To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Conception pour AM.

Journal articles on the topic 'Conception pour AM'

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles

Select a source type:

Consult the top 21 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Conception pour AM.'

Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.

You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.

Browse journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.

1

Blair, Kelsey, and Megan Johnson. "“I am Invictus”: Parasport, the Invictus Games, and Disability Performance in Canada." Theatre Research in Canada 43, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 96–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/tric.43.1.a05.

Full text
Abstract:
En septembre 2017, les Jeux Invictus – une rencontre sportive internationale pour le personnel militaire blessé ou malade – ont eu lieu au Canada, dans la ville de Toronto. Cet article revient sur l’évènement pour examiner la façon dont la performance parasportive, les conceptions de la blessure, de la maladie et du handicap, ainsi que la logique de l’État-nation et de l’armée s’entremêlent. Les rencontres parasportives comme les Jeux Invictus mobilisent des représentations de l’invalidité et du handicap; elles orientent l’opinion publique sur des questions liées à l’invalidité, matérialisent des formes communautaires réelles ou imaginées et donnent l’occasion aux individus de participer à des activités physiques. Abordant les Jeux Invictus par la lorgnette des études sur le théâtre et la performance, cet article met au jour les courants idéologiques complexes et souvent opposés qui les traversent. En particulier, l’article s’appuie sur le concept des écologies de la performance pour montrer que le parasport est une niche sous-théorisée de l’écologie de la performance en contexte d’invalidité au Canada. Par une analyse de la performance, l’article éclaire la logique tortueuse inscrite au cœur des Jeux Invictus, notamment leur lien avec le complexe militaro-industriel et une conception ambivalente de l’invalidité, de la blessure et de la maladie. En définitive, l’article affirme l’importance de nouer un dialogue avec la logique contradictoire des Jeux Invictus au lieu de la désavouer, car, se faisant, on ouvre à la recherche de nouvelles voies pour éclairer les complexités de cette écologie de la performance au dynamisme renversant.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
2

Jucquois, Guy. "Monosyllabisme Originel, Fiction Et Reconstruction." Diachronica 8, no. 1 (January 1, 1991): 17–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.8.1.03juc.

Full text
Abstract:
SUMMARY The monosyllablic character of language is often presented as reflecting its original trait. This tendency seems to underlie much of the earlier conceptions of the origin of language as well as the more recent glottogonic theories, in which, with variations, an original system of monosyllabic cries ('calls') is hypothesized which evolves, parallel with humanity, into a more complex system of communication. This view reappears in the so-called 'constructed' or artificial languages whose goal it has been to facilitate international communication through a simplified system. Finally, in the reconstructed natural languages, the procedures usually lead to the hypostatization of an initial monosyllabic root. In the different sectors of linguistic study, it appears that a linear evolution from the simple to the complex is regularly implied, which finds its expression in the passage of language structures from an original monosyllabism to a subsequent polysyllabism. RÉSUMÉ Le caractere monosyllabique du langage est souvent presente comme etant un trait originel. Cette tendance se vérifie aussi bien dans les conceptions du passé sur les origines du langage que dans les theories contemporaines ou on pose toujours, avec des variantes, un systeme originel de cris monosyllabiques se complexifiant ensuite, parallélement avec l'évolution humaine. Cette conception se retrouve egalement dans les langues constitutes et artificielles dont le but explicite serait une communication meilleure, mais plus simplifiee entre les hommes. Enfin, dans les langues reconstruites, naturelles, les procédures aboutissent, pour des families de langues fort diverses, à poser un mono-syllabisme radical initial. Dans les différents secteurs des études linguistiques, on semble toujours supposer une évolution linéaire, du simple au complexe, qui s'exprimerait par le passage d'un monosyllabisme premier à un polysyl-labisme secondaire. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Die einsilbige Beschaffenheit der Sprache wird oft als die ursprüngliche dargestellt. Die Neigung bestäigt sich sowohl in den fruheren Vorstellungen vom Sprachursprung als auch in den heutigen glottogonischen Theorien, in denen man stets — mit Abwandlungen — mit einem ursprunglichen System monosyllabischer Schreie operiert, die anschließend komplexer werden, und zwar parallel zur Entwicklung der Menschheit. Diese Auffassung findet sich ebenfalls in den konstruierten und küinstlichen Sprachen, deren ausdrückliches Ziel eine verbesserte, wenngleich weit vereinfachte, Kommunikation unter den Menschen ist. Schlieélich, was die rekonstruierten natürlichen Sprachen an-geht, so nimmt man am Ende immer an — und zwar in den verschiedenartigsten Sprachen —, daG eine ursprunglich einsilbige Wurzel anzusetzen sei. In den verschiedensten Sparten der Sprachforschung scheint man immer noch eine geradlinige Entwicklung vom Einfachen zum Komplexen anzusetzen, die ihren Ausdruck in der Annahme eines primaren Monosyllabismus findet, der anschließend in einen Polysyllabismus mündet.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
3

Bell, Daniel A., and Yara Boehlen. "Une perspective confucéenne sur les droits de propriété." Revue de philosophie économique Vol. 24, no. 1 (August 28, 2023): 67–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/rpec.241.0067.

Full text
Abstract:
Tout au long de l’histoire de la Chine, les confucéens se sont opposés au contrôle rigoureux du gouvernement légiste et ont mis en garde contre les effets négatifs de l’intervention de l’État dans l’économie. Cela ne s’est toutefois pas traduit par l’approbation d’un régime de droits de propriété privée sans entraves. Du point de vue confucéen, l’État a l’obligation de garantir les conditions du bien-être matériel de base de la population et celle-ci est prioritaire sur la promotion du marché libre, ce qui devrait inspirer un régime justifiable de droits de propriété. Historiquement, les confucéens ont plaidé pour l’abolition des monopoles d’État sur le sel et sur le fer sous la dynastie Han, tandis que le système du « champ de captage » chez Mencius a permis à l’État d’attribuer des terres sur des fondements égalitaires. Ces exemples montrent que l’objectif principal des penseurs confucéens n’est ni un contrôle absolu de l’État sur l’économie, ni une forme de marché libre, mais plutôt un mixte pour le bien-être de la population. De nos jours, une attention particulière est accordée aux valeurs confucéennes dans les régimes de droits de propriété en Asie de l’Est et elle semble inciter les États à redistribuer les ressources de façon égalitaire, par exemple sous la forme d’une portion importante de logements sociaux, à Singapour et à Hong Kong ou, dans le secteur agricole en Chine, de la renaissance moderne du système du « champ de captage » de Mencius sous Deng Xiaoping. Dans ces exemples, l’accès de la population à la terre et au logement sont les garanties de son bien-être matériel basique : c’est ce qui a été privilégié sur un marché immobilier libre (voire libertarien). Une valeur centrale pour la garantie du bien-être matériel de base était le fait Mencius et Confucius, qui considèrent la survie du peuple comme condition préalable nécessaire au bon fonctionnement de tout ordre étatique. Alors que l’idée selon laquelle le confucianisme s’oppose en fait aux droits de propriété privée est largement répandue, cet essai suggère que le confucianisme propose plutôt sa propre théorie de la propriété. Au lieu de contester les droits de propriété en tant que tels, il remet en question les conceptualisations européennes et américaines de ces droits. Fondamentalement, la théorie confucéenne de la propriété considère que les droits de propriété sont « particularistes » et relatifs à d’autres considérations sociales. Par conséquent, ces droits peuvent primer sur les droits individuels, si besoin est. Cette notion confucéenne de la propriété peut non seulement être considérée comme une alternative à la conception libérale occidentale de la propriété, mais elle peut également offrir un point de départ viable pour examiner une multitude de notions de droit façonnées dans un contexte international. S’éloigner d’une notion centrée sur l’Occident et prendre en compte d’autres théories, comme le confucianisme, peut s’avérer crucial non seulement pour l’État chinois dans l’élaboration de ses lois et de ses règlements, mais aussi pour la communauté internationale lors de la rédaction d’accords véritablement internationaux. Cet essai montre comment les droits de propriété de type confucéen ont influencé le fonctionnement des pays d’Asie de l’Est d’héritage confucéen et continuent de le faire. Classification JEL  : P14
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
4

Stein, Dieter. "Semantic Similarity between Categories as a Vehicle of Linguistic Change." Diachronica 5, no. 1-2 (January 1, 1988): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.5.1-2.02ste.

Full text
Abstract:
SUMMARY The paper discusses three instances of linguistic change from the history of English which seem to involve semantic similarity between linguistic categories in the pattern of internal evolution. One case concerns the generalization of a personal ending within the same person category across number categories. The second one deals with the transfer of a syntactic strategy from one person category to a semantically similar one, also involving the second person category, and the third example tries to account for the sequential diffusion of a syntactic innovation (rise of do periphrasis) through different types of w/z-question by appealing to a notion of semantic similarity to the original or most weighted context of the innovation (yes-no questions). It is argued that although semantic similarity defines directionalities of syntactic and morphological change, it is dependent on the operation of further forces, such as a motivation to generalize, to become operative in linguistic change. The paper includes a general discussion of theoretical difficulties associated with the notion 'similarity'. RÉSUMÉ L'expose discute trois cas de changement linguistique dans l'histoire de la langue anglaise dont I'évolution interne est caractérisée par des effets d'une dimension de ressemblance sémantique entre des catégories linguistiques. Le premier exemple concerne la généralisation d'un suffixe personnel d'une catégorie de nombre k l'autre au sein de la meme catégorie personnelle. Le deuxième se réfere k la transmission d'une stratégic syntaxique d'une categorie personnelle a un autre, qui lui ressemble sur le plan sémantique, en utilisant la deuxième personne. Dans le troisieme exemple donc il est essayé de qualifier la diffusion d'innovations syntaxiques, qui succèdent 1'un k l'autre (la naissance de la périphrase de do), k cause des types divers de questions partielles (qui commencent par wh) par une conception de ressemblance sémantique, de contexte de depart de l'innovation ou de contexte auquel est attachee l'importance la plus grande (questions totales). H est argumente que, bien que la ressemblance semantique determine les directionalites des changements syntaxiques et morphologiques, la ressemblance est en plus dependante d'autres facteurs (comme par exemple de la generalisation de la motivation) pour en effet declencher un procès de changment linguistique. L'expose traite egalement quelques difficultes theoriques qui resultent du concept psychologique de 'ressemblance'. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Der Aufsatz diskutiert drei Falle von Sprachwandel aus der Geschichte der englischen Sprache, deren interne Entwicklung sas Wirken einer Dimension semantischer Ahnlichkeit zwischen linguistischen Kategorien nahelegt. Das erste Beispiel betrifft die Generalisierung einer Personen-Endung inner-halb ein- und derselben Personenkategorie von einer Numeruskategorie zu einer anderen. Das zweite bezieht sich auf die Obertragung einer syntaktischen Strategic von einer Personenkategorie auf eine semantisch ahnliche unter Einbeziehung der zweiten Person. Im dritten Beispiel schließlich wird ver-sucht, die Diffusion von zeitlich aufeinanderfolgenden syntaktischen Innova-tionen (das Entstehen der doPeriphrase) durch die verschiedenen Typen von wh-Fragen durch ein Konzept semantischer Ahnlichkeit zum Ausgangskontext der innovation oder zum am starksten gewichteten Kontext zu erklaren (yes-no Fragen). Es wird argumentiert, daß, obwohl die semantische Ahnlichkeit die Direktionalitaten syntaktischer und morphologischer Veranderungen bestimmt, diese zusatzlich von weiteren Faktoren abhängig ist (wie z.B. von der Generalisierung der Motivation), um einen Sprachwandelprozess tatsachlich auszulosen. Der Aufsatz geht auch kurz auf die theoretischen Schwierigkeiten ein, die mit dem psychologischen Begriff 'Ahnlichkeit' verbunden sind.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
5

Mekonnen, Teweldemedhn, and Leul Berhe. "ASSESSMENT OF EFFICIENCY OF ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION SERVICE IN CATTLE PRODUCTION IN THE WESTERN ZONE OF TIGRAY REGION, ETHIOPIA." Slovak Journal of Animal Science 56, no. 3 (September 29, 2023): 29–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.36547/sjas.829.

Full text
Abstract:
The study was conducted before the ignition (before October 2020) of the war in Tigray Region, Ethiopia. Artificial insemination (AI) is the first generation biotechnology and is one of the assisted reproductive techniques (ART) that greatly plays for a faster genetic improvement of farm animals. Though AI was implemented in cattle crossbreeding for many decades in Ethiopia, there is quite insignificant national output of crossbred cattle population (1.54 %). The aim of the survey was to assess the efficiency of AI service in cattle production in the Western Zone of Tigray Region, Ethiopia. Twenty (20) Kebeles and 353 small-scale farmers were purposively involved in the household face-to-face survey interview. The data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), and summarized by mean, frequency and percentages. The survey indicated that the existing reproductive efficiency of cattle AI service in the Western Zone of Tigray Region, Ethiopia was extremely poor. The mean number of services per conception (NSC) was very high that could be due to mainly inappropriate heat detections. The recommended, acceptable and excellent grade of NSC fall in the range of 1 − 1.7. The overall conception rate at first insemination (CRFI) was also very poor (20.4 %) and thus calving rate (CR) was poor (20.5 %). About one-third (33.4 %) of the respondents indicated that cows and heifers exhibited heat in 0:01 − 6:00 am of the day. About 30.9 % and 28.6 % of the respondents reported that their cows and heifers were inseminated in 9 − 12 hours and 4 − 8 hours after the onset of heat, respectively. The majority (70.8 %) of the respondents did not practice controlled mating and breeding, and the first preference of 50.1 % of the respondents was natural mating. The most common source of bulls for about 34.3 % of the respondents was from neighbors and followed by own bred bulls (30.0 %). Cattle AI feasibility study and identification of AI strategic interventions should be the first focus to improve the existing poor AI efficiency of the study area.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
6

Adamu, S., M. Abdulrashid, M. Zahraddeen, and O. M. Daudu. "Yields and milk characteristics of Bunaji, Wadara and Friesian X Bunaji cows fed Dietary baobab fruit pulp meal under tropical environment." Nigerian Journal of Animal Production 50, no. 1 (December 6, 2023): 81–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.51791/njap.v50i1.3906.

Full text
Abstract:
The research was conducted at Dairy Research and Development Centre (DRDC) of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi. The study was carried out to evaluate the effect of organic antioxidant (baobab fruit pulp meal) supplementation on milk production pattern of lactating Bunaji, Wadara and Friesian x Bunaji cattle. A total of 24 clinically healthy lactating cows on their first and second parity were used for the research. The experimental cows were allotted to four treatment levels: 0.00, 5.30, 10.60 and 15.90 kg/100kg diet (diet 0, diet 1, diet 2 and diet 3) baobab fruit pulp meal (BFPM) with six animals per treatment in a Completely Randomized Design. The treatments were administered once daily (10 to 20 minutes) before milking and lasted for 186 days. However, milking was done manually once daily (morning) at 7:30 to 8:30 am by the same collector consistently up to the end of the data collection as described above. Moreover, milk yield parameters (initial milk yield (IMY), peak milk yield (PMY), decline milk yield (DOY), total milk yield (TMY) and average daily milk yield (ADMY) (L/head/day) of the cow was recorded dailyon record sheet and measured in litres using calibrated rubber buckets and the data was subjected to analysis of variance of SPSS software. The milk yield parameters differed (P<0.001) significantly and shared similar characteristics pattern, in both the main and in interaction effects. There was significant (P<0.001) difference on breed effect along milk yield parameters measured. The Friesian x Bunaji Crosses had recorded significant higher total milk yield (2,529.60 litres), followed by Wadara breed (1,737.24 litres) while Bunaji recorded the lowest (1,644.44 litres) yield respectively. Second parity had recorded higher total milk yield (2,018.71 litres) than first parity (1,897.21 litres). Experimental animals under diet 3 (15.90 kg/ 100kg diet) had produced large volume of total milk yield as compared to other treatment levels. The control group produced lower total milk yield. In conclusion, BFPM supplementations significantly improved milk production yield from (1,413.60 to 2,057. 16 litres). It is recommended that, under tropical conditions BFPM as organic antioxidants with high concentrations of vitamin C, could be supplemented in the diet of lactating cows up to 15.90 kg/100 kg diet in order to improve milk production performances under tropical conditions. La recherche a été menée au Centre de Recherche et de Développement des produits Laitiers (CRDL) de l'Université Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Bauchi. L'étude a été réalisée pour évaluer l'effet d'une supplémentation en antioxydants organiques (farine de pulpe de fruit de baobab) sur le modèle de production laitière des bovins Bunaji, Wadara et Friesian x Bunaji en lactation. Au total, 24 vaches en lactation cliniquement saines à leurs premières et deuxièmes mises basses ont été utilisées pour la recherche. Les vaches expérimentales ont été affectées à quatre niveaux de traitement : 0,00, 5,30, 10,60 et 15,90 kg/100 kg de régime (régime 0, régime 1, régime 2 et régime 3) de farine de pulpe de fruit de baobab (FPFB) avec six animaux par traitement dans un système complètement randomisé. Conception. Les traitements ont été administrés une fois par jour (10 à 20 minutes) avant la traite et ont duré 186 jours. Cependant, la traite était effectuée manuellement une fois par jour (matin) entre 7h30 et 8h30 par le même collecteur, de manière constante jusqu'à la fin de la collecte de données, comme décrit ci-dessus. De plus, les paramètres de production laitière (rendement laitier initial (RLI), rendement laitier maximal (RLM), rendement laitier en baisse (RLB), rendement laitier total (RLT) et rendement laitier journalier moyen (RLJM) (L/tête/jour) de la vache a été enregistrée quotidiennement sur une feuille d'enregistrement et mesurée en litres à l'aide de seaux en caoutchouc calibrés et les données ont été soumises à une analyse de variance du logiciel SPSS. Les paramètres de production de lait différaient de manière significative (P <0,001) et partageaient des caractéristiques similaires, à la fois dans la principale et dans la dans les effets d'interaction. Il y avait une différence significative (P <0,001) sur l'effet de la race en fonction des paramètres de production de lait mesurés. Les croisements Friesian x Bunaji avaient enregistré une production de lait totale significativement plus élevée (2 529,60 litres), suivis de la race Wadara (1 737,24 litres) tandis que Bunaji enregistrait respectivement le rendement le plus faible (1 644,44 litres). La deuxième parité avait enregistré un rendement total en lait plus élevé (2 018,71 litres) que la première parité (1 897,21 litres). Les animaux expérimentaux soumis au régime 3 (15,90 kg/100 kg de régime) avaient produit un volume important de rendement laitier total car par rapport aux autres niveaux de traitement. Le groupe témoin a produit une production laitière totale inférieure. En conclusion, les supplémentations en FPFB ont significativement amélioré le rendement de production laitière de (1 413,60 à 2 057,16 litres). Il est recommandé que, dans des conditions tropicales, le FPFB, en tant qu'antioxydant organique à forte concentration en vitamine C, puisse être complété dans l'alimentation des vaches en lactation jusqu'à 15,90 kg/100 kg de ration afin d'améliorer les performances de production laitière dans des conditions tropicales.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
7

Grassl, Fabian F. "Atheism? A Critical Analysis Stephen E. Parrish." European Journal of Theology 30, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 232–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/ejt2021.1.024.gras.

Full text
Abstract:
Summary Parrish offers a fine in-depth analysis of the arguably strongest worldview in the West, naturalism. He puts its philosophical underpinnings to the test and finds its answers to life’s biggest questions considerably wanting. Written for a non-specialist audience, this book is an excellent overview over the pressing issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics and aesthetics. It provides substantial and yet lucid reasons for the rational superiority of Christian perspectives on life. Zusammenfassung Parrish bietet eine hervorragende, in die Tiefe gehende Analyse der im Westen wohl am stärksten vertretenen Weltanschauung, des Naturalismus. Er stellt dessen philosophischen Unterbau auf den Prüfstand und findet, dass dessen Antworten auf die bedeutendsten Lebensfragen sich als sehr unzulänglich erweisen. Das Buch, das für eine allgemeine Leserschaft geschrieben ist, bietet einen ausgezeichneten Überblick über die vordringlichen Anliegen in der Metaphysik, der Philosophie des Geistes, der Ethik und Ästhetik. Es liefert grundlegende und dabei einleuchtende Gründe für die rationale Überlegenheit von christlichen Lebensperspektiven. Résumé Parrish offre une belle analyse en profondeur du naturalisme, la vision du monde qui, c’est incontestable, domine en Occident. Il en teste les fondements philosophiques et conclut à la très grande faiblesse des réponses proposées aux principales questions existentielles. Écrit pour un public non averti, ce livre est un excellent survol des questions essentielles qui se posent en matière de métaphysique, de philosophie de l’esprit, d’éthique et d’esthétique. Il présente des arguments substantiels, mais clairs, asseyant la supériorité rationnelle des conceptions chrétiennes de la vie.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
8

Vizzarri, Francesco. "INNOVATIVE AND SUSTAINABLE MULTI-SERVICE MODELS TO BOOST LIVESTOCK FARMING SYSTEM." Slovak Journal of Animal Science 56, no. 3 (September 30, 2023): 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.36547/sjas.847.

Full text
Abstract:
The third issue of Slovak Journal of Animal Science 2023 gives to me the possibility to discuss the innovative and sustainable multi-service approach of scientific community to boost and develop, in terms of competitiveness and profitability, the livestock farming system. The challenge of managing increasing quantity of waste, particularly from agro-food industry, represents a significant cost to society and puts pressure on the natural environment. But this by-product material also represents a valuable resource, which can be exploited by embracing a more circular economy that reduces waste and allows for the continual use of resources. Today's "take-make-dispose" economic model is wasteful and unsustainable. Research institutes, enterprises, academic institutes are therefore plotting ways to reuse products or their components via the circular economy and restore more of their precious materials and energy. This practice will help to conserve environment and to protect society from the impacts of climate change. On the other hand, it has been commonly used the definition "non-conventional feed resources" that generally refer to all those feeds that have not been traditionally used for feeding livestock and are not commercially used in the production of livestock feeds. Several known examples include palm leaf meals, palm press fiber, cassava foliage, spent brewer's grains, sugar cane bagasse, rubber seed meal and some aquatic plants. Defined in this manner non-conventional feed resources (NCFR) can be looked at as covering a wide diversity of feeds and their nutrient contents. A common feature about feeds is that the traditional feeds tend to be mainly from annual crops and feeds of animal and industrial origin. In this sense, the usage of "non-conventional feed resources" could really be more appropriately referred to as "new feeds", and this term is increasingly being used. Thus the term NCFR has been frequently used to describe sources such as oil palm by-products, single-cell proteins and feed materials derived from agro-industrial by-products of plant and animal origin, poor-quality cellulosic roughages from farm residues and other agro- industrial by-products such as slaughter-house by-products and those from the processing of sugar, cereal grains, citrus fruits and vegetables from the processing of food for human consumption. However, it is sometimes difficult to draw a distinct line between traditional feeds and NCFR. In some countries what may now be classified as NCFR may in fact be conventional / traditional owing to the fact that it may have been in use as livestock feed over a long time, an example is wheat straw which is very widely used in South Asian countries, in addition, the availability of NCFR, especially of plant origin, is dependent to a large extent on the type of crops being cultivated and the prevailing degree of application of the crop technology. In the framework of applied science as tool for livestock practice, to successfully control reproduction, obtain primary genetic material, gametes, oocytes, eggs and spermatozoa in the field of reproduction, the use of various biotechnological methods has been practiced for many years. Artificial insemination of livestock has been a staple technology for producers worldwide for over sixty years. This reproductive technology has allowed for the rapid improvement of livestock genetics, most notably in dairy cattle and pigs. The primary benefit of utilizing artificial insemination is the ability to rapidly improve the genetic quality of a herd using a premier male animal's genetics without a producer having to purchase that specific male. Despite its massive contributions to livestock production, there are numerous ways in which artificial insemination can be improved. These improvements are driven by new technologies and deeper understanding of reproductive physiology. In the third Editorial article of 2023, I am going to introduce the contents of the articles collected and published in the third issue of 2023 year. Agbetuyi et al. investigated on broiler chickens to determine the dietary effect on organoleptic attributes, tibia bone growth and mineral retention feeding Moringa oleifera leaf powder and Allium sativum bulb powder. Authors recommended the safe and profitable usage in animal feed industry in the extend of 1 % of Moringa oleifera leaf powder and 0.1 % of Allium sativum bulb powder. Akinduro et al. designed a study to investigate the effect of fermented dried pawpaw seed fed at varying level of inclusion in the diets of broiler chicken at finisher stage on their general performance, carcass and organs characteristics. The result of this study showed that the use of the fermented dried pawpaw seed flour can be tolerated up to about 10 % inclusion as it gave the lowest FCR (feed conversion ratio) which could bring about high profitability, hence, encourage more people to go into Poultry business. Olanloye et al. published a study aimed at predicting and evaluating the variation in the amino acids of cassava roots from their crude protein. The results indicated that equations generated for Total Essential Amino acid (TEA) and Total Amino Acid (TAA) revealed that r2 increased as the number of variables increased. Prediction equations generated values for TEA and TAA of cassava roots were much close to the actual values obtained. Mekonnen & Berhe performed a survey to assess the efficiency and role of artificial insemination (AI) service in cattle production in the Western Zone of Tigray Region, Ethiopia. The overall conception rate at first insemination (CRFI) was also very poor and thus calving rate (CR) was poor. The approach of the artificial insemination service system should be revised and modified to improve the existing poor AI reproductive efficiency. Editorial Team looks forward to evaluating your submitted contributions and providing all necessary support to Authors in order to best serve animal science and the scientific community, with commitment to research integrity and the highest publishing ethics. Enjoy reading!
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
9

Witzig, Aurélien. "A la recherche des critères du contrat de travail. Réflexion à partir des arrêts Uber du 30 mai 2022." sui generis, October 27, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.21257/sg.217.

Full text
Abstract:
Le Tribunal fédéral a rendu récemment deux arrêts dans des affaires concernant l'entreprise numérique Uber. Il s'agissait de déterminer si les prestataires de la plateforme devaient être qualifiés de travailleurs salariés ou d'indépendants. La Haute cour a tranché en faveur de la première possibilité, dans la lignée des évolutions jurisprudentielles actuelles. La présente contribution tente de tirer les conséquences de la clarification désormais apportée, en s'interrogeant plus largement sur le cadre méthodologique le plus adéquat pour la recherche des critères du contrat du travail et sur le choix de tels critères, en droit positif. Nous arrivons à la conclusion que le mixte pragmatique actuellement mis en œuvre par la jurisprudence a vocation à produire ses effets dans le cadre de l'économie numérique, et nous proposons une définition conceptuelle du droit du travail comme le droit visant à protéger les personnes qui mettent leur force de travail à disposition de l'entreprise d'autrui dans des circonstances où diverses protections doivent, selon la conception sociale qui a cours, leur être accordées. -- Das Bundesgericht fällte kürzlich zwei Urteile in Fällen rund um das digitale Unternehmen Uber. Dabei ging es um die Frage, ob die über die Plattform vermittelten Fahrerinnen und Fahrer als Arbeitnehmende oder als Selbstständige einzustufen sind. Das Gericht entschied zugunsten der ersten Variante und folgte damit den aktuellen Entwicklungen in der Rechtsprechung. Der vorliegende Beitrag versucht, die Konsequenzen aus der nunmehr erfolgten Klärung zu ziehen, indem er sich eingehender mit der Frage befasst, welcher methodische Rahmen für die Suche nach den Kriterien des Arbeitsvertrags und die Wahl solcher Kriterien im positiven Recht am besten geeignet ist. Wir kommen zum Schluss, dass die pragmatische Mischung, die derzeit von der Rechtsprechung angewandt wird, auch im Rahmen der digitalen Wirtschaft Wirkung zeigen wird, und schlagen eine konzeptionelle Definition des Arbeitsrechts als Recht zum Schutz von Personen vor, die ihre Arbeitskraft einem Unternehmen unter Umständen zur Verfügung stellen, unter denen ihnen nach der herrschenden gesellschaftlichen Auffassung verschiedene Schutzmechanismen gewährt werden müssen.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
10

Gilabert, Pablo. "Cohen on Socialism, Equality and Community." Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 8, no. 1 (March 3, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.18740/s4w019.

Full text
Abstract:
In this article I discuss G. A. Cohen’s account of the principles animating the socialist ideal. In his book Why Not Socialism? Cohen argues that socialism is based on two principles of radical equality of opportunity and community. Although I am quite sympathetic to Cohen’s contribution, I identify what I take to be some problems in it and suggest ways to overcome them. I challenge Cohen’s claim that although the principle of radical equality of opportunity is a principle of justice, the principle of community is only a wider moral requirement. I argue that to fully account for the role and weight of considerations of community within the socialist ideal, and to justify the limitations on liberty that they would impose in practice, we have reason to see some of them as more stringent demands of justice. More specifically, I propose a construal of some of the demands of community as focused on sufficientarian concerns with basic needs and on requirements to protect equal political status and self-respect, and explain how, so construed, the demands of community relate to demands of equality of economic opportunity and to the protection of personal and political liberty. Dans cet article, je discute le point de vue de G.A. Cohen sur les principes qui animent l ‘idéal socialiste. Dans son livre ‘Pourquoi Pas Le Socialisme?’ Cohen maintient que le socialisme est basé sur les deux principes d’égalité radicale de l’opportunité et de la communauté. Même si je partage assez largement cette conception, j’en identifie quelques problèmes de mon point de vue et suggère quelque pistes pour les combler. Contre Cohen, je ne pense pas que le principe d’égalité radicale d’opportunité soit un principe de justice, alors que le principe de communauté serait seulement un impératif moral plus large. Je maintiens qu’afin de rendre compte pleinement du rôle et du poids des considérations sur la communauté dans l’idéal socialiste, et de justifier les limitations sur la liberté qu’elles imposeraient en pratique, nous avons raison de penser que certaines d’entre elles expriment des demandes fortes de justice . Plus spécifiquement, je propose de reformuler certaines demandes des communautés centrées sur des préoccupations d’autosuffisance relatives à des besoins fondamentaux et sur les conditions de protection de l’égalité politique et du respect de soi, et j’explique comment, sous cet angle, les demandes d’une communauté sont étroitement liées à des demandes d’égalité d’opportunité et de protection de la liberté personnelle et politique.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
11

Azevedo, Marta. "SAÚDE REPRODUTIVA E MULHERES INDÍGENAS DO ALTO RIO NEGRO." Caderno CRH 22, no. 57 (May 19, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/ccrh.v22i57.19047.

Full text
Abstract:
O presente artigo descreve e analisa as concepções próprias das mulheres indígenas do Alto Rio Negro sobre saúde reprodutiva, relacionando-as a indicadores de fecundidade. As informações qualitativas apontam para um conhecimento detalhado e complexo que as mulheres indígenas dessa região possuem sobre seu corpo e os cuidados com sua saúde. Os níveis e padrões etários da fecundidade estão relacionados com a etnia das mulheres, portanto, aos sistemas tradicionais de cuidados com a saúde desses povos. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida entre 1997 e 2003, na região de Iauaretê, Terra Indígena Alto Rio Negro (AM), e teve como primeira fonte de dados o Censo Indígena Autônomo do Rio Negro – CIARN –, levado a efeito pela Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro – FOIRN – em 1992. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: povos indígenas, noroeste amazônico, saúde indígena, demografia e saúde, saúde da mulher. REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND INDIGENOUS WOMEN OF THE HIGH RIO NEGRO Marta Azevedo The present paper describes and analyzes High Rio Negro indigenous women’s own conceptions about reproductive health, relating them to fecundity indicators. Qualitative information point to a detailed and complex knowledge that area’s indigenous women possess on their bodies and the care with their health. The fecundity levels and age patterns are related with the women’s ethnicity, and, therefore, to the traditional healthcare system of these peoples. This research was developed between 1997 and 2003, in the Iauaretê area Indigenous Land High Rio Negro (AM), and had as first source of data Rio Negro’s Autonomous Indigenous Census. CIARN., executed by the Federation of Rio Negro’s Indigenous Organizations. FOIRN. in 1992. KEYWORDS: indigenous peoples, the northwestern Amazon, indigenous health, demography and health, women’s health. SANTE POUR LA REPRODUCTION ET LES FEMMES INDIGENES DU ALTO RIO NEGRO Marta Azevedo Dans cet article on décrit et on analyse les conceptions spécifiques qu’ont les femmes indigènes du Alto Rio Negro en ce qui concerne la santé de la reproduction, et on y fait le lien avec les indicateurs de fécondité. Les informations qualitatives montrent une connaissance détaillée et complexe que possèdent les femmes indigènes de cette région en ce qui concerne leur corps et les soins liés à la santé. Les niveaux et les structures d’âge de la fécondité sont mis en relation avec l’ethnie des femmes, c’est-à-dire avec les systèmes traditionnels de soins relatifs à la santé de ces peuples. La recherche a été faite de 1997 à 2003, dans la région de Iauaretê, Terre Indigène de l’Alto Rio Negro (AM), les premières données utilisées ont été celles fournies par le Recensement Indigène Autonome du Rio Negro – CIARN –, réalisé par la Fédération des Organisation Indigènes (Federação das Organizações Indígenas) du Rio Negro – FOIRN – en 1992. MOTS-CLÉS: peuples indigènes, nord-ouest de l’Amazonie, santé indigènes, démographie et la santé, santé des femmes. Publicação Online do Caderno CRH: http://www.cadernocrh.ufba.br
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
12

van der Eyk, Lise. "What the relationship of religion and culture means for the role of the State in society: Parliamentary debates on education during the “Kulturkampf” in Prussia, France and the Netherlands." SYMPOSIUM CULTURE@KULTUR, February 23, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/sck-2023-0015.

Full text
Abstract:
Abstract Die Ära der Kulturkämpfe kann als ein Schlüsselmoment in der westeuropäischen Geschichte gesehen werden, in dem die Beziehung zwischen Kultur und Religion ein zentrales Thema und Gegenstand unterschiedlicher Interpretationen war, je nach politischem Standpunkt und Land. Diese unterschiedlichen Auffassungen und Definitionen liegen den Argumenten über die Rolle des Staates bei der Erziehung der Nation in diesen Debatten zugrunde. Am Beispiel Preußens, Frankreichs und der Niederlande in den 1870/80er Jahren analysiere ich, welche Rolle dem Staat als „Ersatz“ für die Kirche in der Schule zugeschrieben wurde und welche Rolle die unterschiedlichen und oft gegensätzlichen Definitionen von Religion in der Argumentation hatten. L’ère du Kulturkampf apparaît comme un moment historique privilégié dans l’Europe occidentale où l’articulation entre culture et religion est centrale et sujette à des interprétations très divergentes selon les forces politiques et les pays. Ces différentes conceptions et définitions constituent en même temps un enjeu majeur des débats parlementaires autour du rôle de l’Etat dans l’éducation de la nation à cette époque. A partir de l’exemple de la Prusse, de la France et des Pays Bas dans les années 1870/80, l’objet de cette contribution est d’analyser le discours de « remplacement » de l’Eglise par l’Etat dans le domaine de l’école ainsi que les enjeux qui y sont liés pour les définitions de la religion. The Kulturkampf era can be seen as a key moment in western European history in which the relationship between culture and religion is a central theme and subject to different interpretations depending on the political actors and the country. These different representations of religion and its role in culture function as premises in arguments regarding the role of the State in national education. Using parliamentary debates in the 1870s/80s in Prussia, France and the Netherlands as case studies, I analyze the discourse on the role of the State as “replacement” for the Church in the school and the role that often contradictory definitions of religion had in the legitimation of or opposition to legislation on this topic.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
13

"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Volume 48, Issue 3 48, no. 3 (July 1, 2021): 533–644. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.48.3.533.

Full text
Abstract:
Domeier, Norman / Christian Mühling (Hrsg.), Homosexualität am Hof. Praktiken und Diskurse vom Mittelalter bis heute (Geschichte und Geschlechter, 74), Frankfurt a. M. / New York 2020, Campus, 401 S. / Abb., € 39,95. (Martin Dinges, Stuttgart) Hengerer, Mark / Nadir Weber (Hrsg.), Animals and Courts. Europe, c. 1200 – 1800, Berlin / Boston 2020, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, VII u. 434 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Stefano Saracino, Jena / München) Baumann, Anette / Alexander Jendorff / Frank Theisen (Hrsg.), Religion – Migration – Integration. Studien zu Wechselwirkungen religiös motivierter Mobilität im vormodernen Europa, Tübingen 2019, Mohr Siebeck, VIII u. 312 S. / € 54,00. (Bettina Braun, Mainz) Dirmeier, Artur / Mark Spoerer (Hrsg.), Spital und Wirtschaft in der Vormoderne. Sozial-karitative Institutionen und ihre Rechnungslegung als Quelle für die Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Studien zur Geschichte des Spital-‍, Wohlfahrts- und Gesundheitswesens, 14), Regensburg 2020, Pustet, 308 S. / Abb., € 34,95. (Peter Rauscher, Wien) Raffa, Guy P., Dante’s Bones. How a Poet Invented Italy, Cambridge / London 2020, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, VIII u. 370 S. / Abb., $ 28,95. (Arne Karsten, Wuppertal) Backes, Martina / Jürgen Dendorf (Hrsg.), Nationales Interesse und ideologischer Missbrauch. Mittelalterforschung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vorträge zum 75jährigen Bestehen der Abteilung Landesgeschichte am Historischen Seminar der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Freiburger Beiträge zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 1), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 268 S. / Abb., € 28,00. (Bernd Schneidmüller, Heidelberg) Page, Sophie / Catherine Rider (Hrsg.), The Routledge History of Medieval Magic (Routledge Histories), London / New York 2019, Routledge, XVII u. 550 S. / Abb., £ 175,00. (Rita Voltmer, Trier) Ziegler, Tiffany A., Medieval Healthcare and the Rise of Charitable Institutions. The History of the Municipal Hospital (The New Middle Ages), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, VI u. 155 S., € 58,84. (Artur Dirmeier, Regensburg) Speich, Heinrich, Burgrecht. Von der Einbürgerung zum politischen Bündnis im Spätmittelalter (Vorträge und Forschungen, Sonderband 59), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 419 S. / Abb., € 52,00. (Gabriel Zeilinger, Rostock) Harry, David, Constructing a Civic Community in Late Medieval London. The Common Profit, Charity and Commemoration, Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XI u. 216 S., £ 75,00. (Jens Röhrkasten, Dresden) Carr, Mike, Merchant Crusaders in the Aegean, 1201 – 1352 (Warfare in History), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XII u. 196 S. / Abb., £ 19,99. (Kristjan Toomaspoeg, Lecce) Dokumente zur Geschichte des Deutschen Reiches und seiner Verfassung 1340 – 1343, Bd. 7, Teil 2, bearb. v. Michael Menzel (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, 7.2), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz, XLIV und 404 S., € 120,00. (Andrea Stieldorf, Bonn) Flemmig, Stephan, Zwischen dem Reich und Ostmitteleuropa. Die Beziehungen von Jagiellonen, Wettinern und Deutschem Orden (1386 – 1526) (Quellen und Forschungen zur sächsischen und mitteldeutschen Geschichte, 44), Stuttgart 2019, Steiner, 706 S., € 116,00. (Julia Burkhardt, München) Hagemann, Manuel, Herrschaft und Dienst. Territoriale Amtsträger unter Adolf II. von Kleve (1394 – 1448) (Schriften der Heresbach-Stiftung Kalkar, 17), Bielefeld 2020, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 912 S., € 49,00. (Benjamin Müsegades, Heidelberg) Traxler, Christina, Firmiter velitis resistere. Die Auseinandersetzung der Wiener Universität mit dem Hussitismus vom Konstanzer Konzil (1414 – 1418) bis zum Beginn des Basler Konzils (1431 – 1449) (Schriften des Archivs der Universität Wien, 27), Göttingen 2019, V&amp;R unipress / Vienna University Press, 547 S., € 70,00. (Blanka Zilynská, Prag) Chronik des Konstanzer Konzils 1414 – 1418 von Ulrich Richental. Historisch-kritische Edition, 3 Bde., Bd. 1: A-Version; Bd. 2: K-Version; Bd. 3: G-Version, eingel., komm. u. hrsg. v. Thomas M. Buck (Konstanzer Geschichts- und Rechtsquellen, 49.1 – 3), Ostfildern 2020, Thorbecke, 461 S.; 415 S.; 433 S., € 145,00. (Christof Rolker, Bamberg) Šmahel, František, Die Basler Kompaktaten mit den Hussiten (1436). Untersuchung und Edition (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Studien und Texte, 65), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz, XXII u. 226 S., € 45,00. (Dušan Coufal, Prag) Decembrio, Pier Candido, Lives of the Milanese Tyrants, hrsg. v. Massimo Zaggia, ins Englische übers. u. mit einer Einleitung versehen v. Gary Ianziti (The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 88), Cambridge / London 2019, Harvard University Press, LIII u. 339 S., £ 19,95. (Tobias Daniels, Zürich) Thomas von Kempen, Dialogus noviciorum / Novizengespräche, hrsg. v. Nikolaus Staubach / Stefan Sudmann, Münster 2020, Aschendorff, 472 S., € 69,00. (Julia Becker, Heidelberg) Kempf, Charlotte K., Materialität und Präsenz von Inkunabeln. Die deutschen Erstdrucker im französischsprachigen Raum bis 1500 (Forum historische Forschung. Mittelalter, 1), Stuttgart 2020, Kohlhammer, 583 S. / Abb., € 89,00. (Christoph Reske, Mainz) Gammerl, Benno / Philipp Nielsen / Margrit Pernau (Hrsg.), Encounters with Emotions. Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity, New York / Oxford 2019, Berghahn, VI u. 308 S. / Abb., £ 92,00. (Kim Siebenhüner, Jena) Dierksmeier, Laura, Charity for and by the Poor. Franciscan-Indigenous Confraternities in Mexico, 1527 – 1700, Norman / San Diego 2020, University of Oklahoma Press / The Academy of American Franciscan History, XVI u. 222 S. / Abb., $ 55,00. (Tobias Winnerling, Düsseldorf) Strunck, Christina (Hrsg.), Faith, Politics and the Arts. Early Modern Cultural Transfer between Catholics and Protestants (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 158), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 391 S., € 88,00. (Bernd Roeck, Zürich) Glück, Helmut / Mark Häberlein / Andreas Flurschütz da Cruz (Hrsg.), Adel und Mehrsprachigkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ziele, Formen und Praktiken des Erwerbs und Gebrauchs von Fremdsprachen (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 155), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 259 S. / Abb., € 58,00. (Martin Wrede, Grenoble) Scholz, Luca, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (Studies in German History), Oxford 2020, Oxford University Press, VI u. 266 S., £ 60,00. (Tobias Schenk, Wien) Füssel, Marian (Hrsg.), Wissensgeschichte (Basistexte Frühe Neuzeit, 5), Göttingen 2019, Steiner, 300 S. / Abb., € 28,00. (Kristina Hartfiel, Düsseldorf) Friedrich, Markus / Jacob Schilling (Hrsg.), Praktiken frühneuzeitlicher Historiographie (Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History / Wissenskulturen und ihre Praktiken, 2), Berlin / Bosten 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, VIII u. 445 S. / Abb., € 79,95. (Helmut Zedelmaier, München) Stockhorst, Stefanie, Ars Equitandi. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Reitlehre in der Frühen Neuzeit, Hannover 2020, Wehrhahn, 359 S. / Abb., € 34,00. (Jürgen Overhoff, Münster) Frohnapfel-Leis, Monika, Jenseits der Norm. Zauberei und fingierte Heiligkeit im frühneuzeitlichen Spanien (Hexenforschung, 18), Bielefeld 2019, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 263 S. / Abb., € 29,00. (Sarah Masiak, Detmold) Kamp, Jeannette, Crime, Gender and Social Control in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main (Crime and City in History, 3), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, XII u. 335 S. / Abb., € 121,00. (Matthias Schnettger, Mainz) Liapi, Lena, Roguery in Print. Crime and Culture in Early Modern London (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 33), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, IX u. 194 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Birgit Näther, Berlin) Ritsema van Eck, Marianne P., The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts (c. 1480 – 1650). Theology, Travel, and Territoriality (The Medieval Franciscans, 17), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XI u. 260 S. / Abb., € 132,00. (Mirko Breitenstein, Dresden) Bowd, Stephen D., Renaissance Mass Murder. Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars, Oxford / New York 2018, Oxford University Press, X u. 288 S., £ 65,00. (Christian Jaser, Klagenfurt) Schulte, Daniela, Die zerstörte Stadt. Katastrophen in den schweizerischen Bilderchroniken des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 41), Zürich 2020, Chronos, 246 S. / Abb., € 48,00. (Stephanie Armer, Eichstätt) Deiters, Maria / Ruth Slenczka (Hrsg.), Häuslich – persönlich – innerlich. Bild und Frömmigkeitspraxis im Umfeld der Reformation, Berlin / Boston 2020, de Gruyter, XIV u. 423 S. / Abb., € 99,95. (Gregor Rohmann, Frankfurt a. M.) Christ-von Wedel, Christine, Die Äbtissin, der Söldnerführer und ihre Töchter. Katharina von Zimmern im politischen Spannungsfeld der Reformationszeit, unter Mitarbeit v. Irene Gysel / Jeanne Pestalozzi / Marlis Stähli, Zürich 2019, Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 356 S. / Abb., € 33,90. (Bettina Braun, Mainz) Grochowina, Nicole, Reformation (Seminar Geschichte), Berlin / Boston 2020, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, X u. 220 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Tobias Jammerthal, Neuendettelsau) Behringer, Wolfgang / Wolfgang Kraus / Roland Marti (Hrsg.), Die Reformation zwischen Revolution und Renaissance. Reflexionen zum Reformationsjubiläum (Kulturelle Grundlagen Europas, 6), Berlin 2019, Lit, 350 S. / Abb., € 39,90. (Martina Fuchs, Wien) Greiling, Werner / Thomas T. Müller / Uwe Schirmer (Hrsg.), Reformation und Bauernkrieg (Quellen und Forschungen zu Thüringen im Zeitalter der Reformation, 12), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 474 S. / Abb., € 55,00. (Ulrich Bubenheimer, Reutlingen) Werz, Joachim, Predigtmodi im frühneuzeitlichen Katholizismus. Die volkssprachliche Verkündigung von Leonhard Haller und Georg Scherer in Zeiten von Bedrohungen (1500 – 1605) (Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, 175), Münster 2020, Aschendorff, X u. 606 S. / graph. Darst., € 77,00. (Kai Bremer, Osnabrück) Freitag, Werner / Wilfried Reininghaus (Hrsg.), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Reformation in Westfalen, Bd. 2: Langzeitreformation, Konfessionskultur und Ambiguität in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Beiträge der Tagung am 27. und 28. Oktober 2017 in Lemgo (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen. Neue Folge, 47), Münster 2019, Aschendorff, 391 S. / Abb. / CD-ROM, € 44,00. (Andreas Rutz, Dresden) Cordes, Jan-Christian, Politik und Glaube. Die Reformation in der Hansestadt Lüneburg (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 304), Göttingen 2020, Wallstein, 758 S., € 49,00. (Olaf Mörke, Kiel) Hough, Adam G., The Peace of Augsburg and the Meckhart Confession. Moderate Religion in an Age of Militancy (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), New York / London 2019, Routledge, X u. 341 S. / Abb., £ 115,00. (Marion Bechtold-Mayer, Darmstadt) Francisco de Vitoria, De iustitia / Über die Gerechtigkeit, Teil 3, hrsg., eingel. u. ins Deutsche übers. v. Joachim Stüben, mit einer Einleitung v. Tilman Repgen (Politische Philosophie und Rechtstheorie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit. Reihe I: Texte, 5), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2020, Frommann-Holzboog, LI u. 242 S., € 168,00. (Nils Jansen, Münster) Overell, M. Anne, Nicodemites: Faith and Concealment between Italy and Tudor England (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XII u. 218 S., € 125,00. (Andreas Pietsch, Münster) Schultz, Jenna M., National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552 – 1652 (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 32), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XVII u. 326 S. / Karten, £ 70,00. (Iris Fleßenkämper, Münster) Heinemann, Julia, Verwandtsein und Herrschen. Die Königinmutter Catherine de Médicis und ihre Kinder in Briefen 1560 – 1589 (Pariser Historische Studien, 118), Heidelberg 2020, Heidelberg University Publishing, 517 S. / Abb., € 49,90. (Katrin Keller, Wien) Malettke, Klaus, Katharina von Medici. Frankreichs verkannte Königin, Paderborn 2020, Schöningh, VIII u. 403 S. / Abb., € 78,00. (Katrin Keller, Wien) Haar, Christoph Ph., Natural and Political Conceptions of Community. The Role of the Household Society in Early Modern Jesuit Thought, c. 1590 – 1650 (Jesuit Studies, 17), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, VI u. 314 S., € 132,00. (Nils Jansen, Münster) Senning, Calvin F., Spain, Rumor, and Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Jacobean England. The Palatine Match, Cleves, and the Armada Scares of 1612 – 1613 and 1614 (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), New York / London 2019, Routledge, XI u. 254 S. / Abb., £ 120,00. (Alexander Schunka, Berlin) Saito, Keita, Das Kriegskommissariat der bayerisch-ligistischen Armee während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Herrschaft und soziale Systeme in der Frühen Neuzeit, 24), Göttingen 2020, V&amp;R unipress, 346 S. / graph. Darst., € 50,00. (Michael Kaiser, Bonn) Hämmerle, Tobias E., Flugblatt-Propaganda zu Gustav Adolf von Schweden. Eine Auswertung zeitgenössischer Flugblätter der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Stockholm, Marburg 2019, Büchner-Verlag, 577 S. / Abb., € 45,00. (Michael Kaiser, Bonn) Hennings, Jan, Russia and Courtly Europe. Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648 – 1725 (New Studies in European History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2016, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 297 S. / Abb., £ 70,99. (Martina Winkler, Kiel) Bell, David A. / Yair Mintzker (Hrsg.), Rethinking the Age of Revolutions. France and the Birth of the Modern World, New York 2018, Oxford University Press, XXIX u. 287 S. / Abb., £ 64,00. (Volker Depkat, Regensburg) Vallance, Edward (Hrsg.), Remembering Early Modern Revolutions. England, North America, France and Haiti (Remembering the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds), London / New York 2019, Routledge, XI u. 222 S., £ 90,00. (Volker Depkat, Regensburg) Mokhberi, Susan, The Persian Mirror. French Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France, New York 2019, Oxford University Press, XI u. 223 S. / Abb., £ 47,99. (Markus Friedrich, Hamburg) Fulda, Daniel (Hrsg.), Aufklärung fürs Auge. Ein anderer Blick auf das 18. Jahrhundert, Halle 2020, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 247 S. / Abb., € 38,00. (Denise Schlichting, Osnabrück) Müller, Miriam, Der sammelnde Professor. Wissensdinge an Universitäten des Alten Reichs im 18. Jahrhundert (Wissenschaftskulturen. Reihe I: Wissensgeschichte, 1), Stuttgart 2020, Steiner, 268 S. / Abb., € 44,00 (Bernhard Homa, Hannover) Schläwe, Elisabeth, Ins Gedächtnis geschrieben. Leben und Schreiben der Eleonora Wolff Metternich zur Gracht (1679 – 1755) (Transgressionen, 1), Stuttgart 2020, Steiner, 218 S. / Abb., € 52,00. (Melanie Greinert, Kiel) Fingerhut-Säck, Mareike, Das Gottesreich auf Erden erweitern. Einführung und Festigung des Pietismus durch das Grafenpaar Sophie Charlotte und Christian Ernst zu Stolberg-Wernigerode in seiner Grafschaft (1710 – 1771) (Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur Mitteldeutschlands, 5), Halle a. d. S. 2019, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 410 S. / Abb., € 54,00. (Thomas Dorfner, Aachen / Erfurt) Ihle, Stefan, Die Entführung des Johann Wilhelm Pfau in Halle 1734. Eine Studie zur Rivalität zweier anhaltischer Landesfürsten (Forschungen zur hallischen Stadtgeschichte, 28), Halle 2021, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 214 S. / Abb., € 24,00. (Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Berlin) Klesmann, Bernd, Die Notabelnversammlung 1787 in Versailles. Rahmenbedingungen und Gestaltungsoptionen eines nationalen Reformprojekts (Beihefte der Francia, 83), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 569 S., € 67,00. (Martin Wrede, Grenoble) Quaasdorf, Friedrich, Kursachsen und das Ende des Alten Reichs. Die Politik Dresdens auf dem Immerwährenden Reichstag zu Regensburg 1802 bis 1806 (Schriften zur sächsischen Geschichte und Volkskunde, 63), Leipzig 2020, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 449 S., € 55,00. (Dorothée Goetze, Bonn)
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
14

James, Sara. "Finding Your Passion: Work and the Authentic Self." M/C Journal 18, no. 1 (February 9, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.954.

Full text
Abstract:
IntroductionThe existential question today is not whether to be or not to be, but how one can become what one truly is. (Golomb 200)In contemporary Western culture the ideal of living authentically, of being “true to yourself,” is ubiquitous. Authenticity is “taken for granted” as an absolute value in a multitude of areas, from music, to travel to identity (Lindholm 1). A core component of authentic selfhood is to find an occupation that is a “passion:” work that is “really you.” This article draws on recent qualitative interviews with Australians from a range of occupations about work, identity and meaning (James). It will demonstrate that for these contemporary individuals, occupation is often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. I begin by overviewing the significance and presence of authenticity as a value in contemporary culture through discussions of reality television and self-help literature focussed on careers. This is followed by a discussion of sociological theories of authenticity, drawing out the connections between the authentic self, modernity and work. The final section uses examples from the interviews to argue that the ideal of work being an extension of the authentic self is compelling because in providing direction and purpose, it helps the individual avoid anomie, disenchantment and other modern malaises (Taylor).The Authentic Self and Career Guidance in Contemporary Popular CultureThe prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western popular culture can be seen in reality television programs like Master Chef (a cooking competition) and The Voice (a singing competition). Generally, contestants take part in the show in order to “follow their dreams” and pursue the career they feel they were “destined” for. When elimination is immanent, those at risk of departure are given one last chance to tell the judges what being in the competition means to them. This usually takes the form of a tearful monologue in which the contestant explains that the past few weeks have been the best of their life, that they finally feel “alive” and that they have found their “passion.” In these shows, finding work that is “really you”—that is an extension of your authentic-self—is portrayed as being a fundamental component of fulfillment and self-actualization.The same message is delivered in self-help media and texts. Since the 1970s, “finding your passion” and “finding yourself” have been popular subjects for the genre. The best known of these books is perhaps Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute?: a job-hunting manual aimed primarily at people looking for a career change. First published in 1970, a new edition has been released every year and there are over 10 million copies in print. In 1995 it was included in the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book’s 25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives, placing Bolles in the company of Cervantes and Tolstoy (Bolles).Bolles’s book and similar career guidance titles generally follow a pattern of providing exercises for the reader to help them discover the “real you,” which then becomes the basis for choosing the “right” occupation, or as Bolles puts it, “first deciding who you are before deciding the kind of work you want to pursue.” Another best-selling self-help writer is Phil McGraw or “Dr. Phil,” better known for his television program than his books. In his Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out, McGraw begins bytelling the story of his own search for his authentic “passion.” Before moving into television, McGraw spent ten years working as a practicing psychiatrist. He recalls:So much of what I did—while totally okay if it had been what I had a passion for—was as unnatural for me as it would be for a dog. It didn’t come from the heart. It wasn’t something that sprang from who I really was ... I wasn’t doing what was meaningful for me. I wasn’t doing what I was good at and therefore was not pursuing my mission in life, my purpose for being here … You and everyone else has a mission, a purpose in life that cannot be denied if you are to live fully. If you have no purpose, you have no passion. If you have no passion, you have sold yourself out (7–12).McGraw connects living authentically with living meaningfully. Working in an occupation that is in accordance with the authentic self gives one’s life purpose. This is the same message Oprah Winfrey chose to deliver in the final episode of the The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was watched by more than 16 million viewers in the U.S. alone. Rather than following the usual pattern of the show and interview celebrity guests, Winfrey chose to talk directly to her viewers about what matters in life:Everybody has a calling, and your real job in life is to figure out what that is and get about the business of doing it. Every time we have seen a person on this stage who is a success in their life, they spoke of the job, and they spoke of the juice that they receive from doing what they knew they were meant to be doing [...] Because that is what a calling is. It lights you up and it lets you know that you are exactly where you're supposed to be, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And that is what I want for all of you and hope that you will take from this show. To live from the heart of yourself.Like McGraw, Winfrey draws a link between living authentically—living “from the heart”—and finding a “calling.” The message here is that the person whose career is in accordance with their authentic self can live with certainty, direction and purpose. Authenticity may act as a buffer against the anomie and disenchantment that arguably plague individuals in late modernity (Elliott & du Gay).Disenchantment, Modernity and Authenticity For many sociologists, most famously Max Weber, finding something that gives life purpose is the great challenge for individuals in the modern West. In a disenchanted society, without religion or other “mysterious incalculable forces” to provide direction, individuals may struggle to work out what they should do with their lives (149). For Weber the answer is to find your calling. Each individual must discover the “demon who holds the fibers of his very life” and obey its demands (156).Following Weber, John Carroll has argued that in modern secular societies, individuals must draw on their inner resources to find answers to life’s “fundamental questions” (Ego 3–4). As Carroll stresses, it is not that the religious impulse has disappeared from contemporary society, but it is expressed in new ways. Individuals still yearn for a sense of purpose but they are “more likely to pursue their quests for meaning on their own, in experimental ways and with their main resource being their ontological qualities” (Carroll, Beauty 221).Other Australian academics, like Gary Bouma and David Tacey, argue that rather than a decline in religiosity in Australia, what we are seeing is a change in the way people pursue the spiritual. Tacey suggests that while many Australians may “slink away” from the idea of God as something external to our lives, they may find more resonance with a conception of God as a “core dimension” of the person (167). Contemporary Australians continue to yearn for guidance, but they are more likely to look within to find it.There is a clear link between this process of turning inward to pursue the spiritual, the prevalence of authenticity in contemporary Western culture, and modernity. With the breakdown of traditional structures, individuals become more “free to self-create” (Bauman, Identity 3). As Charles Lindholm describes it: “The inclination toward a spontaneous mode of expressive self-revelation correlates with the collapse of reliable and sacralised institutional frameworks that once offered meaning and succour” (65–66).For Charles Taylor, the origins of this “massive subjective turn of modern culture” (26) lie in the 18th-century romantic period with the idea that each individual has an intuitive moral sense. To determine what is right, the individual must be in touch with their “inner voice” and act in accordance with it. It is in this notion that Taylor identifies the background to the belief, which is so prominent today, that “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s” (28–29). Lindholm points to Rousseau as the “inventor” of this ideal, with his revelatory Confessions becoming “the harbinger of a new ideal in which exploring and revealing one’s essential nature was taken as an absolute good” (8). According to Rousseau, social norms suppress the individual’s true nature, and so it is only possible for one to be authentic if they break these chains and act in accordance with their inner depths. For employees in today’s service-oriented knowledge economy, there are significant risks involved in following Rousseau’s advice and expressing one’s “true feelings.” As many researchers have noted, in the new capitalism, workers are increasingly required to regulate their emotions and present themselves as calm, agreeable and above all positive (Hochschild; Sennett; Ehrenreich). To offer criticism or express frustration, to drop the “mask of cooperativeness” (Sennett 112), may mean risking one’s employment.Nevertheless, while it is arguably becoming more difficult to express authentic feeling at work, for contemporary workers, choice of occupation is still often closely linked to perceptions of authentic selfhood. In fact, in a time of increasingly fragmented careers and short-term, episodic work, it becomes more necessary to create a meaningful narrative to link numerous and varied jobs to a core sense of self. As Richard Sennett argues, today’s flexible employees—frequently moving from one workplace to the next—are at risk of “drift:” a sensation of aimless movement (30). To counter this, individuals must create a convincing story that provides a rationale for career changes and can thereby “form their characters into sustained narratives” (31).In the next section, drawing on recent empirical research, I argue that linking authentic selfhood to work provides individuals with a way to make sense of the trajectory of their work lives and to accept change. Today’s employees are able to interpret even the most unexpected career changes as a beneficial occurrence—something that was “meant to be”—by rationalising that such changes are part of a process of finding work that is an expression of the authentic self.The Authentic Self at Work: Being True to Your EssenceThe following discussion focuses on how authenticity as an ideal influences individuals’s work identity and career aspirations. It draws examples from recent qualitative interviews with Australian workers from a range of occupations (James 2012). A number of interviewees described a search for an occupation that was authentically “them,” a task that was well-suited to their capabilities and came “naturally:”I have a feeling that I was sort of a natural teacher. (Teacher, 60)Medical is what I like, that’s me. (Paramedic, 49)I found my thing, I stick to it. (Farrier, 27) These beliefs are quite clearly influenced by the idea of vocation, in that there is a particular task the individual is most suited to, but they do not invoke the sense of duty that a religious “calling” entails. Often, the interviewees had discovered the occupation that was “really them” by working in other jobs that were not their “true passion.” Realising that performing a particular role felt inauthentic helped them to define their authentic self and encouraged them to pursue more fulfilling work. This process often required experimentation, since “one knows what one is only after realising what one is not” (Golomb 201).For instance, Olivia, a 33-year old lawyer had begun her career in a corporate law firm. She had never felt comfortable in the corporate environment: “I always thought, ‘They know I don’t belong here’.” Her performance at work felt inauthentic: “I was never good at smiling and saying yes.” This experience led her to move into human rights, which she found more fulfilling. Similarly Hazel, a 50 year-old social worker, had started her career in what she described as “boring administration jobs.” Although she had “always wanted” to work in the “caring sector” her family’s expectations and her low self-confidence had stopped her from applying for university. When she finally quit the administration work and began to study it was liberating: “a weight had come out off my shoulders.” In her occupation as a social worker she felt that her work fitted with her authentic self: “the kind of person I am,” and for the first time in her life she looked forward to going to work. Both of these women, and many of the other interviewees, rationalised their decision to work in a particular field by appealing to narratives of authentic selfhood.Similarly, in explaining why they enjoyed their work, a number of interviewees looked back to their childhood for signs of what was “meant to be.” For instance, Tim, a 27 year-old farrier, justified his work with horses: “Mum came from a farming background, every school holidays I was up there…I followed my grandpa around like a little dog, annoyed and pestered him and asked him ‘Why’ and How?’ I’ve always been like that … So I think from an early age I was destined to do something like this.” Ken, a 50 year-old electrician, had a similar explanation for his choice of occupation: “Even as a little kid I was always mucking around with batteries and getting lights to work and things like that, so I think it was just a natural progression.”This tendency to associate childhood interests with authentic selfhood is perhaps due to the belief that childhood is a time of innocence and freedom, where the individual had not yet been moulded by society. As Duschinsky argues, childhood is often connected with an “originary natural essence.” We are close here to Rousseau’s “sentiment of being,” or its contemporary manifestation the “real you.” Of course, the idea that the child is free from external influence is problematised by ideas of socialisation. From birth the infant learns by copying “significant others” and self-conception is formed through interaction (Cooley; Mead). Therefore, from the very beginning, an individual’s interests, dispositions and tastes are influenced by family and culture.Shane, a 29 year-old real estate agent, had resisted working in property because it was the family business and he “didn’t want to be as boring as to follow in Dad’s footsteps.” He saw himself as “academic” and “creative” and for a number of years worked as a writer. Eventually though he decided that writing was not his calling: it was “not actually me … I categorise myself as someone who has the ability to write but not naturally.” When Shane began working in real-estate however, it felt almost automatic. Like the other members of his family he had the right skills and traits to thrive in the business and was immediately successful. Interestingly, Shane’s conception of his authenticity includes both a belief in an essential, pre-social “true” self and at the same time an understanding of the importance of the influence of family in the formation of the self.Regardless of whether the idea of a natural, inner-essence discernable in childhood pastimes can be disproven, it is clear that the understanding of authentic selfhood as an “immediate expression of our essence” continues to influence how individuals conceive of their work identities. However, at the same time, the interviewees’ accounts of authenticity also acknowledged the role of parents in influencing traits and dispositions. In these narratives of the self, authenticity encompasses opposing understandings of childhood as being both free from social influences and highly influenced by primary agents of socialisation. That individuals are willing to do the necessary mental and emotional work to maintain these contradictory beliefs suggests that there is a strong incentive to frame work identity as an expression of authentic selfhood.Authenticity Provides PurposeThe great benefit of being able to convincingly rationalise one’s work as a manifestation of the true self is that it gives the individual direction and purpose. Work then provides answers to Carroll’s fundamental questions: “who am I?” and “What should I do with my life?” A number of the interviewees recalled their attempts to secure a sense of purpose by linking their current occupation to their inner essence. As Greg, a 36-year-old fitness consultant described it:You just gotta think ‘What do you really wanna do, what makes you happy, what are you about?’ … I guess the strengthening and conditioning work, the fitness, has been the constant right the way through. It’s probably the core of what I’ve done over the years, seeing individuals and teams get fit. It’s what I do. That’s my role, if you put it in a nutshell. That’s what I’m about … I was sort of floating around a little bit … I need to go ‘This is what I am.’ By identifying his authentic self and linking it to his work, Greg was able to make sense of his past. He had once been a professional runner and after an injury was forced to redefine himself. He now rationalised that his ability to run had led him into the fitness field: You look at what is your life mission and basically what are you out here for … with athletics it’s allowed me to deal with any sport, made me flexible in my career … if I was, therefore born to run? Yeah, quite possibly, there had to be a reason. Like many of the interviewees, Greg had been forced to change his plans, but he was able to rationalise that this change was positive by forming a narrative that connected both his current and previous occupations to his perception of his authentic self. As Sennett describes it, he is able to from his character into a “sustained narrative” (31). Similarly, Trish, a 42 year-old retail coordinator, connected both her work as a chef and her job in a hardware store back to her sense of authentic self. Both occupations, she thought, were “down and dirty” and she linked this to her family “roots” and her identity as a “country girl.” In interpreting these two substantially different occupations as an expression of her true self, Trish is able to create a narrative in which unexpected career changes are as seen as something beneficial that was “meant to be.” These accounts of career trajectories suggest that linking authenticity to work identity is a strategy individuals employ to cope with the disorienting effects of fragmented work lives. Even jobs that are unfulfilling and feel inauthentic can be made meaningful by interpreting them as necessary steps leading towards the discovery of one’s “ true passion”. This is quite different to the ideal of a life-long calling in one occupation, which as Bauman has noted, has become a “privilege of the few” in late-modernity (Work 34). In an era of insecure and fragmented work, the narrative of an authentic self becomes particularly appealing as it allows the individual to create a meaningful work-narrative that can accommodate the numerous twists and turns of contemporary “liquid” existence (Bauman, Identity 5) and avoid “drift” (Sennett). Conclusion Drawing on qualitative research, this paper has analysed the connections between authenticity, work and modern selfhood. I have shown that in an era of flexible and fragmented working lives, work-identities are often closely tied to understandings of authentic selfhood. Interpreting particular kinds of work as being expressions of the authentic self provides individuals with a sense of purpose and in some cases assists them in coming to terms with unexpected career changes. A meaningful career narrative acts as a buffer against disorientation, disenchantment and anomie. It is therefore no wonder that authentic selfhood is such a prominent theme in reality television, self-help and other forms of popular culture, since it is taps into an existential need for a sense of purpose that becomes increasingly elusive in late-modernity. It is clear from the accounts presented in this paper that the pursuit of authenticity is not merely a narcissistic endeavor, and is employed by individuals to work through fundamental existential questions. Future work in this area should continue to make use of empirical research to add depth and complexity to theoretical accounts of authentic selfhood. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Identity in the Globalizing World.” Identity in Question. Ed. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. 1–12. Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open UP, 1998. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute 2015. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/books/view/what-color-is-your-parachute-2015›. Bolles, Richard. What Colour Is Your Parachute. Berkley: Ten Speed, 1970. Bouma, Gary. Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Carroll, John. “Beauty contra God: Has Aesthetics Replaced Religion in Modernity?” Journal of Sociology 48.2 (2012): 206–23. Carroll, John. Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning. Melbourne: Scribe, 2008. Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s, 1902. Duschinsky, Robbie. “Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education, and Performativity.” Textual Practice 27.5 (2013): 763–81. Elliott, Anthony, and Paul du Gay. “Editors’ Introduction.” Identity in Question. Eds. Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2009. xi–xxi. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided : How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York: Henry Holt, 2009. Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge, 1995. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization Human Feeling. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. James, Sara. “Making a Living, Making a Life: Contemporary Narratives of Work, Vocation and Meaning.” PhD Thesis. La Trobe U, 2012. Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. McGraw, Phil. Self Matters—Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. London: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1934. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: WW Norton, 1998. Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth. Sydney: Daimon, 2008. Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills. London: Routledge, 1991. 129–56. Winfrey, Oprah. The Oprah Winfrey Show Finale. 23 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/The-Oprah-Winfrey-Show-Finale_1#ixzz3PbhBrdBs›.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
15

Muir, Cameron. "Vigilant Citizens: Statecraft and Exclusion in Dubbo City." M/C Journal 9, no. 3 (July 1, 2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2628.

Full text
Abstract:
The following petition was circulated in Dubbo in May 2003: Mr Carr, We the undersigned are concerned citizens, tired of Government inaction in dealing with young children who are causing distress around our cities. Children 8, 9 & 10 year olds are roaming the streets day & night and Harassment of the elderly & Intimidation, Truancy, Enter & Steal, Vandalism and Shoplifting are causing major concern in our area. Young children, too young to deal with now, grow up bigger & stronger as they move into the adult world of crime. At present they seem to be untouchable with many people with good intentions making excuses. We need laws in place to help them toward a better future and a safer environment for us all. You have achieved much in relation to crime & punishment with Goals & we need to save this coming generation from a life of crime. Parents should be made responsible for their children’s actions. If parents can’t or won’t, the children should be placed in suitable accommodation where Self Esteem, Education, Health & Responsibilities are taught. Mr Carr, NSW has an opportunity to lead the country in what is a national problem. Anyone shopping in Dubbo’s main street in at that time would have found copies of this petition presented in neat stacks on sales counters and reception desks in the majority of retail stores and other small businesses. One month later, 11 000 people from a population of 36 000 had signed the petition. In examining why such a severe proposal arose, and why it garnered so much support, I am positioning the events in the lead up to and following the petition as part of continuing processes of domination and exclusion within race relations. The theoretical framework for this relies on Roxanne Lynn Doty’s notion of ‘statecraft’, which she draws from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The main street in Dubbo is a place for consumption and public display. People are welcome as long as they observe the rules ‘concerned citizens’ deem appropriate for that space. The main street is the image of the town, invested with symbolic capital. Those who threaten the construction of a particular image are literally out of place. The petition is a matter of ‘race relations’, or more accurately, domination and resistance, despite no specific indications in the document’s wording. In official and pseudo-official situations in Dubbo, in local newspapers and radio, ‘uncontrollable’ had become a substitute for Aboriginal. Warren Mundine, at the time Deputy Mayor and Dubbo’s only Indigenous Councillor, said, ‘people might say “we haven’t mentioned Aboriginal kids” but everyone knows what they are talking about’ (O’Malley 3). To understand why there were calls for widespread and systematic forcible removal of Aboriginal children – a proposed measure that resonated with the darkest periods of pre-1970s style of removal – we need to contextualise it with discussion of key events in the lead up to the petition’s appearance. A local radio announcer, Leo de Kroo, whose morning talk-back show emulated the programs of metropolitan ‘shock-jocks’ instigated the petition after some months of on-air attacks on young people in Dubbo. Like some metropolitan stations, 2DU aligned itself with conservative political parties. On his show, de Kroo directly and indirectly supported Coalition policies and initiatives such as lobbying for the Parental Responsibility Act to operate in Dubbo as it does in Orange, and to lower the age at which children could be charged with crimes. De Kroo’s individual motivations is partially explained by his political opportunism, but the wider processes his actions are a part of, and the large degree of support for petition from people in Dubbo, are more interesting. De Kroo’s claim that Dubbo was a town ‘out of control’ and in a ‘bad spot with youth on the streets’ (Roberts, “Voice of Youth” 2) came at a time when crime rates were falling. In February 2003 Local Area Commander Supt Ian Lovell said that crime had dropped to ‘unheard of [levels]. Dubbo hasn’t experienced such low levels of crime in years’ (Jacobson, “Viking Cuts” 11). In March the Orana Crime Management Unit declared assaults, car accidents, malicious damage, stealing and traffic offences were down from the previous month (Jacobson, “Burglaries Falling” 4). Again in May Supt Lovell declared a similar range of crimes were down from the previous month (Jacobson, “Crime Cools” 4). Typically, stories about crime statistics were published in the middle sections of the local paper, while complaints about crime were almost invariably on the front page, but this was still a time when one might expect the community to be feeling safer in their everyday lives. However, despite consecutive months of falling crime rates, some inhabitants clearly felt insecure. This is evidenced by the support for the petition one month later, and interviews by the local newspaper, such as one with main street retailers who said they believed crime was spiralling out of control, that children were ‘terrorising staff’, that it was no longer safe to go to work, and that it was a matter of time before a shop assistant would be ‘stuck’ with a drug user’s needle (Jacobson, “We’re Sick of It” 1). To examine this situation I am turning to Doty’s concept of ‘statecraft’, desire and exclusion, which she bases on the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Doty draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire to suggest ‘the state’ is always an unattainable desire for order. Desire for Deleuze and Guattari is ‘not a lack or fantasy or pleasure’ (Doty 1) but instead is a free flowing energy, a creative flow of production, that is coded and channelled by forces within the social body (Deleuze and Guattari). Social practices that channel and code desire create systems of meanings, values, hierarchies, inclusions and exclusions (Doty). So desire possesses the simultaneous potential for liberating, breaking down and deterritorialising, as well as for repression, segmentation and reterritorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari see this tension as existing in two poles of desire: ‘the schizophrenic pole deterritorialises and threatens to destroy the codes that inscribe meaning to social forms. The paranoiac pole presses for order and contains an inherent tendency toward despotism, repression, fascism’ (Doty 10). These poles, in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, are tied to economic systems. Doty, paraphrasing Karl Polaryi – a philosopher whose work critiques liberal economic systems – says that ‘the self-adjusting market of capitalism could not exist for any length of time without annihilating society’ (qtd. in Doty 7). The destabilising flows of liberal economies are always countered by some form of governmentality which reinforces society through welfare, regulation and other protections and interventions. Capitalism ‘liberates flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limits and its own dissolution’ (Deleuze and Guattari 139). Capitalism belongs to the fluid pole of desire, the schizophrenic pole, and the fixing, regulating forces of ‘the state’ belong to the paranoiac pole. The state, then, is a desire for order, a movement towards fixedness, rigidness. Doty calls the set of practices that enable these movements ‘statecraft’. It is Doty’s conception of ‘the state’ and statecraft that I have tried to apply to the events that took place in Dubbo. ‘We can speak of “the state” only in a very provisional sense. It is not unitary. It is not an actor. It is not even a concrete “thing”… There is no such thing as “the state”, only a powerful desire that pervades the social realm’ (Doty 12). For Doty, the state is nothing but practices of statecraft that can originate in government bureaucracies, churches, corporations, theatres, newspapers, in our backyards, in our living rooms and bedrooms. They can come from the Federal or State Government, the local Council, the editor of the local newspaper, a journalist, a documentary maker, teenagers exchanging SMSes, the gossip mongers in the street and couples drinking tea in their kitchens. There were a number of key events in the lead up to the release of the petition in Dubbo that exacerbated the paranoiac pole of desire, the desire for order. At the start of 2003 the Federal Government was running an anti-terrorism campaign through television ads and later through a kit delivered to households across Australia. This was to generate fear to try to garner support for its involvement in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Also, election campaigns for the March State elections were run on Law and Order platforms. The NSW Government organised an Operation Viking which took place in Dubbo and was the largest police operation ever undertaken outside of Sydney (Jacobson, “Viking Cuts” 11). Hundreds of police officers were bussed in from Sydney and other cities and the ‘high visibility’ policing action included the use of a helicopter which shone a spotlight into people’s backyards. One local Councillor said the operation gave the impression there was ‘some national emergency’ (Jacobson, “Police” 1). Indicative of the tendency for these actions generate more fear are the comments of Supt Lovell, ‘I feel upset when people have to be briefed and calmed down after an operation that was designed to do just that’ (Roberts, “Operation” 1). Then in April there was an arson attack on Dubbo’s Council buildings. The offices were razed and this event is significant because the high public profile and uncommon nature of the incident, and because the accused perpetrators were the same ‘uncontrollable’ children said to be roaming the streets. These events contributed to an elevated sense of fear an anxiety around the same time the petition was circulated despite the fact that crime figures were falling. Indeed, the bulk of the complaints against ‘uncontrollable children’ were not that they were committing any particular crimes. The main street retailers quoted earlier felt intimidated by their presence. The complaints were of ‘antisocial behaviour’ and of minor annoyances incommensurable to the drastic and violent measures called for to deal with perceived problems. Their alleged swearing, spitting and talking in groups – in essence, their mere presence on the street – made people feel unsafe. This is due to a facet of statecraft – the exclusion of certain groups who are deemed antithetical to the social order. Doty notes the poor are often those rendered a threat to social order because of their lack of fixedness, their perceived lack of morals, the public display of behaviour the inside group consider private, and the different priorities relative to the inside group. Any threats to the social order are dealt with violently, as practices of statecraft inherently tend towards violence (Doty). In this case, the call for Government to forcibly remove children is violent, but it can also manifest in vigilante action, over zealous arrests, or casual assaults on the streets of Dubbo. Aboriginal people become an ‘excluded other that is itself constituted by the social order from which it is excluded’ (Doty 14). Practices of statecraft create excluded groups (Indigenous people’s claim to land is certainly antithetical to the social order of colonisers) and these outside groups in turn become feared by the inside group. The petition was never submitted to the Premier, nor tabled in parliament in its own right. Instead it was simply used by NSW National Party leader Andrew Stoner to strengthen his arguments for lowering the age at which children could be charged for crimes. The fact that it was not submitted to the Premier suggests the aim of the petition was to create a sense that all Aboriginal adults are criminals, and that Aboriginal culture is an inherently criminal one. ‘Young children, too young to deal with now, grow up bigger & stronger as they move into the adult world of crime’ (Petition). A local Aboriginal leader, after convening a meeting in response to the petition, said, ‘thinly-veiled comments made on radio and circulating within the community made it clear a lot of Dubbo residents believed Aboriginal people were to blame for all the city’s ills’ (Hodder, “Meeting” 2). The purpose of the petition is to justify exclusion of anyone deemed a threat to the stability of the social order. The Carr government dismissed calls for children to be removed from their parents, but responded to the petition by declaring there would be more Operation Vikings for Dubbo (Stone 1). The desire for order, an order always unattainable, intensified by generation of fear, has enabled vigilante action on the streets of Dubbo. The action targets those the petition constructed as ‘uncontrollable’. Retailers in the CBD have set up networks amongst themselves, with the help of cameras, mobile phones and sirens to assail anyone they suspect of being threatening, or of shoplifting or making a mess of their stores (Hodder, “Retailers” 10). Recently ‘I [heart] Dubbo’ T-shirts were manufactured in a campaign to counter the negative media coverage generated by the petition and subsequent racial tensions. It was a defiant display of localism that seemed specifically designed to shun criticisms of Dubbo-style race relations and separate those who say they want success for the town from those who are said to want to destroy it. After identifying practices of statecraft in this series of events, what is needed is an examination of methods and practices for evading or deterritorialising movements towards order. References Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Doty, Roxanne Lynn. Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies : Statecraft, Desire and the Politics of Exclusion. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2003. Hodder, S. “Meeting Declared a Success.” Daily Liberal 12 June 2003: 2. ———. “Retailers Call on Each Other to Fight Thieves.” Daily Liberal 10 November 2004: 2. Jacobson, B. “Viking Cuts City Crime: Police Chief.” Daily Liberal 6 February 2003: 11. ———. “Burglaries Falling.” Daily Liberal 5 March 2003: 4. ———. “Crime Cools Down.” Daily Liberal 6 May 2003: 4. ———. “Police ‘Picked on’ Youth in Blitz.” Daily Liberal 5 February 2003: 1. ———. “We’re Sick of It.” Daily Liberal 3 April 2003: 1. O’Malley, N. “Brogden Backs Dubbo Radio Host’s Hard Line on Child Crime.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 June 2003: 3. Roberts, N. “Operation ‘Was Not Perfect’.” Daily Liberal 7 February 2003: 1. ———. “Voice of Youth to Be Heard across Radio Airwaves.” Daily Liberal 9 May 2003: 2. Stone, K. “Carr Takes Control.” Daily Liberal 18 June 2003: 1. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Muir, Cameron. "Vigilant Citizens: Statecraft and Exclusion in Dubbo City." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/02-muir.php>. APA Style Muir, C. (Jul. 2006) "Vigilant Citizens: Statecraft and Exclusion in Dubbo City," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/02-muir.php>.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
16

Watkins, Patti Lou. "Fat Studies 101: Learning to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too." M/C Journal 18, no. 3 (May 18, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.968.

Full text
Abstract:
“I’m fat–and it’s okay! It doesn’t mean I’m stupid, or ugly, or lazy, or selfish. I’m fat!” so proclaims Joy Nash in her YouTube video, A Fat Rant. “Fat! It’s three little letters–what are you afraid of?!” This is the question I pose to my class on day one of Fat Studies. Sadly, many college students do fear fat, and negative attitudes toward fat people are quite prevalent in this population (Ambwani et al. 366). As I teach it, Fat Studies is cross-listed between Psychology and Gender Studies. However, most students who enrol have majors in Psychology or other behavioural health science fields in which weight bias is particularly pronounced (Watkins and Concepcion 159). Upon finding stronger bias among third- versus first-year Physical Education students, O’Brien, Hunter, and Banks (308) speculated that the weight-centric curriculum that typifies this field actively engenders anti-fat attitudes. Based on their exploration of textbook content, McHugh and Kasardo (621) contend that Psychology too is complicit in propagating weight bias by espousing weight-centric messages throughout the curriculum. Such messages include the concepts that higher body weight invariably leads to poor health, weight control is simply a matter of individual choice, and dieting is an effective means of losing weight and improving health (Tylka et al.). These weight-centric tenets are, however, highly contested. For instance, there exists a body of research so vast that it has its own name, the “obesity paradox” literature. This literature (McAuley and Blair 773) entails studies that show that “obese” persons with chronic disease have relatively better survival rates and that a substantial portion of “overweight” and “obese” individuals have levels of metabolic health similar to or better than “normal” weight individuals (e.g., Flegal et al. 71). Finally, the “obesity paradox” literature includes studies showing that cardiovascular fitness is a far better predictor of mortality than weight. In other words, individuals may be both fit and fat, or conversely, unfit and thin (Barry et al. 382). In addition, Tylka et al. review literature attesting to the complex causes of weight status that extend beyond individual behaviour, ranging from genetic predispositions to sociocultural factors beyond personal control. Lastly, reviews of research on dieting interventions show that these are overwhelmingly ineffective in producing lasting weight loss or actual improvements in health and may in fact lead to disordered eating and other unanticipated adverse consequences (e.g., Bacon and Aphramor; Mann et al. 220; Salas e79; Tylka et al.).The newfound, interdisciplinary field of scholarship known as Fat Studies aims to debunk weight-centric misconceptions by elucidating findings that counter these mainstream suppositions. Health At Every Size® (HAES), a weight-neutral approach to holistic well-being, is an important facet of Fat Studies. The HAES paradigm advocates intuitive eating and pleasurable physical activity for health rather than restrictive dieting and regimented exercise for weight loss. HAES further encourages body acceptance of self and others regardless of size. Empirical evidence shows that HAES-based interventions improve physical and psychological health without harmful side-effects or high dropout rates associated with weight loss interventions (Bacon and Aphramor; Clifford et al. “Impact of Non-Diet Approaches” 143). HAES, like the broader field of Fat Studies, seeks to eradicate weight-based discrimination, positioning weight bias as a social justice issue that intersects with oppression based on other areas of difference such as gender, race, and social class. Much like Queer Studies, Fat Studies seeks to reclaim the word, fat, thus stripping it of its pejorative connotations. As Nash asserts in her video, “Fat is a descriptive physical characteristic. It’s not an insult, or an obscenity, or a death sentence!” As an academic discipline, Fat Studies is expanding its visibility and reach. The Fat Studies Reader, the primary source of reading for my course, provides a comprehensive overview of the field (Rothblum and Solovay 1). This interdisciplinary anthology addresses fat history and activism, fat as social inequality, fat in healthcare, and fat in popular culture. Ward (937) reviews this and other recently-released fat-friendly texts. The field features its own journal, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, which publishes original research, overview articles, and reviews of assorted media. Both the Popular Culture Association and National Women’s Studies Association have special interest groups devoted to Fat Studies, and the American Psychological Association’s Division on the Psychology of Women has recently formed a task force on sizism (Bergen and Carrizales 22). Furthermore, Fat Studies conferences have been held in Australia and New Zealand, and the third annual Weight Stigma Conference will occur in Iceland, September 2015. Although the latter conference is not necessarily limited to those who align themselves with Fat Studies, keynote speakers include Ragen Chastain, a well-known member of the fat acceptance movement largely via her blog, Dances with Fat. The theme of this year’s conference, “Institutionalised Weightism: How to Challenge Oppressive Systems,” is consistent with Fat Studies precepts:This year’s theme focuses on the larger social hierarchies that favour thinness and reject fatness within western culture and how these systems have dictated the framing of fatness within the media, medicine, academia and our own identities. What can be done to oppose systemised oppression? What can be learned from the fight for social justice and equality within other arenas? Can research and activism be united to challenge prevailing ideas about fat bodies?Concomitantly, Fat Studies courses have begun to appear on college campuses. Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer (180) identified and described four Fat Studies and two HAES courses that were being taught in the U.S. and abroad as of 2012. Since then, a Fat Studies course has been taught online at West Virginia University and another will soon be offered at Washington State University. Additionally, a new HAES class has been taught at Saint Mary’s College of California during the last two academic years. Cameron (“Toward a Fat Pedagogy” 28) describes ways in which nearly 30 instructors from five different countries have incorporated fat studies pedagogy into university courses across an array of academic areas. This growing trend is manifested in The Fat Pedagogy Reader (Russell and Cameron) due out later this year. In this article, I describe content and pedagogical strategies that I use in my Fat Studies course. I then share students’ qualitative reactions, drawing upon excerpts from written assignments. During the term reported here, the class was comprised of 17 undergraduate and 5 graduate students. Undergraduate majors included 47% in Psychology, 24% in Women Studies, 24% in various other College of Liberal Arts fields, and 6% in the College of Public Health. Graduate majors included 40% in the College of Public Health and 60% in the College of Education. Following submission of final grades, students provided consent via email allowing written responses on assignments to be anonymously incorporated into research reports. Assignments drawn upon for this report include weekly reading reactions to specific journal articles in which students were to summarise the main points, identify and discuss a specific quote or passage that stood out to them, and consider and discuss applicability of the information in the article. This report also utilises responses to a final assignment in which students were to articulate take-home lessons from the course.Despite the catalogue description, many students enter Fat Studies with a misunderstanding of what the course entails. Some admitted that they thought the course was about reducing obesity and the presumed health risks associated with this alleged pathological condition (Watkins). Others understood, but were somewhat dubious, at least at the outset, “Before I began this class, I admit that I was skeptical of what Fat Studies meant.” Another student experienced “a severe cognitive dissonance” between the Fat Studies curriculum and that of a previous behavioural health class:My professor spent the entire quarter spouting off statistics, such as the next generation of children will be the first generation to have a lower life expectancy than their parents and the ever increasing obesity rates that are putting such a tax on our health care system, and I took her words to heart. I was scared for myself and for the populations I would soon be working with. I was worried that I was destined to a chronic disease and bothered that my BMI was two points above ‘normal.’ I believed everything my professor alluded to on the danger of obesity because it was things I had heard in the media and was led to believe all my life.Yet another related, “At first, I will be honest, it was hard for me to accept a lot of this information, but throughout the term every class changed my mind about my view of fat people.” A few students have voiced even greater initial resistance. During a past term, one student lamented that the material represented an attack on her intended behavioural health profession. Cameron (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) describes comparable reactions among students in her Critical Obesity course taught within a behavioural health science unit. Ward (937) attests that, even in Gender Studies, fat is the topic that creates the most controversy. Similarly, she describes students’ immense discomfort when asked to entertain perspectives that challenge deeply engrained ideas inculcated by our culture’s “obesity epidemic.” Discomfort, however, is not necessarily antithetical to learning. In prompting students to unlearn “the biomedically-informed truth of obesity, namely that fat people are unfit, unhealthy, and in need of ‘saving’ through expert interventions,” Moola at al. recommend equipping them with an “ethics of discomfort” (217). No easy task, “It requires courage to ask our students to forgo the security of prescriptive health messaging in favour of confusion and uncertainty” (221). I encourage students to entertain conflicting perspectives by assigning empirically-based articles emanating from peer-reviewed journals in their own disciplines that challenge mainstream discourses on obesity (e.g., Aphramor; Bombak e60; Tomiyama, Ahlstrom, and Mann 861). Students whose training is steeped in the scientific method seem to appreciate having quantitative data at their disposal to convince themselves–and their peers and professors–that widely held weight-centric beliefs and practices may not be valid. One student remarked, “Since I have taken this course, I feel like I am prepared to discuss the fallacy of the weight-health relationship,” citing specific articles that would aid in the effort. Likewise, Cameron’s (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) students reported a need to read research reports in order to begin questioning long-held beliefs.In addition, I assign readings that provide students with the opportunity to hear the voices of fat people themselves, a cornerstone of Fat Studies. Besides chapters in The Fat Studies Reader authored by scholars and activists who identify as fat, I assign qualitative articles (e.g., Lewis et al.) and narrative reports (e.g., Pause 42) in which fat people describe their experiences with weight and weight bias. Additionally, I provide positive images of fat people via films and websites (Clifford et al. HAES®; Watkins; Watkins and Doyle-Hugmeyer 177) in order to counteract the preponderance of negative, dehumanising portrayals in popular media (e.g., Ata and Thompson 41). In response, a student stated:One of the biggest things I took away from this term was the confidence I found in fat women through films and stories. They had more confidence than I have seen in any tiny girl and owned the body they were given.I introduce “normal” weight allies as well, most especially Linda Bacon whose treatise on thin privilege tends to set the stage for viewing weight bias as a form of oppression (Bacon). One student observed, “It was a relief to be able to read and talk about weight oppression in a classroom setting for once.” Another appreciated that “The class did a great job at analysing fat as oppression and not like a secondhand oppression as I have seen in my past classes.” Typically, fat students were already aware of weight-based privilege and oppression, often painfully so. Thinner students, however, were often astonished by this concept, several describing Bacon’s article as “eye-opening.” In reaction, many vowed to act as allies:This class has really opened my eyes and prepared me to be an ally to fat people. It will be difficult for some time while I try to get others to understand my point of view on fat people but I believe once there are enough allies, people’s minds will really start changing and it will benefit everyone for the better.Pedagogically, I choose to share my own experiences as they relate to course content and encourage students, at least in their written assignments, to do the same. Other instructors refrain from this practice for fear of reinforcing traditional discourses or eliciting detrimental reactions from students (Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer 191). Nevertheless, this tack seems to work well in my course, with many students opting to disclose their relevant circumstances during classroom discussions: Throughout the term I very much valued and appreciated when classmates would share their experiences. I love listening and hearing to others experiences and I think that is a great way to understand the material and learn from one another.It really helped to read different articles and hear classmates discuss and share stories that I was able to relate to. The idea of hearing people talk about issues that I thought I was the only one who dealt with was so refreshing and enlightening.The structure of this class allowed me to learn how this information is applicable to my life and made it deeper than just memorising information.Thus far, across three terms, no student has described iatrogenic effects from this process. In fact, most attribute positive transformations to the class. These include enhanced body acceptance of self and others: This class decreased my fat phobia towards others and gave me a better understanding about the intersectionality of one’s weight. For example, I now feel that I no longer view my family in a fat phobic way and I also feel responsible for educating my brother and helping him develop a strong self-esteem regardless of his size.I never thought this class would change my life, almost save my life. Through studies shown in class and real life people following their dreams, it made my mind completely change about how I view my body and myself.I can only hope that in the future, I will be more forgiving, tolerant, and above all accepting of myself, much less others. Regardless of a person’s shape and size, we are all beautiful, and while I’m just beginning to understand this, it can only get better from here.Students also reported becoming more savvy consumers of weight-centric media messages as well as realigning their eating and exercise behaviour in accordance with HAES: I find myself disgusted at the television now, especially with the amount of diet ads, fitness club ads, and exercise equipment ads all aimed at making a ‘better you.’ I now know that I would never be better off with a SlimFast shake, P90X, or a Total Gym. I would be better off eating when I’m hungry, working out because it is fun, and still eating Thin Mints when I want to. Prior to this class, I would work out rigorously, running seven miles a day. Now I realise why at times I dreaded to work out, it was simply a mathematical system to burn the energy that I had acquired earlier in the day. Instead what I realise I should do is something I enjoy, that way I will never get tired of whatever I am doing. While I do enjoy running, other activities would bring more joy while engaging in a healthy lifestyle like hiking or mountain biking.I will never go on another diet. I will stop choosing exercises I don’t love to do. I will not weigh myself every single day hoping for the number on the scale to change.A reduction in self-weighing was perhaps the most frequent behaviour change that students expressed. This is particularly valuable in that frequent self-weighing is associated with disordered eating and unhealthy weight control behaviours (Neumark-Sztainer et al. 811):I have realised that the number on the scale is simply a number on the scale. That number does not define who you are. I have stopped weighing myself every morning. I put the scale in the storage closet so I don’t have to look at it. I even encouraged my roommate to stop weighing herself too. What has been most beneficial for me to take away from this class is the notion that the number on the scale has so much less to do with fitness levels than most people understand. Coming from a numbers obsessed person like myself, this class has actually gotten me to leave the scales behind. I used to weigh myself every single day and my self-confidence reflected whether I was up or down in weight from the day before. It seems so silly to me now. From this class, I take away a new outlook on body diversity. I will evaluate who I am for what I do and not represent myself with a number. I’m going to have my cake this time, and actually eat it too!Finally, students described ways in which they might carry the concepts from Fat Studies into their future professions: I want to go to law school. This model is something I will work toward in the fight for social justice.As a teacher and teacher of teachers, I plan to incorporate discussions on size diversity and how this should be addressed within the field of adapted physical education.I do not know how I would have gone forward if I had never taken this class. I probably would have continued to use weight loss as an effective measure of success for both nutrition and physical activity interventions. I will never be able to think about the obesity prevention movement in the same way.Since I am working toward being a clinical psychologist, I don’t want to have a client who is pursuing weight loss and then blindly believe that they need to lose weight. I’d rather be of the mindset that every person is unique, and that there are other markers of health at every size.Jones and Hughes-Decatur (59) call for increased scholarship illustrating and evaluating critical body pedagogies so that teachers might provide students with tools to critique dominant discourses, helping them forge healthy relationships with their own bodies in the process. As such, this paper describes elements of a Fat Studies class that other instructors may choose to adopt. It additionally presents qualitative data suggesting that students came to think about fat and fat people in new and divergent ways. Qualitative responses also suggest that students developed better body image and more adaptive eating and exercise behaviours throughout the term. Although no students have yet described lasting adverse effects from the class, one stated that she would have preferred less of a focus on health and more of a focus on issues such as fat fashion. Indeed, some Fat Studies scholars (e.g., Lee) advocate separating discussions of weight bias from discussions of health status to avoid stigmatising fat people who do experience health problems. While concerns about fostering healthism within the fat acceptance movement are valid, as a behavioural health professional with an audience of students training in these fields, I have chosen to devote three weeks of our ten week term to this subject matter. Depending on their academic background, others who teach Fat Studies may choose to emphasise different aspects such as media representations or historical connotations of fat.Nevertheless, the preponderance of positive comments evidenced throughout students’ assignments may certainly be a function of social desirability. Although I explicitly invite critique, and in fact assign readings (e.g., Welsh 33) and present media that question HAES and Fat Studies concepts, students may still feel obliged to articulate acceptance of and transformations consistent with the principles of these movements. As a more objective assessment of student outcomes, I am currently conducting a quantitative evaluation, in which I remain blind to students’ identities, of this year’s Fat Studies course compared to other upper division/graduate Psychology courses, examining potential changes in weight bias, body image and dieting behaviour, adherence to appearance-related media messages, and obligatory exercise behaviour. I postulate results akin to those of Humphrey, Clifford, and Neyman Morris (143) who found reductions in weight bias, improved body image, and improved eating behaviour among college students as a function of their HAES course. As Fat Studies pedagogy proliferates, instructors are called upon to share their teaching strategies, document the effects, and communicate these results within and outside of academic spheres.ReferencesAmbwani, Suman, Katherine M. Thomas, Christopher J. Hopwood, Sara A. Moss, and Carlos M. Grilo. “Obesity Stigmatization as the Status Quo: Structural Considerations and Prevalence among Young Adults in the U.S.” Eating Behaviors 15.3 (2014): 366-370. Aphramor, Lucy. “Validity of Claims Made in Weight Management Research: A Narrative Review of Dietetic Articles.” Nutrition Journal 9 (2010): n. pag. 15 May 2015 ‹http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/30›.Ata, Rheanna M., and J. Kevin Thompson. “Weight Bias in the Media: A Review of Recent Research.” Obesity Facts 3.1 (2010): 41-46.Bacon, Linda. “Reflections on Fat Acceptance: Lessons Learned from Thin Privilege.” 2009. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.lindabacon.org/Bacon_ThinPrivilege080109.pdf›.Bacon, Linda, and Lucy Aphramor. “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift.” Nutrition Journal 10 (2011). 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.nutritionj.com/content/10/1/9›.Barry, Vaughn W., Meghan Baruth, Michael W. Beets, J. Larry Durstine, Jihong Liu, and Steven N. Blair. “Fitness vs. Fatness on All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases 56.4 (2014): 382-390.Bergen, Martha, and Sonia Carrizales. “New Task Force Focused on Size.” The Feminist Psychologist 42.1 (2015): 22.Bombak, Andrea. “Obesity, Health at Every Size, and Public Health Policy.” American Journal of Public Health 104.2 (2014): e60-e67.Cameron, Erin. “Learning to Teach Everybody: Exploring the Emergence of an ‘Obesity” Pedagogy’.” The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. Eds. Erin Cameron and Connie Russell. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press.Cameron, Erin. “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A Study of Pedagogical Approaches Aimed at Challenging Obesity Discourses in Post-Secondary Education.” Fat Studies 4.1 (2015): 28-45.Chastain, Ragen. Dances with Fat. 15 May 2015 ‹https://danceswithfat.wordpress.com/blog/›.Clifford, Dawn, Amy Ozier, Joanna Bundros, Jeffrey Moore, Anna Kreiser, and Michele Neyman Morris. “Impact of Non-Diet Approaches on Attitudes, Behaviors, and Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 47.2 (2015): 143-155.Clifford, Dawn, Patti Lou Watkins, and Rebecca Y. Concepcion. “HAES® University: Bringing a Weight Neutral Message to Campus.” Association for Size Diversity and Health, 2015. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.sizediversityandhealth.org/content.asp?id=258›.Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ufts20/current#.VShpqdhFDBC›.Flegal, Katherine M., Brian K. Kit, Heather Orpana, and Barry L. Graubard. “Association of All-Cause Mortality with Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of the American Medical Association 309.1 (2013): 71-82.Humphrey, Lauren, Dawn Clifford, and Michelle Neyman Morris. “Health At Every Size College Course Reduces Dieting Behaviors and Improves Intuitive Eating, Body Esteem, and Anti-Fat Attitudes.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, in press.Jones, Stephanie, and Hilary Hughes-Decatur. “Speaking of Bodies in Justice-Oriented Feminist Teacher Education.” Journal of Teacher Education 63.1 (2012): 51-61.Lee, Jenny. Embodying Stereotypes: Memoir, Fat and Health. Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections, July 2012, Wellington, NZ. Unpublished conference paper.Lewis, Sophie, Samantha L. Thomas, Jim Hyde, David Castle, R. Warwick Blood, and Paul A. Komesaroff. “’I Don't Eat a Hamburger and Large Chips Every Day!’ A Qualitative Study of the Impact of Public Health Messages about Obesity on Obese Adults.” BMC Public Health 10.309 (2010). 23 Apr 2015 ‹http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/309›.Mann, Traci, A. Janet Tomiyama, Erika Westling, Ann-Marie Lew, Barbara Samuels, and Jason Chatman. “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not the Answer.” American Psychologist 62.3 (2007): 220-233.McAuley, Paul A., and Steven N. Blair. “Obesity Paradoxes.” Journal of Sports Sciences 29.8 (2011): 773-782. McHugh, Maureen C., and Ashley E. Kasardo. “Anti-Fat Prejudice: The Role of Psychology in Explication, Education and Eradication.” Sex Roles 66.9-10 (2012): 617-627.Moola, Fiona J., Moss E. Norman, LeAnne Petherick, and Shaelyn Strachan. “Teaching across the Lines of Fault in Psychology and Sociology: Health, Obesity and Physical Activity in the Canadian Context.” Sociology of Sport Journal 31.2 (2014): 202-227.Nash, Joy. “A Fat Rant.” YouTube, 17 Mar. 2007. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUTJQIBI1oA›.Neumark-Sztainer, Dianne, Patricia van den Berg, Peter J. Hannan, and Mary Story. “Self-Weighing in Adolescents: Helpful or Harmful? Longitudinal Associations with Body Weight Changes and Disordered Eating.” Journal of Adolescent Health 39.6 (2006): 811–818.O’Brien, K.S., J.A. Hunter, and M. Banks. “Implicit Anti-Fat Bias in Physical Educators: Physical Attributes, Ideology, and Socialization.” International Journal of Obesity 31.2 (2007): 308-314.Pause, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 2.1 (2012): 42-56.Rothblum, Esther, and Sondra Solovay, eds. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Russell, Connie, and Erin Cameron, eds. The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Salas, Ximena Ramos. “The Ineffectiveness and Unintended Consequences of the Public Health War on Obesity.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 106.2 (2015): e79-e81. Tomiyama, A. Janet, Britt Ahlstrom, and Traci Mann. “Long-Term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7.12 (2013): 861-877.Tylka, Tracy L., Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrun Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, and Rachel M. Calogero. “The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss.” Journal of Obesity (2014). 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2014/983495/›.Ward, Anna E. “The Future of Fat.” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013): 937-947.Watkins, Patti Lou. “Inclusion of Fat Studies in a Difference, Power, and Discrimination Curriculum.” The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. Eds. Erin Cameron and Connie Russell. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Rebecca Y. Concepcion. “Teaching HAES to Health Care Students and Professionals.” Wellness Not Weight: Motivational Interviewing and a Non-Diet Approach. Ed. Ellen Glovsky. San Diego: Cognella Academic Publishing, 2014: 159-169. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Andrea Doyle-Hugmeyer. “Teaching about Eating Disorders from a Fat Studies Perspective. Transformations 23.2 (2013): 147-158. Watkins, Patti Lou, Amy E. Farrell, and Andrea Doyle Hugmeyer. “Teaching Fat Studies: From Conception to Reception. Fat Studies 1.2 (2012): 180-194. Welsh, Taila L. “Healthism and the Bodies of Women: Pleasure and Discipline in the War against Obesity.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 1 (2011): 33-48. Weight Stigma Conference. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://stigmaconference.com/›.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
17

Monty, Randall W. "Driving in Cars with Noise." M/C Journal 27, no. 2 (April 16, 2024). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.3039.

Full text
Abstract:
Revving I’m convinced that no one actually listens to podcasts. Or maybe it’s just that no one admits it. This is partially because a podcast falls between fetish and precious. Listening to a podcast is at once intimate, someone speaking directly to you through your AirPods, and distant, since you’re likely listening by yourself. Listening to a podcast is weird enough; talking about listening to a podcast makes other people feel uncomfortable. This is why no one listens to podcasts while doing nothing else. Podcasts encourage passive listening; they compel active participation in something other than the podcast. There’s a suggested utility to listening to a podcast while doing something else—walking your cockapoo around the block, rearranging your bookshelf, prepping your meals—like you’re performing your practicality for the world. Listening to a podcast is not sufficient. When listening to a podcast, you simultaneously do something else to justify the listening. Podcasts are relatively new, as academic texts go. Yet they have been quickly taken up as technologies and artifacts of analysis (Vásquez), tools for teaching writing (Bowie), and modes of distributing scholarship (McGregor and Copeland). Podcasts are also, importantly, not simply audio versions of written essays (Detweiller), or non-visual equivalents of videos (Vásquez). Podcasts represent genres and opportunities for rhetorical choice that instructors cannot assume students already possess expected literacies for (Bourelle, Bourelle, and Jones). Paralleling much service work at institutions of higher education, women scholars and scholars of colour take on inequitable labour with podcast scholarship (Faison et al.; Shamburg). A promising new direction challenges the raced and gendered stereotypes of the genre and mode, highlighting podcasts as an anti-racist and anti-disinformation tool (Vrikki) and a way to engage reluctant students in critical race discourse (Harris). And, with so many podcasts accessible on virtually any topic imaginable, podcasts have more recently emerged as reliable secondary sources for academic research, a usage accelerated by the availability of audio versions of scholarly publications and professional academics composing podcasts to distribute and conduct their research. When we incorporate podcasts into our academic work, new connections become recognisable: connections between ourselves and other humans, ourselves and other things, and things and other things—including the connections between audio and work. Podcasts maintain their histories as a passive medium. A student can listen to a podcast for class while making dinner and keeping an eye on their family. A professional academic might more dutifully pay attention to the content of the podcast, but they’ll also attune to how the physical experience of doing research that way affects their work, their findings, and themself. When considered as academic work, as in this piece, podcasts persuade us to pay attention to methods, materiality, networks, and embodiment. Methods I listen to podcasts in the car, most often while driving to and from work. Listening to podcasts while commuting is common. Yet listening beyond content immersion or distraction, listening as part of an intentional methodology—formulating a plan, rhetorically listening, taking audio notes, annotating and building on those notes later—maybe less so. This intentional, rhetorical approach to listening while driving attunes the researcher to the embodied, physical aspects of each of these activities: research, driving, and listening. As a result, the research experience provides different kinds of opportunities for invention and reflection. My process is as follows: first, I curate a playlist based around a specific research question or agenda. This playlist will include selected episodes from podcasts that I have evaluated as reliable on a given topic. This evaluation is usually based on a combination of factors, mainly my familiarity with the podcast, the professional credentials (academic or otherwise) of the podcast hosts and guests, and recommendations from other researchers or podcasters. I also consider the structure of the podcast and the quality of the audio recording, because if I can’t hear the content, or if I must spend more time skipping ads than actively listening, then the podcast isn’t very usable for this stage of my research process. I will sometimes include single episodes of podcasts I’m less familiar with, usually because I noticed them pitched on one of my social media feeds and as a trial to see if I want to subscribe to the podcast. The playlist is arranged in what I hope will be a coherent order based on the episode descriptions. For example, sequencing episodes of Have You Heard (Berkshire and Schneider), Talking Race, Africa and People (Tiluk and Hope), and Is This Democracy (Mason and Zimmer) with the titles, "Digging Deep into the Education Wars”, “They Stole WOKE”, and “‘Cancel Culture’: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World” places these sources in conversation with each other, juxtaposes the arguments, and allows me to synthesise my own comprehensive response. Second, I listen. Ratcliffe positioned rhetorical listening as a performative “trope for interpretive invention” and a method for “facilitating cross-cultural dialogues” within composition studies (196). Listening is a thing we do in order to do something else. Under this framework, the listener/researcher approaches their task with goals of understanding and responsibility to themselves and others, which then affords opportunities to identify commonalities and differences within claims and cultural logics (204). In other words, by paying closer attention to who we are and who we’re listening to, and by listening in good faith, we can better understand what and why people are saying and doing what they are, and when we understand those better, we are better equipped for future action. Listening rhetorically can be an anchor when researching with podcasts, a modality notoriously coded and memed as white, male, and upper middle class (Locke; Morgan; “A Group of White Men Is Called a Podcast”). The technologies I use during this research afford and constrain, which leads to the third aspect: notetaking. I can’t write while driving. I tend to forget important bits. But the act of listening opens me up to things I might otherwise have missed. Sound, Detweiler shows, “affords different modes of composing, listening, thinking, and responding”. To facilitate my listening as invention, I added myself to my contacts list so that I can talk-to-text myself with questions about what I’m listening to, names and key terms that I need to look up later, and starter drafts of my own writing. While driving, I can “favourite” an episode while on the go, a marker to myself to re-listen and inspect the episode transcript. Later, at my work desk, I decipher whatever it is my phone’s text messaging app thought I said. “Anna Genesis Evolution from one species to another.” “Ben sick something at the bottom of the sea.” “Dinosaurs and dragons make each other plausible.” (Pretty sure my phone got that last one right.) There, my workflow is mediated by expected reading research technologies (word processing application, PDF viewer, boutique file organisation and annotation software), agents (desk, chair, and lighting selected by my employer to improve my productivity), and processes (coding transcripts, annotating secondary sources, writing, and revising). Materiality My methodology is an auditory variation of McNely’s visual fieldwork, which “attempts to render visible the environs, objects, sensations, and affects of inquiry” ("Lures" 216). Podcasts are expressions of physicality that bring together a confluence of networked actors, technologies, and spaces. Moreover, a podcast is itself a material artifact in the most literal sense: sound is a physical phenomenon, emitting and reverberating waves stimulating effects in our body and affecting physio-emotional responses. Inside my car, there is little impeding the sound waves emitting from the speakers and into my ears. Diffraction is minimal; the sound fills the interior of my vehicle so quickly that I can’t perceive that it is moving. I’m surrounded by the sound of the podcast, but not in the sense that is usually meant by “surround sound”. I’m also inundated by other sounds, the noises of driving that the twenty-first-century commuter has been conditioned to render ambient: the buzz of other vehicles passing me, the hum of my tyres on asphalt, the squeak of brakes and crunch of slowly turning tyres. Listening to a podcast in the car is like sitting in on a conversation that you can’t participate in. Slate magazine’s sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen” plays with this expectation, taking its name for the clichéd valediction that callers to local sports radio shows would say to indicate that they are done asking their question, signifying to the host that it’s their turn again. It’s a shibboleth through which the caller acknowledges and performs the participatory role of the listener as an actor within the network of the show. McNely writes that when he walks, “there are sounds in me, around me, passing through me. When I walk, I feel wind, mist, sleet. When I walk, I feel bass, treble, empathy. When I walk, I feel arguments, metaphors, dialogues—in my gut, in my chest” (Engaging 184). His attunement to all of these elicits physical sensations and emotional responses, and the sounds of the podcast cause similar responses for me. I jostle in my seat. I tense up, grip the steering wheel, and grind my teeth. I sigh, guffaw, roll my eyes, and yell. I pause—both my movement and the podcast app—to let a potential response roll about in my head. I’m in the car, but podcasts attempt to place me somewhere else through ambient worldbuilding: the clinking of cups and spoons to let me know the conversation is taking place in a coffee shop, the chirps of frogs and bugs to make me feel like I’m with the guest interviewee at the Amazonian research site, the clamour of a teacher calling their third-grade class to attention as a lead in for a discussion of public school funding. The arrangement and design of the podcast takes the listener to the world within the podcast, and it reminds me how the podcast, and myself, my car, and the listening are connected to everything else. Networks I am employed at an institution with a “distributed campus”, with multiple sites spread across the local region and online, without an officially designated central campus. Faculty and students attend these different places based on appointment, proximity, and preference. I teach classes in person on two of the campuses, sometimes at both simultaneously connected via videoconference. So where is the location of my class? It’s the physical campuses, certainly. It’s also the online space where the class meets, the locations where users join from (home, a dorm room, their workplace, etc.), and the Internet connecting those people and spaces. The class is transnational, as many of our students live in the neighbouring country. The class is also in between and in transit, with students using the shuttle bus Wi-Fi to complete work or join meetings. As with the research methodology detailed above, the class is moving between the static places, too, as the instructor and students alike travel to teach or attend class or book it home to join via videoconference in time. The institution’s networks enact Detweiller’s characterisation of podcasts as enacting both rhetorical distribution and circulation. Taken together, “distribution is not a strictly one-to-many phenomenon”. Yes, it’s “a conception of rhetoric that challenges but does not erase the role of human agency in rhetorical causes and effects”, but it’s also the physical networks and “supply chains” that move things. In both cases, the decentralisation draws attention away from individual nodes and to the network and the interconnections between various actors. Consider the routes the podcast takes. I start the episode as I leave my driveway. By the time I reach the highway, the podcast has made it through its preamble and first ad read. The episode travels with me in the car along my route, the sound of a single word literally takes up physical space on the highway. Ideas stretch for miles. I make the entire trip in a single episode. I then assign that episode to my students, who take the podcast with them. It moves at different speeds but also at the same speed (unless a particular listener sets their playback at a faster pace). In some ways, it’s the same sound, yet in other ways—time, space, distribution, audience—the same episode makes a different sound. Meanwhile, the podcast hosts remain in their recording booth, simultaneously locked into and moving through spacetime. Further, by analysing the various texts surrounding my listening to podcasts, we can see a multimodal genre ecology of signs, roadways, mapped and unmapped routes, turn-by-turn navigation apps, as well as other markers of location and direction, like billboards, water towers in the distance, the setting sun, and that one tree in a field that doesn’t belong there but lets me know I’ve passed the midpoint of my commute. Visual cues are perhaps more easily felt, but Rickert reminds us that “we consciously and unconsciously depend on sound to orient, situate, and wed ourselves to the places we inhabit” (152). The three-note dinging of a railroad crossing halts drivers even without visual confirmation of an oncoming train. The brutal springtime crosswind announces its presence on my passenger window, giving me a split second to steady the wheel. The lowering pitch of the pavement as I take the exit towards my house. The network of audio extends beyond the situations of the researcher and draws attention to what Barad referred to as “entangled material agencies” resulting in “networks or assemblages of humans and nonhumans” (1118, 1131). The network of my podcast listening accounts for the mobile device that we use to access content, the digital networks that I download episodes over, as well as the physical infrastructures that enable those networks, the hosting services and recording technologies and funding mechanisms used by the podcasters, the distribution of campuses, the roads I travel on, the tonnage of steel and plastic that I manipulate while researching, and that’s even before we get to everything else that impacts on my listening, like weather, traffic, the pathways all these material items took to get where they are, the head cold impacting on my hearing, my personal history of hearing different sounds, and on and on. Embodiment I listen to podcasts in the car while commuting to work. A more accurate way of putting that would be to say that commuting is work, which I mean twice over. First, a commute is likely a requisite component of your job. This is not to assign full culpability to one actor or another; the length of your commute likely owes to various factors—availability of affordable housing, proximity of worksite relative to your home, competing duties of family care, etc.—but a commute is and should be considered part of the work. Even if you’re not getting paid for it, even if the neoliberal economic system that overarches your life has convinced you that you are actively choosing to commute as part of the mutually and equally entered-into contract with your employer, you’re on the clock when commuting because you’re doing that action because of the work. If your response to this is, “then what about people who work from home? Should their personal devices and monthly Internet costs be considered work expenses? Or what about the time it takes to get up early to put makeup on or prepare lunches for their kids? Does all that count as work?” Yes. Yes, it does. The farmer’s day doesn’t start when they milk the cow, it starts as soon as they wake up. It starts before then, even. We are entangled with our work selves. Lately, I’ve begun logging these listening commutes on my weekly timesheet. It’s not an official record: salaried employees at my institution are not required to keep track of their work hours. Instead, it’s a routine and technical document I developed to help me get things done, an artifact of procedural rhetoric and the broader genre ecology of my work. Second, commuting is a physical act. It is work. We walk to bus and train stops and stand around waiting. We power our bicycles. We drive our vehicles, manoeuvring through streets and turns and other drivers. The deleterious effects of sitting down for prolonged periods for work, including while commuting, are well documented (Ding et al.). Driving itself is an act that places the human—the driver, passengers, and pedestrians—in greater physical danger than flying, or riding a train, or swimming with sharks. Research in this way presents a different kind of epistemic risk. Arriving So, the question I’m left to codify is what does this commuting audio research methodology offer for researchers that other, more traditional approaches, might not? Rickert analysed an electric car as “inherently suasive”, as it “participates in the conflicted discourses about that built environment and showcases some fundamental preconceptions rooted into our everyday ways of being together” (263). I’m alone in the car, but every sound reminds me of how I am connected to someone or something else. Of course, neither commuting nor listening to podcasts are exclusively solo endeavours: people carpool to work, and fans attend live recordings of their favourite shows. Perhaps listening while driving causes me to pay closer attention to what’s being said, the way you seem to learn the words of a song better when listening and singing along in the car. There are different kinds of distractions when driving versus sitting at one’s desk to read or listen (although it’s fair to say that the podcast itself is the distraction from what I should be paying the most attention to when driving). Anyone who has taken a long road trip alone can tell you about the opportunities it provides to sit with one’s thoughts, to spend uninterrupted time and miles turning over an idea in your mind, to reflect at length on a single topic, to rant to the noise of the road. Maybe that’s what a commuting podcast methodology affords: isolated moments surrounded by sound, away from the overtly audio, and connected to the rest of the world. References “A Group of White Men Is Called a Podcast.” Know Your Meme, 20 Feb. 2019. 6 Mar. 2024 <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-group-of-white-men-is-called-a-podcast>. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Berkshire, Jennifer, and Jack Schneider, hosts. “Digging Deep into the Education Wars.” Have You Heard 156 (4 May 2023). <https://www.haveyouheardpodcast.com/episodes/156-digging-deep-into-the-education-wars?rq=woke>. Bourelle, Andrew, Tiffany Bourelle, and Natasha Jones. “Multimodality in the Technical Communication Classroom: Viewing Classical Rhetoric through a 21st Century Lens.” Technical Communication Quarterly 24.4 (2015): 306-327. Bowie, Jennifer L. “Podcasting in a Writing Class? Considering the Possibilities.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 16.2 (2012). 29 Nov. 2023 <https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.2/topoi/bowie/index.html>. Detweiler, Eric. “The Bandwidth of Podcasting.” Tuning in to Soundwriting, special issue of enculturation/Intermezzo. 9 Feb. 2024 <http://intermezzo.enculturation.net/14-stedman-et-al/detweiler.html>. Ding, Ding, et al. “Driving: A Road to Unhealthy Lifestyles and Poor Health Outcomes.” Plos One 9.6. 15 Feb. 2024 <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094602>. Faison, Wonderful, et al. “White Benevolence: Why Supa-Save-a-Savage Rhetoric Ain’t Getting It.” In Counterstories from the Writing Center, eds. Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon. Logan: Utah State UP. 81-94. Harris, Jasmine. “Podcast Talk and Public Sociology: Teaching Critical Race Discourse Participation through Podcast Production.” About Campus 24.3 (2019): 16-20. Locke, Charley. “Podcasts' Biggest Problem Isn't Discovery, It's Diversity.” Wired, 31 Aug. 2015. 6 Mar. 2024 <https://www.wired.com/2015/08/podcast-discovery-vs-diversity/>. Mason, Lily, and Thomas, hosts. “‘Cancel Culture’: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World – with Adrian Daub.” Is This Democracy 24 (16 May 2023). <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/24-cancel-culture-how-a-moral-panic-is-capturing/id1652741954?i=1000612321369>. McGregor, Hannah, and Stacey Copeland. “Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 27.1 (2022). 15 Feb. 2024 <https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html>. McNely, Brian. “Lures, Slimes, Time: Viscosity and the Nearness of Distance.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 52.3 (2019): 203-226. ———. Engaging Ambience: Visual and Multisensory Methodologies and Rhetorical Theory. Logan: Utah State UP, 2024. Morgan, Josh. “Data Confirm That Podcasting in the US Is a White Male Thing.” Quartz, 12 Jan. 2016. 6 Mar. 2024 <https://qz.com/591440/data-confirm-that-podcasting-in-the-us-is-a-white-male-thing>. Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a 'Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct'.” College Composition and Communication 51.2 (1999): 195-224. Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2013. Shamburg, Christopher. “Rising Waves in Informal Education: Women of Color with Educationally Oriented Podcasts.” Education and Information Technologies 26 (2021): 699–713. Tiluk, Daniel, and Have Hope, hosts. “They Stole WOKE.” Talking Race, Africa and People 1 (14 Apr. 2023). <https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/01-they-stole-woke/id1682830005?i=1000609221830> Vásquez, Camilla. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis. London, Bloomsbury, 2022. Vrikki, Photini, and Sarita Malik. “Voicing Lived-Experience and Anti-Racism: Podcasting as a Space at the Margins for Subaltern Counterpublics.” Popular Communication 17.4 (2018): 273-287.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
18

Deffenbacher, Kristina. "Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto." M/C Journal 22, no. 4 (August 14, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1518.

Full text
Abstract:
Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
19

Stead, Naomi. "White cubes and red knots." M/C Journal 5, no. 3 (July 1, 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1961.

Full text
Abstract:
The question of colour in architecture offers many potential points of entry. Taking an historical standpoint, one could discuss the use of bright colour in ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the importance of brilliantly coloured mosaic and stained glass to sacred architecture in the Byzantine and medieval periods, and the primacy of colour in non-Western architectural traditions both ancient and modern. It would be possible to trace prohibitions against the use of applied colour, derived from late 18th century notions of architectural morality—ideals demanding authenticity, honesty and directness in the expression of structure, function and materials. This puritan strand could be pursued into the modern movement, to its quasi-pathological attachment to whiteness.1 It would also be possible to note a trend which ran counter to dominant modernist attitudes to colour, in the eclectic 'neon historicism' of so-called 'post-modernist' architecture. But while it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the history of colour in architecture in passing, it has been well addressed elsewhere, and is in any case outside the scope of this paper.2 What is significant is that this history is marked throughout by many of the same, largely unspoken, prohibitions against colour that can be traced across other cultural realms—that which David Batchelor has described as a history of 'chromophobia'. As Batchelor writes; 'Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity…. [T]his purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other it is perceived merely as a secondary quantity of experience, and thus unworthy or serious consideration.'3 Numerous examples of the attempt to 'purge' colour can be identified throughout the history of architecture in the modern period. The mode of chromophobia particular to architecture may be summarised thus: colour in architecture has been associated with illusion and frivolity, and thus with decoration—it has been seen as being excess or supplementary to 'real' architecture.4 Discussions of colour in architecture can never be completely distinguished from discussions of ornament, or of materials and materiality. Colour is not necessarily a problem in itself—it is acceptable, for instance, when it is inherent to the material or to its weathering process, as in the bright green of copper verdigris. It is the application of colour, in the form of paint or stain, that raises questions of authenticity. The importance of surface and colour have been consistently made subordinate to architectural form; and the idea that colour is acceptable in interiors but not exteriors is merely the expression of another hierarchy, linking and demoting the trivial, contingent, feminised interior in favour of universal, masculinized, heroic external form. In the modern period, a work of 'serious' Architecture (as opposed to vernacular, commercial, or 'popular' architecture) has most often either been white, or coloured in the subdued palette afforded by the inherent characteristics of 'natural' materials.5 This is nowhere more true than in institutional architecture generally, and museum architecture in particular. Museums and their stake in the neutral monochrome The museum as an institution has traditionally functioned as a symbol of the establishment and its authority, a symbolic role often expressed in conventionally monumental architecture. This monumentality has, in turn, been reinforced by prestigious materials: much of the dignity and status of institutional architecture is taken from materials valued for their expense, rarity, or durability.6 Museum buildings are required to last, and thus they must not only use enduring materials, but materials which demonstrate their durability by being self-finishing in their natural, apparently neutral, state. The very idea that 'natural' materials are also somehow 'neutral' opens onto another, more ideological investment that the museum has in avoiding colour. Museums have long held a stake in the idea of an objective stance, and maintained the pretence of an unmediated presentation of historical fact. The notion of the museum as 'white cube' embodies all of this—the idea of the white cube, with its aformal form and achromatic colour, signifies purity and transcendence. Just as the whiteness of modern architecture was a continuation of the hygienic whiteness of doctor's coat, bathroom tiles, and hospital walls, the whiteness of the museum signifies clinical objectivity.7 It also, perhaps more significantly, stands for the ideal of the tabula rasa, the clean slate upon which the documentary evidence of art, history, or any other metanarrative could be methodically examined and arranged. For the museum, abandoning the neutrality of its public presentation may also mean a symbolic abandonment of objectivity. It would mean, if not a surrender to partiality, at least the admission of partiality—and the renunciation of universal whiteness for the specificities of colour. In the modern period, applied colour can never be neutral, but is read as mask, disguise, or stain. In the postmodern period, the discourse of the 'new museology' has challenged and discredited many of the ideological complicities of the idea of the museum as 'white box', linked as they are with a suspiciously absolutist rhetoric of abstract purity. Museums have increasingly begun to render explicit their role in the re-presentation of history, and to work at recontextualising ideas and artefacts. But even if a critical and self-reflexive stance is now more common in museological practice, it has taken much longer to begin to inform museum architecture. It would be a very courageous museum indeed that was willing to cash in all of the chips of its cultural authority, of which prestigious monumental architecture is a particularly powerful source. Most museums are still, if not white, at least respectably neutral, inside and out. But not so the National Museum of Australia (NMA). This museum, in its polychromatic formal complexity, could hardly be further from a 'white cube' museum. The National Museum of Australia: flirting with the flippant The NMA is housed in a loud and gregarious building. From its controversial strategy of literally appropriating elements from other canonical modernist works, through the coded messages of the Braille patterns on its surface, to the device of the extruded string and red 'knot' which passes through and around the building's form, it is relentless in its challenge to conventional institutional architecture. This is nowhere more true than in its colouration—there is hardly a neutral tone in sight. For that matter, there is hardly a 'natural' material in sight either—the majority of the building is constructed from pre-formed aluminium panelling in grey, yellow, red and khaki, crossed in places by sweeping calligraphic symbols.8 The dramatic aerial loop at the museum's entry is white and bright orange. There are walls of black dimpled pre-formed concrete, blue painted poles (get it?), a 'Mexican wave' of multicoloured steel sheets, and of course the richly cacophonous Garden of Australia Dreams. There are also some deliberate plays on colour symbolism—Le Corbusier's gleaming white modernist classic, the Villa Savoye, is reversed and reconstituted in black, corrugated steel. The fact that this forms part of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is a hint of the building's clear, even dangerously frank, employment of colour symbolism. Given the architects previous work, we can safely assume that in this case, as elsewhere in the building, the choice of colours is calculated for maximum rhetorical effect. But I am less concerned here with the specific ploys of the architects than with the ways in which the building's reception has been conditioned by its employment of colour, specifically the ways in which it has been construed as populist. The NMA has polarised the architectural community in Australia. While much of the comment directed at the building has centred around its contravention of standards of taste and propriety in civic architecture, I would argue that this is only the symptom of a deeper reaction against its apparent frivolity, as signified most strongly by its colour. This is exemplified in a critique of the building by Stephen Frith, a respected Canberra academic. Concluding a polemical review in the Canberra Times, Frith asks: But why such tongue-lashings and breast-beatings over what has quickly established itself as a happy theme park to mediocrity? Surely its condoning of the ruthless kitsch of petty capitalism in its imagery and finishes provides for some spectre of merit? The problem becomes one of the civic domain in which architecture and its rhetoric is interpreted. For a supposedly public work, the museum is an intensely private building, privately encoded with in-jokes, and in the end hugely un-funny... The confection of cheap cladding and plasterboard is a spurious sideshow of magpie borrowings passing themselves off as cultural reference...9 Everything in this passage decries what Frith reads as the NMA's verisimilitude of popularity - the reference to theme-parks, sideshows, commercialism - a confection constructed with poor quality materials and finishes, which nevertheless flirts 'pretentiously' with the canon of modern architecture. To Frith the building reads not as a cheap and cheerful reflection of the Australian vernacular, but as a demeaning attempt to raise a laugh from the elite at the expense of the uncomprehending masses. His complaint is thus two-fold—that the building has insufficient gravitas, and that this is compounded rather than redeemed by the fact that it is not truly popular at all, but rather 'intensely private'. There is an important distinction to be made here, then, between 'populism' and 'popularity'. Populism has the negative connotation of deliberately seeking popular acceptance at the cost of quality, intellectual rigour, or formal aesthetic value. 'Popularity' still retains its more neutral modern sense, either of actual public involvement, or of things that are socially recognised as popular. In architecture, populism is already hedged about with prohibitions springing from the idea that a deliberately populist architecture is somehow fraudulent. A piece of serious, civic, monumental architecture should neither set out expressly to be popular, nor to look like it is, so the logic goes: if a work of high architecture happens to gain popular acclaim, then that is a happy accident. But there are significant reasons why such popularity must be seen to be incidental to other, more lofty concerns. Given that colour is seen to be 'popular', a highly coloured building is thus assumed to be 'lowering' itself in order to appeal to popular taste. Old systems of thought endure, and both museums and architecture are each subject to an unspoken hierarchy that still sees 'populism', if not actual popularity, as inferior. Conclusions: colour as the sign of a critical engagement But there is another possible reading of the NMA's apparent populism. I would argue that the building in fact presents and problematises the question of popularity in formal architectural terms. This leads to a proposition: that there is a 'look' of populism that exists independently of any intended or actual popularity, or even a connection with popular culture. I would argue that the NMA opens an elaborate play on this 'look' of the popular, and that it does so by manipulating certain key aesthetic devices: literal and figurative elements, visual jokes, non-orthogonal forms, and most significantly, bright and mixed colour. Such devices carry a weight of expectation and association, they cause a building to be read or socially recognised as being populist, largely as a result of pre-existing dichotomies between 'high' and 'low' art. In this conception the NMA, turning the modernist prohibition on its head, uses colour as the deliberately frivolous disguise of a profoundly serious intent. Rather than concealing the absence of meaning, it conceals an overabundance of meaning—a despairing accumulation of piled up allegories, codes and fragments. It is thus deeply ironic that the NMA has been read as a light, flippant, and populist confection, since I would argue that it could hardly be further from being those things. Rather than taking the usual path, of seeking cultural authority through allusion to traditional monumental architecture, the NMA makes perverse references to the seemingly trivial, commercial, and populist. The reasons why the architects might want the building to be (mis)read in this way are complex. But by renouncing the aesthetic trappings of a serious institution, the NMA reveals the very superficiality of such trappings. Furthermore, by renouncing the 'look of authority' in favour of colour, frivolity, and apparent populism, it introduces a note of doubt. Could the building, and thus the institution - a national museum, remember, charged with representing the nation and placed in the national capital - really be as flippant as it seems? Or is there some more subtle game afoot, a subversive questioning of accepted notions of Australian national history and national identity? I would argue that this is so. In the NMA, then, colour is the sign of a critical engagement. It positions the building itself as a discourse or discussion, not only of architectural colour as conferring inferiority and flippancy, but of a lack of colour as conferring authority and legitimacy. Of course, it is precisely because of architecture's history of chromophobia that colour can itself become a tool for subversiveness, provide an invitation to alternative readings, and collapse unspoken hierarchies. In this respect, the colour in and of the NMA provides an emblem of that which has long been marginalised in architecture, and in culture more generally. Notes 1. Mark Wigley writes that the primacy of whiteness in high modernist architecture (particularly the work of Le Corbusier) lies partly in the removal of decoration. '[The] erasure of decoration is portrayed [by Le Corbusier] as the necessary gesture of a civilized society. Indeed, civilization is defined as the elimination of the 'superfluous' in favour of the 'essential' and the paradigm of inessential surplus is decoration. Its removal liberates a new visual order. Echoing an argument at least as old as Western philosophy, Le Corbusier describes civilization as a gradual passage from the sensual to the intellectual, from the tactile to the visual. Decoration's 'caresses of the senses' are progressively abandoned in favour of the visual harmony of proportion.' Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, pp. 2-3 2. See for example John Gage's superb and authoritative history of the use and meaning of colour, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism, Thames and Hudson, London, 1999. For a survey of the use of colour in architecture, see Tom Porter, Architectural Colour: A Design Guide to Using Colour on Buildings, Whitney Library of Design, New York, 1982, or the more recent Architectural Design Profile number 120: Colour in Architecture, AD, vol. 66, no 3/4, March/April 1996. These are only a few examples of the available literature. 3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 22-23. 4. The notable exception to this - the architecture of schools is emblematic in itself: colour is appealing to children, so the logic would go, because they have undeveloped, 'primitive' tastes. 5. William Braham has perceptively examined the allure of 'natural' materials and colours in the modern period. He writes that 'the natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance. The fact that a family of paint colours neutrals, ochres, and other earth colours fit within the definition of natural is only partly explained by their original manufacture with naturally occurring mineral compounds. Though they are opaque surface coatings, they resemble the tones produced in natural materials by weathering.' He goes on to say that the 'natural/neutral palette' is characterised by 'the difficult pursuit of authenticity', and this question goes indeed to the heart of the issue of colour in architecture. William W. Braham, 'A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colours in Modern Architecture', JAE Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53. No.1, September 1999, p. 10. 6. But perhaps more important than actual durability in institutional architecture is the appearance of durability, and this appearance is undermined by protective treatments like paint, whether coloured or not. Materials which are seen as flimsy or fragile may as well be coloured, so the logic goes, since they require constant re-painting anyway, and since it fits their low status. 7. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 5. 8. Aluminium panelling is a new technology and a new material one that was unknown in the high modernist period but which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous today. The fact that aluminium panelling is coloured during the manufacturing process opens a new and interesting question: is this colour inherent, or is it simply applied earlier in the building process? Is it, in other words, an 'honest' or a 'dishonest' colour? Given that aluminium does have its own colour, and that it can be lacquered or anodised to retain that colour, it seems that the aluminium panelling of the NMA have been received as 'dishonest'. 9. Frith, 'A monument to lost opportunity', The Canberra Times, 20 March 2001 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stead, Naomi. "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php>. Chicago Style Stead, Naomi, "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Stead, Naomi. (2002) White cubes and red knots. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]).
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
20

Richardson, Nicholas. "“Making It Happen”: Deciphering Government Branding in Light of the Sydney Building Boom." M/C Journal 20, no. 2 (April 26, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1221.

Full text
Abstract:
Introduction Sydney, Australia has experienced a sustained period of building and infrastructure development. There are hundreds of kilometres of bitumen and rail currently being laid. There are significant building projects in large central sites such as Darling Harbour and Barangaroo on the famous Harbour foreshore. The period of development has offered an unprecedented opportunity for the New South Wales (NSW) State Government to arrest the attention of the Sydney public through kilometres of construction hoarding. This opportunity has not been missed, with the public display of a new logo, complete with pithy slogan, on and around all manner of government projects and activities since September 2015. NSW is “making it happen” according to the logo being displayed. At first glance it is a proactive, simple and concise slogan that, according to the NSW Government brand guidelines, has a wide remit to be used for projects that relate to construction, economic growth, improved services, and major events. However, when viewed through the lens of public, expert, and media research into Sydney infrastructure development it can also be read as a message derived from reactive politics. This paper elucidates turning points in the history of the last decade of infrastructure building in NSW through qualitative primary research into media, public, and practice led discourse. Ultimately, through the prism of Colin Hay’s investigation into political disengagement, I question whether the current build-at-any-cost mentality and its mantra “making it happen” is in the long-term interest of the NSW constituency or the short-term interest of a political party or whether, more broadly, it reflects a crisis of identity for today’s political class. The Non-Launch of the New Logo Image 1: An ABC Sydney Tweet. Image credit: ABC Sydney. There is scant evidence of a specific launch of the logo. Michael Koziol states that to call it an unveiling, “might be a misnomer, given the stealth with which the design has started to make appearances on banners, barriers [see: Image 1, above] and briefing papers” (online). The logo has a wide range of applications. The NSW Government brand guidelines specify that the logo be used “on all projects, programs and announcements that focus on economic growth and confidence in investing in NSW” as well as “infrastructure for the future and smarter services” (30). The section of the guidelines relating to the “making it happen” logo begins with a full-colour, full-page photograph of the Barangaroo building development on Sydney Harbour—complete with nine towering cranes clearly visible across the project/page. The guidelines specifically mention infrastructure, housing projects, and major developments upfront in the section denoted to appropriate logo applications (31). This is a logo that the government clearly intends to use around its major projects to highlight the amount of building currently underway in NSW.In the first week of the logo’s release journalist Elle Hunt asks an unnamed government spokesperson for a definition of “it” in “making it happen.” The spokesperson states, “just a buzz around the state in terms of economic growth and infrastructure […] the premier [the now retired Mike Baird] has used the phrase several times this week in media conferences and it feels like we are making it happen.” Words like “buzz,” “feels like” and the ubiquitous “it” echo the infamous courtroom scene summation of Dennis Denuto from the 1997 Australian film The Castle that have deeply penetrated the Australian psyche and lexicon. Denuto (played by actor Tiriel Mora) is acting as a solicitor for Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton) in fighting the compulsory acquisition of the Kerrigan family property. In concluding an address to the court, Denuto states, “In summing up, it’s the constitution, it’s Mabo, it’s justice, it’s law, it’s the Vibe and, no that’s it, it’s the vibe. I rest my case.” All fun and irony (the reason for the house acquisition that inspired Denuto’s now famous speech was an airport infrastructure expansion project) aside, we can assume from the brand guidelines as well as the Hunt article that the intended meaning of “making it happen” is fluid and diffuse rather than fixed and specific. With this article I question why the government would choose to express this diffuse message to the public?Purpose, Scope, Method and ResearchTo explore this question I intertwine empirical research with a close critique of Colin Hay’s thesis on the problematisation of political decision-making—specifically the proliferation of certain tenets of public choice theory. My empirical research is a study of news media, public, and expert discourse and its impact on the success or otherwise of major rail infrastructure projects in Sydney. One case study project, initially announced as the North West Rail Line (NWR) and recently rebadged as the Sydney Metro Northwest (see: http://www.sydneymetro.info/northwest/project-overview), is at the forefront of the infrastructure building that the government is looking to highlight with “making it happen.” A comparison case study is the failed Sydney City Metro (SCM) project that preceded the NWR as the major Sydney rail infrastructure endeavour. I have written in greater detail on the scope of this research elsewhere (see: Richardson, “Curatorial”; “Upheaval”; “Hinterland”). In short, my empirical secondary research involved a study of print news media from 2010 to 2016 spanning Sydney’s two daily papers the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and the Daily Telegraph (TELE). My qualitative research was conducted in 2013. The public qualitative research consisted of a survey, interviews, and focus groups involving 149 participants from across Sydney. The primary expert research consisted of 30 qualitative interviews with experts from politics, the news media and communications practice, as well as project delivery professions such as architecture and planning, project management, engineering, project finance and legal. Respondents were drawn from both the public and private sectors. My analysis of this research is undertaken in a manner similar to what Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke term a “thematic discourse analysis” (81). The intention is to examine “the ways in which events, realities, meanings and experiences and so on are the effects of a range of discourses operating within society.” A “theme” captures “something important about the data in relation to the research question,” and represents, “some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set.” Thematic analysis therefore, “involves the searching across a data set—be that a number of interviews or focus groups, or a range of texts—to find repeated patterns of meaning” (80-86).Governing Sydney: A Legacy of Inability, Broken Promises, and Failure The SCM was abandoned in February 2010. The project’s abandonment had long been foreshadowed in the news media (Anonymous, Future). In the days preceding and following the announcement, news media articles focussed almost exclusively on the ineptitude and wastefulness of a government that would again fail to deliver transport it had promised and invested in (Cratchley; Teutsch & Benns; Anonymous, Taxation). Immediately following the decision, the peak industry body, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, asserted, “this decision shreds the credibility of the government in delivering projects and will likely make it much harder to attract investment and skills to deliver new infrastructure” (Anonymous, Taxation). The reported ineptitude of the then Labor Government of NSW and the industry fallout surrounding the decision were clearly established as the main news media angles. My print media research found coverage to be overwhelmingly and consistently negative. 70% of the articles studied were negatively inclined. Furthermore, approximately one-quarter featured statements pertaining directly to government paralysis and inability to deliver infrastructure.My public, expert, and media research revealed a number of “repeated patterns of meaning,” which Braun and Clarke describe as themes (86). There are three themes that are particularly pertinent to my investigation here. To describe the first theme I have used the statement, an inability of government to successfully deliver projects. The theme is closely tied to the two other interrelated themes—for one I use the statement, a legacy of failure to implement projects successfully—for the other I use a cycle of broken promises to describe the mounting number of announcements on projects that government then fails to deliver. Some of the more relevant comments, on this matter, collected throughout my research appear below.A former Sydney radio announcer, now a major project community consultation advisor, asserts that a “legacy issue” exists with regards to the poor performance of government over time. Through the SCM failure, which she asserts was “a perfectly sound idea,” the NSW Government came to represent “lost opportunities” resulting in a “massive erosion of public trust.” This sentiment was broadly mirrored across the public and industry expert research I conducted. For example, a public respondent states, “repeated public transport failures through the past 20 years has lowered my belief in future projects being successful.” And, a former director general of NSW planning asserts that because of the repeated project failures culminating in the demise of the SCM, “everybody is now so cynical”.Today under the “making it happen” banner, the major Sydney rail transport project investment is to the northwest of Sydney. There was a change of government in 2011 and the NWR was a key election promise for the incoming Premier at the time, Barry O’Farrell. The NWR project, (now renamed Sydney Metro Northwest as well as extended with new stages through the city to Sydney’s Southwest) remains ongoing and in many respects it appears that Sydney may have turned a corner with major infrastructure construction finally underway. Paradoxically though, the NWR project received far less support than the SCM from the majority of the 30 experts I interviewed. The most common theme from expert respondents (including a number working on the project) is that it is not the most urgent transport priority for Sydney but was instead a political decision. As a communications manager for a large Australian infrastructure provider states: “The NWR was an election promise, it wasn’t a decision based on whether the public wanted that rail link or not”. And, the aforementioned former director general of NSW planning mirrors this sentiment when she contends that the NWR is not a priority and “totally political”.My research findings strongly indicate that the failure of the SCM is in fact a vitally important catalyst for the implementation of the NWR. In other words, I assert that the formulation of the NWR has been influenced by the dominant themes that portray the abilities of government in a negative light—themes strengthened and amplified due to the failure of the SCM. Therefore, I assert that the NWR symbolises a desperate government determined to reverse these themes even if it means adopting a build at any cost mentality. As a respondent who specialises in infrastructure finance for one of Australia’s largest banks, states: “I think in politics there are certain promises that people attempt to keep and I think Barry O’Farrell has made it very clear that he is going to make sure those [NWR] tunnel boring machines are on the ground. So that’s going to happen rain, hail or shine”. Hating Politics My empirical research clearly elucidates the three themes I term an inability of government to successfully deliver projects, a legacy of failure and a cycle of broken promises. These intertwining themes are firmly embedded and strengthening. They also portray government in a negative light. I assert that the NWR, as a determined attempt to reverse these themes (irrespective of the cost), indicates a government at best reactive in its decision making and at worst desperate to reverse public and media perception.The negativity facing the NSW government seems extreme. However, in the context of Colin Hay’s work, the situation is perhaps more inevitable than surprising. In Why We Hate Politics (2007), Hay charts the history of public disengagement with western politics. He does this largely by arguing the considerable influence of problematic key tenets of public choice theory that permeate the discourse of most western democracies, including Australia. They are tenets that normalise depoliticisation and cast a lengthy shadow over the behaviour and motivations of politicians and bureaucrats. Public choice can be defined as the economic study of nonmarket decision-making, or, simply the application of economics to political science. The basic behavioral postulate of public choice, as for economics, is that man is an egoistic, rational, utility maximizer. (Mueller 395)Originating from rational choice theory generally and spurred by Kenneth Arrow’s investigations into rational choice and social policy more specifically, the basic premise of public choice is a privileging of individual values above rational collective choice in social policy development (Arrow; Dunleavy; Hauptman; Mueller). Hay asserts that public choice evolved as a theory throughout the 1960s and 70s in order to conceptualise a more market-orientated alternative to the influential theory of welfare economics. Both were formulated in response to a need for intervention and regulation of markets to correct their “natural tendency to failure” (95). In many ways public choice was a reaction to the “idealized depiction of the state” that welfare economics was seen to be propagating. Instead a “more sanguine and realistic view of the […] imperfect state, it was argued, would lead to a rather safer set of inferences about the need for state intervention” (96). Hay asserts that in effect by challenging the motivations of elected officials and public servants, public choice theory “assumed the worst”, branding all parties self-interested and declaring the state inefficient and ineffective in the delivery of public goods (96). Although, as Hay admits, public choice advocates perhaps provided “a healthy cynicism about both the motivations and the capabilities of politicians and public officials,” the theory was overly simplistic, overstated and unproven. Furthermore, when market woes became real rather than theoretical with crippling stagflation in the 1970s, public choice readily identify “villains” at the heart of the problem and the media and public leapt on it (Hay 109). An academic theory was thrust into mainstream discourse. Two results key to the investigations of this paper were 1) a perception of politics “synonymous with the blind pursuit of individual self interest” and 2) the demystification of the “public service ethos” (Hay 108-12). Hay concludes that instead the long-term result has been a conception of politicians and the bureaucracy that is “increasingly synonymous with duplicity, greed, corruption, interference and inefficiency” (160).Deciphering “Making It Happen” More than three decades on, echoes of public choice theory abound in my empirical research into NSW infrastructure building. In particular they are clearly evident in the three themes I term an inability of government to successfully deliver projects, a legacy of failure and a cycle of broken promises. Within this context, what then can we decipher from the pithy, ubiquitous slogan on a government logo? Of course, in one sense “making it happen” could be interpreted as a further attempt to reverse these three themes. The brand guidelines provide the following description of the logo: “the tone is confident, progressive, friendly, trustworthy, active, consistent, getting on with the job, achieving deadlines—“making it happen” (30). Indeed, this description seems the antithesis of perceptions of government identified in my primary research as well as the dogma of public choice theory. There is certainly expert evidence that one of the centrepieces of the government’s push to demonstrate that it is “making it happen”, the NWR, is a flawed project that represents a political decision. Therefore, it is hard not to be cynical and consider the government self-interested and shortsighted in its approach to building and development. If we were to adopt this view then it would be tempting to dismiss the new logo as political, reactive, and entirely self-serving. Further, with the worrying evidence of a ‘build at any cost’ mentality that may lead to wasted taxpayer funds and developments that future generations may judge harshly. As the principal of an national architectural practice states:politicians feel they have to get something done and getting something done is more important than the quality of what might be done because producing something of quality takes time […] it needs to have the support of a lot of people—it needs to be well thought through […] if you want to leap into some trite solution for something just to get something done, at the end of the day you’ll probably end up with something that doesn’t suit the taxpayers very well at all but that’s just the way politics is.In this context, the logo and its mantra could come to represent irreparable long-term damage to Sydney. That said, what if the cynics (this author included) tried to silence the public choice rhetoric that has become so ingrained? What if we reflect for a moment on the effects of our criticism – namely, the further perpetuation and deeper embedding of the cycle of broken promises, the legacy of failure and ineptitude? As Hay states, “if we look hard enough, we are likely to find plenty of behaviour consistent with such pessimistic assumptions. Moreover, the more we look the more we will reinforce that increasingly intuitive tendency” (160). What if we instead consider that by continuing to adopt the mantra of a political cynic, we are in effect perpetuating an overly simplistic, unsubstantiated theory that has cleverly affected us so profoundly? When confronted by the hundreds of kilometres of construction hoarding across Sydney, I am struck by the flippancy of “making it happen.” The vast expanse of hoarding itself symbolises that things are evidently “happening.” However, my research suggests these things could be other things with potential to deliver better public benefits. There is a conundrum here though—publicly expressing pessimism weakens further the utility of politicians and the bureaucracy and exacerbates the problems. Such is the self-fulfilling nature of public choice. ConclusionHay argues that rather than expecting politics and politicians to change, it is our expectations of what government can achieve that we need to modify. Hay asserts that although there is overwhelming evidence that we hate politics more now than at any stage in the past, he does not believe that, “today’s breed of politicians are any more sinful than their predecessors.” Instead he contends that it is more likely that “we have simply got into the habit of viewing them, and their conduct, in such terms” (160). The ramifications of such thinking ultimately, according to Hay, means a breakdown in “trust” that greatly hampers the “co-operation,” so important to politics (161). He implores us to remember “that politics can be more than the pursuit of individual utility, and that the depiction of politics in such terms is both a distortion and a denial of the capacity for public deliberation and the provision of collective goods” (162). What then if we give the NSW Government the benefit of the doubt and believe that the current building boom (including the decision to build the NWR) was not entirely self-serving but a line drawn in the sand with the determination to tackle a problem that is far greater than just that of Sydney’s transport or any other single policy or project problem—the ongoing issue of the spiralling reputation and identity of government decision-makers and perhaps even democracy generally as public choice ideals proliferate in western democracies like that of Australia’s most populous state. As a partner in a national architectural and planning practice states: I think in NSW in particular there has been such an under investment in infrastructure and so few of the promises have been kept […]. Who cares if NWR is right or not? If they actually build it they’ll be the first government in 25 years to do anything.ReferencesABC Sydney. “Confirmed. This is the new logo and phrase for #NSW getting its first outing. What do you think of it?” Twitter. 1 Sep. 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <https://twitter.com/abcsydney/status/638909482697777152>.Arrow, Kenneth, J. Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: Wiley, 1951.Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (2006): 77-101. The Castle. Dir. Rob Sitch. Working Dog, 1997.Cratchley, Drew. “Builders Want Compo If Sydney Metro Axed.” Sydney Morning Herald 12 Feb. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/builders-want-compo-if-sydney-metro-axed-20100212-nwn2.html>.Dunleavy, Patrick. Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Hauptmann, Emily. Putting Choice before Democracy: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory. Albany, New York: State U of New York P, 1996.Hay, Colin. Why We Hate Politics. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.Hunt, Elle. “New South Wales’ New Logo and Slogan Slips By Unnoticed – Almost.” The Guardian Australian Edition 10 Sep. 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/blog/2015/sep/10/new-south-wales-new-logo-and-slogan-slips-by-unnoticed-almost>.Koziol, Michael. “‘Making It Happen’: NSW Gets a New Logo. Make Sure You Don’t Breach Its Publishing Guidelines.” Sydney Morning Herald 11 Sep. 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/making-it-happen-nsw-gets-a-new-logo-make-sure-you-dont-breach-its-publishing-guidelines-20150911-gjk6z0.html>.Mueller, Dennis C. “Public Choice: A Survey.” Journal of Economic Literature 14 (1976): 395-433.“The NSW Government Branding Style Guide.” Sydney: NSW Government, 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <http://www.advertising.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/downloads/page/nsw_government_branding_guide.pdf>.Perry, Jenny. “Future of Sydney Metro Remains Uncertain.” Rail Express 3 Feb. 2010. 25 Apr. 2017 <https://www.railexpress.com.au/future-of-sydney-metro-remains-uncertain/>.Richardson, Nicholas. “Political Upheaval in Australia: Media, Foucault and Shocking Policy.” ANZCA Conference Proceedings 2015, eds. D. Paterno, M. Bourk, and D. Matheson.———. “A Curatorial Turn in Policy Development? Managing the Changing Nature of Policymaking Subject to Mediatisation” M/C Journal 18.4 (2015).———. “The Hinterland of Power: Rethinking Mediatised Messy Policy.” PhD Thesis. University of Western Sydney, 2015.“Taxpayers Will Compensate Axed Metro Losers: Keneally.” Sydney Morning Herald 21 Feb. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/taxpayers-will-compensate-axed-metro-losers-keneally-20100221-on6h.html>. Teutsch, Danielle, and Matthew Benns. “Call for Inquiry over $500m Poured into Doomed Metro.” Sydney Morning Herald 21 Mar. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/call-for-inquiry-over-500m-poured-into-doomed-Metro-20100320-qn7b.html>.“Train Ready to Leave: Will Politicians Get on Board?” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Feb. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/train-ready-to-leave-will-politicians-get-on-board-20100212-nxfk.html>.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
21

Trezise, Bryoni. "What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures." M/C Journal 20, no. 4 (August 16, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1263.

Full text
Abstract:
IntroductionWhen a baby girl born in Britain was endowed with the topical name ‘Hashtag’, a social media post decried the naming, and a media storm followed. Before she was even home from hospital, headlines were at the ready: “Did a mother really just name her child Hashtag?” (Nye) and “Baby Hashtag: has the search for original names gone too far?” (Barkham). Trollers were also poised to react, offering: “The first name is REALLY dumb. And you're even dumber,” prompting a rejection of the baby’s name as well as her ostensibly ill-equipped parents (Facebook). Dubbed a “Public Figure” on her Facebook page, Hashtag Jameson accrued a particularly premature type of celebrity, where, with a handful of baby selfies, she declared via Twitter, and only hours after birth, that she was “already trending”.In this article, I consider the relationship between the infant child and the visual-digital economies in which it – as in the Hashtag hoax, above – performs. The infant child is brought into view with the very first sentence that frames John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. “Seeing comes before words”, he writes. “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (1). Berger’s reference to the seeing child positions it as an active agent in cultures and practices of visuality, but also uses an idea of the child to position vision as the primary communicative means by which we “establish our place in the surrounding world” and in which we are enveloped “before” speech (7). Here, I explore the intensified relationship between the visual culture of infancy and the economised digital movement of vision that it produces in one highly specific image-genre: the baby selfie. In doing so I aim to characterise the depictive nature of this format in terms of how it compositionally documents – to further borrow the language of Berger, who was then discussing oil paintings – “a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange” (87).The new sociology of childhood has been concerned with the construction of the child figure as it has interfaced with new cultural and political realities since the early 1980s (Prout). These include “phenomena such as the flexibilization of production … expanding networks of knowledge … and shifts in labour market participation, work and the global economy” (Prout 5). I suggest here that the baby selfie can be seen as an unprecedented social marker of these transformations, signalling a heightened degree of priceless sentiment within which the child – as an animator of amateur affects, viral tendencies and algorithmic logics – is given to operate. I focus on the compositional propensities of the baby selfie in order to characterise how it visually construes a particular kind of self that is intrinsically entangled with the conception of the image as a form of capital exchange. That is, I suggest that in its intense and yet paradoxical self-performativity the baby selfie depicts a way of seeing that is predicated on, but also troubles, the conceit of a commodified social relation. What Does the Baby Selfie Say?“Should babies really be taking selfies?” yells a headline warning against the perceived dangers of youth digital cultures (Cox). The 2014 story references a phone app built by father Matthew Pegula that uses front-facing cameras to “unintentionally teac[h] your baby to take selfies of themselves” by generating “rattling sounds, pictures of cute animals, and more to get the baby’s attention.” The article explains that “[w]hen the baby reaches out to touch the screen, the camera snaps their selfie and saves it to the device”. While Pegula’s Baby Selfie App is available for purchase on Google Play’s app store for $1.09, a similar device named New Born Fame, featuring “Facebook and Twitter symbols that are activated when the youngster reaches for them” and inclusions such as “a pair of shoes with an internal pedometer that tracks kicks and posts the activity online, a squeezable GPS tracker and a ‘selfie-ball’ that photographs the baby and uploads the shot whenever the ball rotates” (Peppers), artistically interrogated this relatively new category of “insta-infa-fame”.In their article “What Does the Selfie Say?”, Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym argue that the selfie exists as the hallmark genre of a new kind of self-reflexive image-making, one that is formally characterised by the “self-generated” nature of the photographic portraiture it depicts, which is in turn conceived for its transmissibility, occurring “primarily via social media” (1589). Popularised in part by new technologies (the camera phone, the smart phone, and then the front-facing phone camera) and in part by new digital platforms (“Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Tumblr, WeChat, and Tinder”) (1589), Senft and Baym further explain that the selfie is simultaneously a photographic object which transmits human feeling, a practice of sending (as well as of depicting), and third, a monetized assemblage curated by nonhuman agents. It is this last factor which renders the objecthood of the selfie as it relates to the vernacular that it enacts as well as the practice of its making, political.Notions around the simultaneously constituting and yet virally distributed “self” of social media are not new. A now prominent literature around how the selfie graphically manifests and performs: intimate publics (Walsh and Baker), a normative or resistive image repertoire (Murray), and emotionalised, communicable affect (Bayer et al.), gives rise to a range of viewpoints that aim to characterise how the hyper self-reflexivity of the selfie depicts – visually as well as ontologically – the self as an agent of their own transmissibility (Holiday et al.). From these we understand that the selfie is distinct for its (i) self-representational image-format (it is an image made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identifiable for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition); ii) its methods of distribution (selfies are taken and distributed often instantaneously, and thereby are not only objects of, but active agents of, the reshaping of digitally communicative economies); iii) its idiomatic performance of a sociality and aesthetic of the amateur or vernacular (Abidin).The doubled glance both inwards and outwards that the selfie casts is further characterised for how it traces as well as points to a gestural self-awareness held within its compositional characteristics (Frosh). This moves us from a semiotic reading of the selfie to a reading of its “kineasthetic sociability” – that is, its embodied inception of new forms of autobiographical inscription which say “not only ‘see this, here, now,’ but also ‘see me showing you me’” (Frosh 1609-10). Here, the selfie is less a static object and more a gestural imprint of the communicative action in process: it is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of, among other things, the selfieness of the image)” (Frosh 1611). In this sense, its compositional logic offers a tracing of this very enactive, embodied tendency, which bears more than an indexical relationship to the field that it marks – it depicts itself as a constituting part of that field.While these characteristics are broadly accepted as being true of selfies, the “selfieness” of a baby selfie might be seen to offer a paradoxical reframing of these depictive qualities. That is, if a selfie is a self-depiction of a process of self-depiction, the baby selfie most usually performs this self-reflexivity with recourse to an external agent who is either present in the image frame or who is occluded from it but nonetheless implied by the very nature of the image (a parent or the image-facilitator, or indeed, a baby app). The baby selfie’s scene of self-depiction, then, might be thought of as a kind of self-depiction-by-proxy. At the same time, the baby selfie asks us to invest in the belief that the picture was knowingly self-taken, and in doing so, models a kind of aspirational autonomy for the child/baby figure who is depicted. In this sense, the baby selfie, by its very nature, disrupts the accepted distinguishing format of the selfie: that the picture is both self-depicting and is self-composed. Instead, the baby selfie can be seen to gesturally reincorporate into its visual scene the very question of this structural im/possibility.Depicting the Viral ChildThe figure of the child has been considered by a range of theorists as the organising principle of modernity. Philippe Aries’ foundational work has argued that the modern discovery of childhood is reflected in the rise of the nuclear family and consequential shifts from sociability to privacy. Viviana Zelizer similarly positions the emergence of the economically “useless” but sentimentally “priceless” child against comprehensive social and industrial transformations taking place across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that excluded the child as a labourer and instead situated it with the disciplinary regime of education. The hetero-normatively white child has since been shown to emblematise concepts of social futurity (Edelman) and myths of morality, humanity and the “ordering of time” (Pelligrini 98).Following Zelizer, the more recently ‘digitally’ visual cultures of childhood can be seen to spin the figure of the child around new socio-economic and discursive imperatives. Lisa Cartwright writes about photographs of waiting adoptee children, in which “children of poor countries become commodities and their images become advertisements in a global market” (83). Deborah Lupton similarly considers the coding of infant bodies in popular media for their “represent[ation] as helpless, vulnerable, uncontrolled, dirty and leaky in opposition to the idealised adult body that is powerful, self-regulated, autonomous, clean, its bodily boundaries sealed from the outside world” (349). More recently, children have been considered for how they either accidentally or volitionally interact with mediated technologies (Nansen) as well as for how they are increasingly digitally surveilled as the objects of a necessary – and increasingly normalised – parental “culture of care” (Leaver 2). These studies make clear that while children are increasingly positioned as the ‘viral’ agents of new kinds of visual markets, they are also infantilised as victims in need of unprecedented cyber-protection.In 1994 Douglas Rushkoff coined the term “media virus” to account for the rapid and uncontrollable ways that popular media texts performed to either coerce or awaken viewing publics. While Rushkoff’s medium of reference was television, Henry Jenkins et al. later reframed virality to instead encompass ideas of user-led agency by linking it with a logic of “stickiness” – evoking what he termed a “peanut butter” analogy to describe the “spreadable” (3) movement of ideas in more recent social media practices. Indeed, Liam French finds a strong parallel between the “phenomenal rise in user generated content” and the turn towards newer visual cultures within social media practices more broadly, noting that it is “ordinary people” (French’s term) who actively generate the very forms of visual cultural production that become key to communicatory circulation. The selfie, in this regard, becomes both a format and an icon of the new ways of seeing brought into perspective by social media practices.Given the political, social and industrial ecologies that constitute such image cultures, it is only recently that the “viral” child, as the next delineation of the sentimentally “priceless” child, has arrived into view. Here, the baby Hashtag hoax can be seen to critically narrate a specific cultural moment: one that is concerned with stabilising the figure of the child even as it constitutes the ground through which that figure also becomes undone. I refer to the way that Hashtag, as a figural baby, presents a tautological identity, where the digital grammar of # names the mechanism by which she would also search for herself. If Hashtag is emblematic of the algorithmic and affective assemblage of contemporary image-cultures of childhood – whose image-work shapes the new temporal dimensions of our watching and viewing practices – she also illustrates how the child has been become not only an object, but a medium of the economic logics of communicative capitalism. That is, the image-work of the baby selfie can be seen to point to the very question of autonomous agency that frames the figure of the child and in doing so, provides a disruptive counterpoint to the “peanut butter” logic of spreadable visual cultures of so-called “ordinary people” more broadly.It is this light that I ask (drawing on Senft and Baym): what does the baby selfie say about how we understand or construe the figure of the child? More specifically, I ask (via Berger) what culture of vision is brought into view by the rise of such visual cultures of the viral child? The “Gestural Gaze” of Digital Infant Agency Ellentv.com recently advertised a call for viewers to send in their favourite baby selfies: “If you've got a baby and a camera, it's time to take some selfies! Take a photo of you and your baby making the same face, and send it to us!” The legal disclaimer accompanying the callout additionally advised that “[b]y submitting Materials, … you … do not violate the right of privacy or publicity of, or constitute a defamation against, any person or entity; that the Materials will not infringe upon or violate the copyright or common law rights or any other rights of any person or entity” (Ellentv.com). From the outset, there appears within baby selfie culture a curious calibration of the agency of the child, who is at once a selfie-self-taker but who is also excluded from a legal right to privacy that concerns “any person or entity”. In this respect we might further ask – following Jacqueline Bhabha’s question “what sort of human is a child?” (1526) – what sort of human is a viral child, and how does the baby selfie depict this paradoxical configuration of infantile agency?While the formality of the baby selfie still demonstrates a range of configurations which often incorporate the figure of a parent and hence contradict the discreet self-composing parameters of the selfie, here I focus in closing on one specific baby selfie that I suggest is emblematic of an increasing prevalence of apparently “true” baby selfies which operate on a range of image-sharing platforms and meme sites. These baby selfies are distinguished by seeming to be (i) an image that is made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identified for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition; ii) an image that is construed for methods of often instantaneous distribution; iii) an image that puts forward an idiomatic performance of an amateur vernacular – or what Abidin has called “calibrated amateurism”.One compilation, “12 of the Cutest Baby Selfies You Will Ever See”, foregrounds the autonomy of the figure of the viral child as depicted by baby selfie culture, explaining that “These babies might be small, but they can do a lot more than just laugh, crawl, and play. It turns out they can also work their way around a camera and snap some amazing selfies. Talk about impressive!” (Campbell). While all the images in the selection depict the embodied gestural sociality of the selfie that Frosh characterises – that which is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of … the selfieness of the image)” (1611) – one in particular is arresting for its striking interpellation of the “innocent” figure of the child with what I will extend via Frosh to call the inherent mediality of her gestural gaze. In this iconic baby selfie, the gestural gaze is witnessed in the way that the baby’s outstretched hand seems to be extending towards us, the viewer, but is rather (we think we know) extended towards the phone camera, in order to better see herself.The infant in the image is coded female, wearing a pink bonnet, dummy clip and dummy. The dummy is centred defiantly in the baby’s mouth and doubly defiantly in the centre of the image frame as an infantile ‘technology’ that seems to undercut the technology of the phone camera apparatus. The dummy imbues the image with an iconic sense of the baby’s innate “baby-ness” which seems to directly contradict the strength of her gaze, which also appears, in following the outwards arc of her selfie-taking arm, to reach beyond the image frame and address her viewer directly. It seems to say – to paraphrase Frosh – see me here, now, showing you me. The ambivalent origins of the image are also key to how it is read and distributed here. The image in question can be found on the media site Woman’s World, which offers an untraceable credit to Instagram for its original source. The image has also, since, spread itself, appearing across a range of other multilingual sites and feeds, depicting the child at the centre of its frame as somewhat entangled in a further labour of self-duplication. The baby selfie in circulation says not only “‘see this, here, now,’” and “‘see me showing you me’,” but ‘see all of this here, and again, here and again, here.’John Berger writes of two related image genres that connect histories of vernacular depiction to histories of the evolution of the publicity image as a medium and sign of capital exchange. Writing on oil painting, he notes how the materiality of the medium signified the “thingness” of its depiction: “if you buy a painting you also buy a look of the thing that it represents” (83). He finds, therein, an “analogy between possessing and a way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting” (83) and which, as he later explains, becomes tied to “the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts” (88). The textural qualities of oil painting, which for Berger construe the “real” as that which can be materially conveyed or indexed as commodity, might be compared to the gestural residue that is contained within the selfie. While oil painting construed the materiality of things – and hence, the commodifiable nature of any particular relation – the selfie might be seen to depict the self in the process of its own self-labour: the material gesture of taking the image necessitates that the self becomes an agent who then becomes the immaterial self of transmission. The selfie is in this way a depiction of the self in a form of capital relation to itself.While the selfie – as a digital composition – is not materially “real” in the same way that oil painting is, the indexical nature of the arm that reaches out beyond the image frame to point to the inherent transmissibility – and hence capital value – of the image, might be. While the baby selfie imitates these capacities, I suggest here that it also traces a compositional logic that further complicates that which Frosh charts. This is because in the very moment that the spectator of the image is confronted with the baby selfie’s call to “see me showing you me” (1609-10), the spectator is also confronted with the figure of the infant as an autonomous agent capable of their own image-constitution. In essence, the baby selfie posits a question around the baby’s innate ability to knowingly generate its image-frame, even as that very image-frame is what casts the infant into the spreadable contexts within which it will then operate – or, indeed, become ‘knowable’.In its heightened self-referentiality but tenuously depicted sense of rhetorical agency, the baby selfie then faces us with what we think we know, or do not know, about the figure of the child. This central ambivalence inherent to the compositional makeup of the baby selfie in this way both depicts and disrupts the economics of circulation that are intrinsic to selfies more broadly, pointing to a decomposing of the parameters by which a selfie is interpreted and understood. Further, it enables us to question relationships between ways of seeing and ways of being – how does the baby selfie envision the figure of the chid? What sort of human does it become? While there are valid discussions to be had around the absence of “direct self-representational agency” (Leaver) and moral rights or wrongs of the parental management of children’s image-work in online spaces, the baby selfie also opens up questions around how we understand the very contours of infantile agency, how we perceive rhetorical knowingness, and what we mean to mean by the relentless circulation of this imagery of the viral child. Indeed, as Wendy S. Hesford writes, it can be helpful to shift an understanding of agency from being an “individual enterprise” to being understood as that which is “enabled and constrained by cultural discourses and material forces” that compel it into material circulation (156).Here, I am not aiming to foreclose debates about the role of infants (or children more broadly) living with and in digital cultures. Neither do I aim to cast judgement upon on those image practices which enfold child subjects within them. I rather aim to circumvent those important debates to find – following Berger – a trace of how the image cultures that co-constitute digital infancies operate to formulate as well as depict a new field of vision that is predicated upon a seemingly impossible but nonetheless compelling logic of the contradictory impulses of the viral child. That is, it challenges us to think more carefully about what we think we know about children as well as about how we come to know them.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society (Apr.-June 2017): 1–15.Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage, 1962.Barkham, Patrick. “Baby Hashtag: Has the Search for Original Names Gone Too Far?” The Guardian 29 Nov. 2012 <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2012/nov/28/baby-hashtag-silliest-name-ever>.Bayer, Joseph B., et al. “Sharing the Small Moments: Ephemeral Social Interaction on Snapchat.” Information, Communication & Society 19.7 (2016): 956–977.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Bhabha, Jacqueline. “The Child: What Sort of Human?” PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1526–1535.Cartwright, Lisa. “Photographs of Waiting Children: The Transnational Adoption Market.” Social Text 74 21.1 (2003): 83–109.Campbell, Nakeisha. “12 of the Cutest Baby Selfies You Will Ever See.” Woman’s World, 22 June 2016. <http://www.womansworld.com/posts/funny-baby-selfies-106002/photos/cute-baby-selfie-4-167875>.Cox, Lauren. “‘Baby Selfie’ Phone App – Should Babies Really Be Taking Selfies?” Hollywoodlife.com, 28 Feb. 2014. <http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/02/28/baby-selfie-smartphone-app-babies-take-selfies/>.Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.Ellentv.com. “Baby Selfies.” <http://www.ellentv.com/photos/baby-selfies/>.French, Liam. “Researching Social Media and Visual Culture.” Social Media in Social Research: Blogs on Blurring the Boundaries. Ed. Kandy Woodfield. London: Sage, 2014. Frosh, Paul. “The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability.” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1607–1628.Hesford, Wendy S. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Holiday, Steven, et al. “The Selfie Study: Archetypes and Motivations in Modern Self-Photography.” Visual Communication Quarterly 23.3 (2016): 175–187Jenkins, Henry, et al. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked World. New York: NYUP, 2013.Lever, Tama. “Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online.” Social Media + Society (Apr.-June 2017): 1–10.Lupton, Deborah. “Precious, Pure, Uncivilised, Vulnerable: Infant Embodiment in Australian Popular Media.” Children & Society 28.5 (2014): 341–351.Murray, Derek Conrad. “Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of Selfies in the Age of Social Media.” Consumption Markets & Culture 18.6 (2015): 490–516Nansen, Bjorn. “Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques.” M/C Journal 18.5 (2015). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1026>.Nye, James. “Did a Mother Really Just Name Her Child Hashtag?” Daily Mail Australia, 28 Nov. 2012. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239599/Did-mother-really-just-child-Hashtag-Photo-baby-Twitter-inspired-sweeps-Internet.html>.Pelligrini, Ann. “What Do Children Learn at School?” Social Text 97 26.4 (2008): 97–105.Peppers, Margot. “Social Media for BABIES? The Dangling Mobile That Lets Newborns Post Selfies and Videos Online from the Crib.” Daily Mail Australia, 25 Oct. 2014. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2806761/Social-media-BABIES-dangling-mobile-lets-newborns-post-selfies-videos-online-crib.html>.Prout, Alan. “Taking a Step Away from Modernity: Reconsidering the New Sociology of Childhood.” Global Studies of Childhood 1.1 (2011): 4–14.Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus! New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.Senft, Theresa M., and Nancy K. Baym. “What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon.” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1588–1606.Walsh, Michael James, and Stephanie Alice Baker. ‘The Selfie and the Transformation of the Public–Private Distinction.” Information, Communication & Society 20.8 (2017): 1185–1203.Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1994.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
We offer discounts on all premium plans for authors whose works are included in thematic literature selections. Contact us to get a unique promo code!

To the bibliography