Samantha Noll

Washington State University | WSU · School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs

This chapter is an introduction to the volume on the legacy of Paul B. Thompson. It also provides an overview of each of the chapters in this volume, exploring how they critically engage with Thompson’s work. This is important for understanding his legacy, as each highlights how Thompson’s research impacts current and future work on some of the mos...

Cities face unprecedented challenges in the 21st century, as this age is marked by drastic economic, environmental, and cultural shifts. These issues push stakeholder groups to leverage land use and design in ways aimed at mitigating harms. City planning commissions are tasked with developing and implementing these plans. But not all community chan...

Many chemicals and toxicants are released into our ecosystem and environment every day, which can cause harmful effects on human populations. Agricultural compounds are used in most crop production and have been shown to cause negative health impacts, including effects on reproduction and other pathologies. Although these chemicals can be helpful f...

Agriculture is one of the oldest and most transformative of human activities, performed in social contexts. Due to the complexity of social structures, the lived experiences of farmers are deeply influenced by gendered conventions. The world is dependent on women’s work but there is a legacy of their contributions not being equally valued. This cha...

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science contains twenty-seven freshly written chapters to give the reader a panoramic introduction to philosophical issues in the practice of political science. Simultaneously, it advances the field of Philosophy of Political Science by creating a fruitful meeting place where both philosophers and prac...

This paper explores the ethical dimensions of lionfish removal and provides an argument supporting hunting lionfish for consumption. Lionfish are an invasive species found around the world. Their presence has fueled management strategies that predominantly rely on promoting human predation and consumption. We apply rights-based ethics, utilitarian...

This chapter explores the ethical dimensions of one of the most contentious applications of agricultural biotechnology: the genetic modification of food products. While the development of genetically modified breeds and seeds has many advantages, the public has consistently expressed worries concerning the adoption of genetically modified organisms...

Today the relationship between food and cities is revitalizing urban areas, as food production practices transform locales one block and one neighborhood at a time. The key catalysts of this transformation include the commitment to address the root causes of inequalities within food systems and the desire to increase local control over food systems...

Can investing in women’s agriculture increase productivity? This paper argues that it can. We assess climate and gender bias impacts on women’s production in the global South and North and challenge the male model of agricultural development to argue further that women’s farming approaches can be more sustainable. Level-based analysis (global, regi...

Can investing in women’s agriculture increase productivity? This paper argues that it can. We assess climate impacts and gender bias on women’s production in the global South and North and challenge the male model of agricultural development to argue further that women’s farming approaches can be more sustainable. Level-based analysis (global, regi...

Climate change continues to have recognizable impacts across the globe, as weather patterns shift and impacts accumulate and intensify. In this wider context, urban areas face significant challenges as they attempt to mitigate dynamic changes at the local level — changes such as those caused by intensifying weather events, the disruption of critica...

This paper explores the tensions between two disparate approaches to addressing hunger worldwide: Food security and food sovereignty. Food security generally focuses on ensuring that people have economic and physical access to safe and nutritious food, while food sovereignty (or food justice) movements prioritize the right of people and communities...

Local food projects are steadily becoming a part of contemporary food systems and take on many forms. They are typically analyzed using an ethical, or socio-political, lens. Food focused initiatives can be understood as strategies to achieve ethical change in food systems and, as such, ethics play a guiding role. But local food is also a social mov...

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising forty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics: Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities; C...

Recently, there has been a concerted effort to shift bioethics’ traditional focus from clinical and research settings to more robustly engage with issues of justice and health equity. This broader bioethics agenda seeks to embed health related issues in wider institutional and cultural contexts and to help develop fair policies. In this paper, we a...

The aim of this chapter is to explore the tension between increasing crop yields and cultivating ecological resilience, in light of climate change, and to provide tools that may be helpful when making management decisions on the ground. Specifically, in the first section of the chapter I introduce readers to the growing problem of human and nonhuma...

Books and articles supporting a local food movement have become commonplace, with popular authors such as Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Pollan espousing the virtues of eating locally. At the same time, others have critiqued the local food movement as failing to achieve its stated ends or as having negative unintended consequences....

Urban residents have the potential to play a key role in helping to facilitate ecological resilience of wilderness areas and ecosystems beyond the city by helping ensure the migration of nonhuman climate refugee populations. Three ethical frameworks related to this issue could determine whether we have an ethical duty to help nonhuman climate refug...

This paper turns to pragmatism for strategies to assist with the timely implementation of conservation efforts, as it provides tools to unfreeze policy decision making so that stakeholders, from farmers to wildlife organizations, can readily address impacts associated with climate induced non-human migration. The first section of this essay introdu...

Local food initiatives are steadily becoming a part of contemporary cities around the world and can take on many forms. While some of these initiatives are concerned with providing consumers with farm-fresh produce, a growing portion are concerned with increasing the food sovereignty of marginalized urban communities. This chapter provides an analy...

Climate change is increasingly impacting agricultural production and methods across the globe. Indeed, scientists, farmers, NGOs, and governments are currently working hard to determine the best ways to address the negative impacts of changing weather patterns on crop yields, and thus impacts to global food security, how to curve agriculture’s cont...

The contours of sustainable systems are defined according to communities’ goals and values. As researchers shift from sustainability-in-the-abstract to sustainability-as-a-concrete-research-challenge, democratic deliberation is essential for ensuring that communities determine what systems ought to be sustained. Discourse analysis of dialogue with...

This chapter begins with a brief definition of "agriculture". It discusses the scope of farming practices and the varied nature of scientific disciplines that focus on improving these practices. The chapter then provides a general overview of agricultural science by describing how agricultural science is not one science, but a multidisciplinary fie...

This paper situates itself within the conversations about food security and sovereignty. Food security requires that 'all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life' (FAO 1996). Food sovereignty focuses on the right of...

The skill of calling animals to fight brings up unique ethical questions. Mages usually interact with animals in two ways: First, the author can summon animals by using animal-summoning or monster-summoning spells. Second, a mage can summon animals to be familiar. A familiar was once a normal animal that has been transformed into magical beast with...

The local food movement has been touted by some as a profoundly effective way to make our food system become more healthy, just, and sustainable. Others have criticized the movement as being less a challenge to the status quo and more an easily co-opted support offering just another set of choices for affluent consumers. In this paper, we analyze t...

The local food movement is, increasingly, becoming a part of the modern American landscape. However, while it appears that the local food movement is gaining momentum, one could question whether or not this trend is, in fact, politically and socially sustainable. Is local food just another trend that will fade away or is it here to stay? One way to...

In this paper, I outline valuable insights that current theorists working in urban environmental ethics can gain from the analysis of nineteenth century urban contexts. Specifically, I argue that an analysis of urban areas during this time reveals two sets of competing metaphysical commitments that, when accepted, shift both the design of urban env...

Ethics and justice are highly influential in decision making as stakeholders invariably bring different ethical frameworks, values, and conceptions to the table when making group decisions, such as those regarding policy. For this reason, one goal of this article is to improve reader's understanding of common ethical approaches and conceptions of j...

It is easy enough to think about preparing food, growing food, and eating food as straight-forward affairs, or mere biological necessities. However, these processes are wrapped up in social relations, personal identities, and political power. Broadly critical frameworks can help pull apart the varying dimensions in this complex and dynamic relation...

Within this paper, I critique the history of the modification of the broiler chicken through selective breeding and possible future genetic modification. I utilize Margaret Atwood’s fictitious depiction of genetically engineered chickens, from her novel Oryx and Crake, in order to forward the argument that modifications that eliminate animal telos...