitalistic outcomes. Unlike systematic reviews that privilege methodological replicability, this narrative review foregrounds interpretive synthesis, tracing how the ethical discourse has shifted from early alarm and prohibition toward more nuanced frameworks for responsible integration. The review identifies a consequentialist tension at the heart of the debate: while GenAI offers measurable benefits in personalisation, accessibility, and efficiency, these gains must be weighed against distributed harms that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, the natural environment, and the epistemic foundations of education itself. The review concludes with a set of guidelines for the ethical use of GenAI in educational contexts, grounded in the literature synthesised in the article. Full article

Deaths caused by or connected to exposure to Brazilian prisons are widely acknowledged as frequent and preventable, yet official data fails to capture their scale, causes, and circumstances. To circumvent what official administrative datasets miss, this article examines an original dataset of 1077 criminal case files from 27 Brazilian state courts involving individuals who died between 2017 and 2021 after having been incarcerated. Drawing on the systematic document review of these cases, we analyze sociodemographic characteristics, health information, causes of death, and judicial responses, distinguishing between deaths occurring in custody (“internal”) and after release (“external”). Our findings reveal pervasive omissions in basic demographic and medical information, extensive use of ill-defined causes of death, and a striking absence of investigation in most cases, including deaths under direct state custody. We identify instances of obfuscation and judicial inaction that, together with the absence of reliable administrative data, are likely to sustain institutional ignorance and normalize preventable deaths. This study advances debates on incarceration and health, state accountability, and proposes the concept of prison lethality: the capacity of carceral spaces to increase people’s exposure to health risks and harms, combined with the epistemic practices that shed light on or obfuscate this capacity. Full article

Background/Objectives: Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are rapidly being integrated into healthcare for tasks ranging from clinical documentation to diagnostic support. Current ethical discussions focus predominantly on bias, privacy, and accuracy, leaving three critical governance questions unresolved: What kind of knowledge does an LLM output represent in clinical reasoning? When is a clinician’s or patient’s trust in that output justified? Who bears responsibility when an AI-informed decision leads to patient harm? This study proposes the Epistemic Authority–Trust–Responsibility (ETR) Architecture, a normative conceptual framework that addresses these three questions as an integrated governance challenge. Methods: The framework was developed through normative conceptual analysis—a method that constructs governance proposals by synthesising philosophical principles, ethical theories, and empirical evidence. The literature was identified through structured searches of PubMed, PhilPapers, and EUR-Lex (January 2020–March 2026), drawing on the philosophy of medical knowledge, the ethics of trust and testimony, and the moral philosophy of responsibility. Results: The ETR Architecture produces four outputs: (i) a four-tier classification system that distinguishes LLM outputs—from administrative drafts to clinical evidence claims—and matches each tier to appropriate verification requirements; (ii) the concept of the ‘epistemic placebo’, formally defined as a governance measure that creates a documented appearance of compliance while lacking at least one operative element of genuine oversight; (iii) a model specifying four conditions under which trust in healthcare AI is justified; (iv) four testable hypotheses with associated research designs connecting governance design to trust calibration and patient safety. Conclusions: The 2025–2027 regulatory transition period offers a critical window for shaping how healthcare institutions govern AI. We argue that deploying LLMs without explicitly classifying their outputs and building appropriate oversight risks allows governance norms to be set by technology vendors rather than by evidence-informed, patient-centred policy. Full article

Public debates about psychoactive substances have traditionally been organized around the pharmacology of compounds and the institutional control of supply. In digitally mediated societies, however, the pathways through which people encounter psychoactives are increasingly informational: search engines, recommender systems, social platforms, and—distinctively—conversational AI. These systems do not merely deliver neutral facts. They rank, frame, personalize, and conversationally validate claims in ways that can shape perceived norms, acceptable risk thresholds, and willingness to seek help. This opinion advances the concept of AI-mediated exposure to capture how algorithmic curation and interactive dialogue become upstream determinants of psychoactive-related harms and benefits across the continuum from everyday medicines to non-medical use. From a social-scientific ethics perspective, the central question is not whether AI is “good” or “bad,” but what obligations apply when AI performs interpretive authority in contexts characterized by vulnerability, stigma, and unequal access to trusted expertise. The paper argues for an ethics-centered governance framework grounded in four commitments: epistemic responsibility (how claims are generated, warranted, and communicated), relational responsibility (how users are treated in moments of uncertainty, distress, and stigma), distributive justice (who benefits and who bears risk under unequal conditions), and accountability (how behavior is evaluated, contested, and corrected over time). The aim is to treat conversational AI as a public-facing institution whose design choices must be ethically legible and publicly contestable, oriented toward harm reduction without intensifying surveillance, moralization, or inequity. Full article

This qualitative research examines the systemic dynamics of the abuse of consecrated women in the Loyola Community, analyzing the allegations against the influential sacral artist and theologian Marko Ivan Rupnik within broader scholarly debates on abuse in Catholic ecclesial contexts. Drawing on survivor testimonies, the study explores how clericalism and forms of spiritual authority were instrumentalized within this specific community to produce a sequential chain of harm encompassing sexual, psychological, and spiritual violence against consecrated women. The analysis demonstrates how vulnerance—the systemic capacity to produce harm—is engineered through institutional configurations and theological distortions. This condition normalizes exploitation and silences survivors over extended periods. Moving beyond individual pathology, the study critically examines systemic power asymmetries, hermeneutical injustice, and forms of institutional betrayal that emerge when the protection of religious reputation takes precedence over accountability and human dignity. Finally, the article highlights the significance of public testimony and digital movements such as #NunsToo in disrupting cultures of silence and contributing to the restoration of epistemic justice for survivors. Full article

Existing law provides no settled account of how deepfake sextortion should be characterised and regulated in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, creating uncertainty for charging, adjudication and platform compliance at the point when the Online Safety Act 2023 allocates duties to regulated services under Ofcom oversight. This article responds by analysing and synthesising the Online Safety Act 2023 with the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and residual harassment and communications offences, using doctrinal analysis and normative evaluation to identify points of alignment and misfit. It establishes criteria for identifying synthetic sexual coercion, including the elements that mark threat-stage conduct, the role of fabrication in the wrong, and the conditions under which epistemic harms should be treated as legally relevant within ordinary doctrine. It rejects three propositions: that intimate-image abuse is primarily a publication-based wrong; that an authentic image is a precondition for liability; and that content-led platform duties adequately address coercion before dissemination. This analysis specifies how courts and prosecutors should classify conduct and select offences, how services should operationalise risk assessment and mitigation for threat-stage harms, and which targeted reforms to offence design, platform duties and victim-facing procedures are required to secure predictable protection and effective redress. Full article

Generative AI (GenAI) now produces text, images, audio, and video that can be perceptually convincing at scale and at negligible marginal cost. While public debate often frames the associated harms as “deepfakes” or incremental extensions of misinformation and fraud, this view misses a broader socio-technical shift: GenAI enables synthetic realities—coherent, interactive, and potentially personalized information environments in which content, identity, and social interaction are jointly manufactured and mutually reinforcing. We argue that the most consequential risk is not merely the production of isolated synthetic artifacts, but the progressive erosion of shared epistemic ground and institutional verification practices as synthetic content, synthetic identity, and synthetic interaction become easy to generate and hard to audit. This paper (i) formalizes synthetic reality as a layered stack (content, identity, interaction, institutions), (ii) expands a taxonomy of GenAI harms spanning personal, economic, informational, and socio-technical risks, (iii) articulates the qualitative shifts introduced by GenAI (cost collapse, throughput, customization, micro-segmentation, provenance gaps, and trust erosion), and (iv) synthesizes recent risk realizations (2023–2025) into a compact case bank illustrating how these mechanisms manifest in fraud, elections, harassment, documentation, and supply-chain compromise. We then propose a mitigation stack that treats provenance infrastructure, platform governance, institutional workflow redesign, and public resilience as complementary rather than substitutable, and outline a research agenda focused on measuring epistemic security. We conclude with the Generative AI Paradox: as synthetic media becomes ubiquitous, societies may rationally discount digital evidence altogether, raising the cost of truth for everyday life and for democratic and economic institutions. Full article

There is now widespread use of large language (LLM)-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in academic research and writing. While these are convenient, quick, and output enhancing, they also arguably incur ethical issues, such as questionable authenticity and plagiarism. Here, I explore epistemological aspects of AI use in academic writing and posit that there is evidence for three related pitfalls in AI use that should not be ignored. These include (1) epistemic detriment or harm in terms of illusions of understanding, (2) potential for cognitive dulling or impairment, and (3) AI dependency (both habitual and/or emotional). Thus, any potential infringements of academic ethics aside, AI use in academic writing incurs intrinsic problems that are epistemic in nature. These epistemic downsides call for restraint and moderation beyond regulatory measures to address ethical issues in AI use. Full article

Sexual minorities in Nigeria face systemic discrimination that extends into tertiary institutions, where silence and institutional neglect perpetuate stigma and abuse. This institutional inaction reinforces a culture of impunity and highlights the urgent need to understand the mechanisms through which institutional structures and cultures contribute to the well-being or harm of this vulnerable student population. This qualitative study employed a narrative phenomenological approach to explore the perceptions of policy makers and peer supporters about sexual harassment among sexual minority students in a higher education institution in Nigeria. A purposive sampling technique was used to recruit seven institutional decision-makers on student affairs, and four peer supporters for sexual minority individuals in the institution for in-depth interviews. The analysis revealed a profound disconnect. While the university perceives no problem due to a lack of formal reports, the lived experiences of students point to a cycle of harassment, vulnerability, and institutional betrayal exacerbated by the university’s neglect. The findings expose a cycle where the institution’s chosen method of “seeing” through formal complaints perpetuates epistemic injustice, validating the need for mandatory structural reforms over incremental sensitization to genuinely ensure safety and dignity for all students. Full article

Climate change disinformation has emerged as a substantial issue in the internet age, affecting public perceptions, policy response, and climate actions. This study, grounded on the theoretical frameworks of social epistemology, Habermas’s theory of communicative action, post-truth, and Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge, examines the effect of digital infrastructures, ideological forces, and epistemic power dynamics on climate change disinformation. The meta-synthesis approach in the study reveals the mechanics of climate change disinformation on social media, the erosion of epistemic welfare influenced by post-truth dynamics, and the ideological and algorithmic amplification of disinformation, shedding light on climate change misinformation as well. The findings show that climate change disinformation represents not only a collection of false claims but also a broader epistemic issue sustained by digital environments, power structures, and fossil corporations. Right-wing populist movements, corporate interests, and algorithmic recommendation systems substantially enhance climate skepticism, intensifying political differences and public distrust in scientific authority. The study highlights the necessity of addressing climate change disinformation through improved scientific communication, algorithmic openness, and digital literacy initiatives. Resolving this conundrum requires systemic activities that go beyond fact-checking, emphasizing epistemic justice and legal reforms. Full article

In this study, we examine the complex interplay between psychiatric epistemic power and its institutional applications through the phenomenon of “diagnosis removal” in Turkey. Within the constraints of limited mental health legislation, psychiatric diagnostic categories serve both as markers of risk and as administrative constructs that can be erased when convenient, presenting paradoxical challenges for healthcare providers and patients alike. Through a systematic analysis of case studies and theoretical frameworks, we explore how bureaucratic authorities can misuse psychiatric diagnoses in employment contexts. The study reveals a significant paradox where psychiatric expertise is simultaneously invoked and challenged, potentially undermining both therapeutic relationships and legal rights. This situation arises from a regulatory vacuum in mental health legislation, further exacerbated by a harm-based approach to mental health issues rather than a rights-based one. Key findings demonstrate how the institutional handling of psychiatric diagnoses creates a treatment disincentive effect, where individuals avoid seeking mental health care due to employment concerns. The analysis also reveals how concept creep and harm-based morality contribute to the misappropriation of psychiatric knowledge in administrative contexts. These findings highlight the urgent need for comprehensive mental health legislation that balances individual rights with public health concerns while protecting the integrity of psychiatric practice from institutional misuse, particularly in employment contexts. Full article

This paper brings the analysis of epistemic injustices and the perspective of media philosophy into dialogue by proposing the new concept of medial epistemic injustice. After introducing the topic, the contribution confronts some metaphilosophical stances in light of the recent medial turn in order to suggest that, despite all their controversies, philosophers seem to agree that doing philosophy uniquely involves writing texts. This discussion sets the stage for the claim that institutionally sanctioned philosophy manifests a mono-genreism that only admits one particular kind of written text and a mono-medialism that excludes all media other than writing. Next, the relationship between non-verbal media and philosophy is examined more closely on two levels. First, it is emphasized how academic philosophy leaves no room for corporeal thinking and visual thinking; second, it is illustrated how this may harm some individuals, using the example of deaf people and visually oriented autistic people. The conclusion proposes a provocative Gestalt-switch: What if current “angelic” philosophical knowledge were itself atypical, exhibiting the traits of an aphantasic mind? Full article

The purpose of this research is to uncover consumers’ willingness to pay more (WTPM) and their choice behavior (CB) for organic food products using the Theory of Consumption Values (TCV) while also examining how skepticism toward organic labeling impacts the relationship between WTPM and CB. This study includes 374 survey responses collected using purposive sampling. The statistical software package IBM SPSS 28 was utilized for factor analysis and reliability, while CFA, validity, and structural assessments were carried out using AMOS 28 software. Process Macro 4.1 was employed to study the interaction of skepticism. This study reveals that consumers favor organic foods due to various values: price, social, emotional, epistemic, and conditional. Despite this, only price value directly affects the willingness to pay more. Once committed, consumers are willing to pay more, yet skepticism can hinder this commitment. Marketers should highlight the health, eco-friendliness, and value benefits of organic food products through advertisements and infomercials linking organics to daily life. Emotional appeals can stress the harms of non-organic foods, though skepticism must be managed delicately by gaining consumers’ trust. Full article

While there has been growing scholarly interest in the role of religious literacy in K-12 teacher education, scholarship on how preservice teachers understand religious literacy as an aim of social justice-oriented education remains limited. This empirical case study of one teacher education program in a Canadian university examines the perspectives of preservice teachers and how they view critical religious literacy (CRL) as a means of addressing the potential harms of religious illiteracy. Using empirical data collected in personal interviews and focus groups, this qualitative case study employed philosophical analysis centered on a theoretical framework that includes the concept of epistemic injustice. The data show that preservice educators feel unprepared to engage with religiously diverse students, to navigate issues related to religious diversity, or to respond to the potential epistemic harms of religious illiteracy, such as exclusion, discrimination, or polarization. As such, this paper contends that to reduce the potential epistemic injustices related to religious illiteracy in their programs and in K-12 classrooms, teacher educators ought to include CRL as an educational aim in preservice teacher education. Full article