Relational equality in education: what,how, and why?

Relational equality is broadly understood to be about relating to others as moral equals. I consider three questions of relational equality as applied to education: what, how, and why? Relational equality is important on a macro (societal) level, a meso (school) level structuring of relationships, and a micro (interpersonal relationships) level. I focus on micro level relational equality in schools, and connect theoretical perspectives from two neighbouring fields: education and humanistic counselling, suggesting that we might usefully draw on theory from humanistic counselling to inform our understanding of how egalitarian interpersonal relationships might manifest in education. I emphasise the importance of considering what we are trying to communicate through our behaviour and suggest that in order to treat someone as a moral equal, educators should work towards communicating empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruence. Such an understanding gives a clearer focus for increasing equality than broader understandings of relational equality, and greater scope for challenging inequality than distributive accounts.     

Big data governance of personal health information and challenges to contextual integrity

Pervasive digitization and aggregation of personal health information (PHI), along with artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced analytical techniques, hold promise of improved health and healthcare services. These advances also pose significant data governance challenges for ensuring value for individual, organizational, and societal stakeholders as well as individual privacy and autonomy. Through a case study of a controversial public-private partnership between Royal Free Trust, a National Health Service hospital system in the United Kingdom, and Alphabet’s AI venture DeepMind Health, we investigate how forms of data governance were adapted, as PHI data flowed into new use contexts, to address concerns of contextual integrity, which is violated when personal information collected in one use context moves to another use context with different norms of appropriateness.     

AAP-BISG book industry data

Book publishing is a relatively small and extremely volatile industry. For this reason, it is difficult to collect data and formulate statistics. This article describes the statistics program of the Association of American Publishers and the Trends Program of the Book Industry Study Group, including information on how data are collected, organized, and published. Measures taken to ensure confidentiality are also described.