Equipment and procedures developed during the past several decades have made the modern intensive care unit (ICU) the hospital's most technologically advanced environment. In terms of patient care, are these advances unmitigated gains? This study aimed to develop a knowledge base of what it means to be critically ill or injured and cared for in technologically intense environments. A lifeworld perspective guided the investigation. Nine unstructured interviews with intensive care patients comprise its data. The qualitative picture uncovered by a phenomenological analysis shows that contradiction and ambivalence characterized the entire care episode. The threat of death overshadows everything and perforates the patient's existence. Four inter-related constituents further elucidated the patients' experiences: the confrontation with death, the encounter with forced dependency, an incomprehensible environment and the ambiguity of being an object of clinical vigilance but invisible at the personal level. Neglect of these issues lead to alienating 'moments' that compromised care. Fixed at the end of a one-eyed clinical gaze, patients described feeling marginalized, subjected to rituals of power, a stranger cared for by a stranger. The roar of technology silences the shifting needs of ill people, muffles the whispers of death and compromises the competence of the caregivers. This study challenges today's caregiving system to develop double vision that would balance clinical competence with a holistic, integrated and comprehensive approach to care. Under such vision, subjectivity and objectivity would be equally honoured, and the broken bonds re-forged between techne, 'the act of nursing', and poesis, 'the art of nursing'.

Modern technology has enabled the use of new forms of information in the care of critically ill patients. In intensive care units (ICUs), technology can simultaneously reduce the lived experience of illness and magnify the objective dimensions of patient care. The aim of this study, based upon two empirical studies, is to find from a philosophical point of view a more comprehensive understanding for the dominance of technology within intensive care. Along with caring for critically ill patients, technology is part of the ICU staff's everyday life. Both technology and caring relationships are of indispensable value. Tools are useful, but technology can never replace the closeness and empathy of the human touch. It is a question of harmonizing the demands of subjectivity with objective signs. The challenge for caregivers in ICU is to know when to heighten the importance of the objective and measurable dimensions provided by technology and when to magnify the patients' lived experiences, and to live and deal with the ambiguity of the technical dimension of care and the human side of nursing.

The qualitative study reported in this article is part of a larger multimethod investigation of child-rearing practices and child-behavior problems in indigenous Sami and majority Norwegian populations in the Sami core area in Northern Norway. In the primary quantitative study we found significant ethnic differences between Sami and Norwegian parents in various areas of child rearing and family structure. Seeking the deeper cultural meaning underlying the parental practices and attitudes that had emerged in the indigenous Sami group, we performed additional indepth interviews. Four parents, selected from the sample of 134 Sami parents, served as subjects. Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological method was used. Data analysis of the interviews identified seven key consitituents of Sami child rearing, which in their interrelationships formed a common structure that constitutes the results of this study. These constituents were: (1) Independence, (2) Hardiness, (3) Autonomy, (4) Closeness/Love, (5) Sami Language, (6) Sami Traditions, and (7) Extended Family. The first four constituents are constituents pertaining to child-rearing values, while the latter three are contextual constituents, related to the promotion of ethnic identity. The study discusses the contemporary dilemmas and challenges that face Sami families in raising their children. It highlights the phenomenon of cultural transition in minority families as an important topic in family research.

Nowadays, erotic behaviour in cyberspace is customary. Online dating is a million dollar industry. Within the everyday politics of erotic-romantic relationships, however, males and females still blush in each other's presence, caress tenderly and trade hickeys. Mainstream social science researches cyber-behaviour voluminously, but totally ignores commonplace fleshy phenomena. Our study probes this discrepancy. What does it mean that virtual sex is winning the current war between desire and technology? Why is the 'flesh' becoming increasingly marginalized? To accomplish our aim, we use a phenomenological-hermeneutic method. Our basic results are two narratives: (1) interpretations about Internet flirting; and (2) descriptive finding about the hickey. Then, in order to reach general conclusions, we interpret the two studies in light of each other. It is a double hermeneutic. The two target phenomena share the similarity of manifesting the same "lovemap," "solicitation and allure." But they also differ sharply. Internet flirting exemplifies "mirror enchantment"; whereas the hickey showcases a phenomenology of the eyes, touch, dialogue and physical presence. We explain Western culture's preference for technology to the neglect of 'live' embodiment as manifesting a repetition of Platonic-Christendom's contempt for the flesh and horror of passionate tenderness. Our culture, on the cusp between modernity and post-modernity, displays dread concerning the flesh by obsessive concerns with safety-security and with modulating excesses. Are not absolute control and perfect security, however, merely illusions? We showcase the positive aspects of seemingly unsafe values: psychological vulnerability, daring, and risk.

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link with popular culture. Fashion, like visual media and music, is an ever-present pivot around which swings this two-way door. Consequently, although the preferences of fashion to reveal or conceal certain bodily regions are transitory, they are never trivial. Each passing fad, as it lingers and fades, pinpoints the crux of its historical moment and thus bears theoretical significance. Insofar as fashion interweaves wardrobe and skin, makeup and hairstyles, perfume, jewelry, and accessories, it mediates the shifting winds of social climate. From the viewpoint of semiotics, this pattern is an intricate system of cultural change and tribal belonging. This study adopts the theoretical rationale of phenomenology to unravel the strands that tie fashion to psychosocialpolitical -historical matters. Maurice Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that the human body is not only an object of observation, but also a meaning-creating subject and a medium of culture. Clothing does not just drape the flesh but extends it. Clothing reveals personal ambitions, social aspirations, and the prevailing zeitgeist. One stellar way to espy the waxing, waning, and displacement of political power is to pay attention to what women are wearing.In each segment of history, fashion indeed singles out some section of the female skin as sensuous. Despite incessant disclaimers, the advertising, entertainment, cosmetic, diet, fitness, and tanning industries massively exploit the female face and torso. Unconscionably, the medical profession colludes with this exploitation. Under the guise of

The weave of a woman's health and beauty is the theme of this study. Its specific focus is the menace to a woman's entire existence that the marriage of late capitalism and the western patriarchy generates. A plethora of commercial enterprises take advantage of the idiosyncratic appearance and uneven distribution of beauty to exploit it and create harm to a woman's health.First, this article intends to depict the siege under which the conglomerate of medical aesthetics, pharmacy, cosmetics, fashion, bodily modification, diet, hair, the spa, and so forth have put women's beauty and heath. These commercial entities huddle under the banner of health, where they collectively reduce beauty to a product, reap massive financial profit, and, in the process, peddle lies that disregard the woman's genuine health and defile her beauty. Women suffer from propaganda, becoming indoctrinated to the viewpoint that no female is beautiful enough.The second intention unmasks the action of our established professions and academic disciplines. Instead of calling the siege to a halt, establishment-paid doers and thinkers shelter it. This study aims to perturb the smug and arrogant complacency of our system-sanctioned disciplines. It provokes a radical reversal in philosophical vision and calls for a veritable metanoia.Each woman is beautiful in her own particular way. But in showing no democratic inclinations, Nature, God, the Buddha, Yahweh, and Allah distribute beauty unevenly. It is preposterous to imagine it otherwise. A woman is not reducible to a sophisticated computer or a highly evolved mammal. She is an earthling whose beauty is subject to the contingencies of frail flesh. Her beauty is fragile.Over the millennia, consequently, women have augmented their appearance by highlighting their best traits and hiding real or imagined flaws. They have adorned themselves with paraphernalia such as body paint,

Who cannot remember the time when whether to give or receive our first real kiss was a living question? Some of us awaited with longing that first touch of another's lips. Others dreaded it with an all-consuming, irrational fear. Still others found ourselves precipitously plunged into the heretofore strange situation. Some of us do not remember it at all. How did we negotiate that unprecedented moment, wherever it happened, whatever our age, whether we were eager, overwhelmed, agonized, graced or stunned?Our respective stories of initiation into kissing are uniquely precious. Are these only cutely trivial, splendid material for poets, storytellers and songwriters, but ill-suited grist for the mill of the science of adolescent development? Or do they harbor common psychological themes? Social science is silent about the Adolescent First Kiss. No empirical study of it can be found in the developmental literature. There is a dearth of published empirical evidence about adolescent kissing in general. Information about kissing at any age is scant in all sexuality texts. Whenever psychologists or sexologists do consider kissing, they reduced it to a single meaning or purpose: a beginning sexual activity, a form of foreplay, a step toward genital intercourse. Does it suffice to define kissing only as a warm-up for the main event, or the appetizer before gourmet lovemaking (Francoeur, 1982; Kilmann, 1984; Mc-Carthy, 1978). Does it not also have personal significance that transcends the subject's role as sexual performer?Several adolescent psychology texts do not even mention kissing (