1,869 research outputs found

    More-than-words: Reconceptualising Two-year-old Children’s Onto-epistemologies Through Improvisation and the Temporal Arts

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    This thesis project takes place at a time of increasing focus upon two-year-old children and the words they speak. On the one hand there is a mounting pressure, driven by the school readiness agenda, to make children talk as early as possible. On the other hand, there is an increased interest in understanding children’s communication in order to create effective pedagogies. More-than-words (MTW) examines an improvised art-education practice that combines heterogenous elements: sound, movement and materials (such as silk, string, light) to create encounters for young children, educators and practitioners from diverse backgrounds. During these encounters, adults adopt a practice of stripping back their words in order to tune into the polyphonic ways that children are becoming-with the world. For this research-creation, two MTW sessions for two-year-old children and their carers took place in a specially created installation. These sessions were filmed on a 360˚ camera, nursery school iPad and on a specially made child-friendly Toddler-cam (Tcam) that rolled around in the installation-event with the children. Through using the frameless technology of 360˚ film, I hoped to make tangible the relation and movement of an emergent and improvised happening and the way in which young children operate fluidly through multiple modes. Travelling with posthuman, Deleuzio-Guattarian and feminist vital material philosophy, I wander and wonder speculatively through practice, memory, and film data as a bag lady, a Haraway-ian writer/artist/researcher-creator who resists the story of the wordless child as lacking and tragic; the story that positions the word as heroic. Instead, through returning to the uncertainty of improvisation, I attempt to tune into the savage, untamed and wild music of young children’s animistic onto-epistemologies

    Conceive and Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives of American Privacy and Reproductive Politics

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    Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights yet formed perhaps the most crucial legal issue of the second half of the twentieth century. But with the Court’s continuous “refinement” and clarification of the right to privacy, the Court has demonstrated how privacy is a Lyotardian differend which, in dividing the inside from the outside, dismantles the logic of both through deconstruction of the margin. Law-determining rulings protecting this right demonstrate a logical impossibility: the Court has made privacy a “right” in such a way that the conditions for exercising it are subject to state surveillance. To be a subject of the law is to relinquish privacy, and privacy requires that the individual subject him/herself to the law by placing the right to privacy within the public domain. Rules-governed practices are entangled in ways both inextricable and unresolvable with notions of privacy. Legal narratives of the right to privacy, therefore, provide a genealogy of failed supplementation, consistent with an array of cultural narratives reflected in contemporaneous literature, film, drama, and political discourse. The Supreme Court’s continual “refinements” of privacy expose the tenuousness of the authority upon which it is based, with the female body positioned as the site of contradiction upon which narratives of domesticity, sexuality, and subjectivity are made legible

    Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction

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    In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible

    Revolution Beyond the Event

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    Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts

    Gratitude in Healthcare an interdisciplinary inquiry

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    The expression and reception of gratitude is a significant dimension of interpersonal communication in care-giving relationships. Although there is a growing body of evidence that practising gratitude has health and wellbeing benefits for the giver and receiver, gratitude as a social emotion made in interaction has received comparatively little research attention. To address this gap, this thesis draws on a portfolio of qualitative methods to explore the ways in which gratitude is constituted in care provision in personal, professional, and public discourse. This research is informed by a discursive psychology approach in which gratitude is analysed, not as a morally virtuous character trait, but as a purposeful, performative social action that is mutually co-constructed in interaction.I investigate gratitude through studies that approach it on a meta, meso, macro, and micro level. Key intellectual traditions that underpin research literature on gratitude in healthcare are explored through a metanarrative review. Six underlying metanarratives were identified: social capital; gifts; care ethics; benefits of gratitude; staff wellbeing; and gratitude as an indicator of quality of care. At the meso (institutional) level, a narrative analysis of an archive of letters between patients treated for tuberculosis and hospital almoners positions gratitude as participating in a Maussian gift-exchange ritual in which communal ties are created and consolidated.At the macro (societal) level, a discursive analysis of tweets of gratitude to the National Health Service at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that attitudes to gratitude were dynamic in response to events, with growing unease about deflecting attention from risk reduction for those working in the health and social care sectors. A follow-up analysis of the clap-for-carers movement implicates gratitude in embodied, symbolic, and imagined performances in debates about care justice. At the micro (interpersonal) level, an analysis of gratitude encounters broadcast in the BBC documentary series, Hospital, uses pragmatics and conversation analysis to argue that gratitude is an emotion made in talk, with the uptake of gratitude opportunities influencing the course of conversational sequencing. The findings challenge the oftenmade distinction between task-oriented and relational conversation in healthcare.Moral economics are paradigmatic in the philosophical conceptualisation of gratitude. My research shows that, although balance-sheet reciprocity characterised the institutional culture of the voluntary hospital, it is hardly ever a feature ofinterpersonal gratitude encounters. Instead, gratitude is accomplished as shared moments of humanity through negotiated encounters infused with affect. Gratitude should never be instrumentalised as compensating for unsafe, inadequatelyrenumerated work. Neither should its potential to enhance healthcare encounters be underestimated. Attention to gratitude can participate in culture change by affirming modes of acting, emoting, relating, expressing, and connecting that intersect with care justice.This thesis speaks to gratitude as a culturally salient indicator of what people express as worthy of appreciation. It calls for these expressions to be more closely attended to, not only as useful feedback that can inform change, but also because gratitude is a resource on which we can draw to enhance and enrich healthcare as a communal, collaborative, cooperative endeavour

    Did you just make that up? An auto-ethnographic investigation into the emergence of images in painting, as situated within the framework of C20th and C21st British Art

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    I am a painter. My paintings depict figures in groups or alone, enacting narrative in illusionistic space. The paintings are produced without much explicit preparation in terms of their content, relying on improvisation in the studio for their realisation. I do not have a clear idea of when they are finished, either, and I often alter paintings long after their first conclusion. I set out to examine where the images and spaces I depict come from, how their form develops and how they might continue to emerge; how I make things up, in other words. In doing this, I hope to make the paintings better by increasing the complexity of my understanding of them, to shed light on creative practice in general, and to offer insight to other painters like me, and to researchers into creative practice. I have subjected the emergent and shifting nature of my paintings to academic study by combining a close attention to the work and its processes with a self-reflective journal of the activity and ongoing theoretical writing. This process generates a virtuous spiral of activity in the studio, as writing about the painting produces insight, which is fed into the painting, making it better, and producing more insight, which is fed into the painting and so on. In subjecting my studio practice to study, I hope to open it up in a way that might be useful to others. The analysis of reflections on my own painting - developing the concept of the intersubjective object - is an attempt to make sense of interrelationships between the material, social and theoretical territories of painting. This is where the originality of my study lies. In presenting it, I offer insights into my creative practice that will be useful for other creative practitioners, and for academic study of creative practice. I address questions about improvisation and narrative development in my paintings. First, I introduce the thesis and lay out its terms. In chapter 1 I set out the literature which informs the thesis, and in chapter 2 I set out the methodologies I have approached in working out my own method. In chapter 3 self-reflection and reflexivity are discussed in relation to improvisation and narrative, in chapter 4 which I examine how meaning is realised in relation to the surface of the painting, in chapter 5 which the positioning of my studio practice in terms of its wider contexts is examined in relation to painting as an intersubjective object and in chapter 6 which I look at continuity in my studio practice. I propose cloth as a metaphor for the work, as an articulation of development within individual paintings and within the practice. In chapter 7 I discuss the problem of finishing paintings. This research has brought my painting into sharper focus, examining the relationship of painting to the improvisation of content. It has allowed me to re-examine elements of my practice that I have either taken for granted or overlooked, revealing historical parallels that would have remained invisible otherwise. It develops an understanding of the significance of narrative and improvisation in any creative practice, elucidating ideas about the self in creativity. In differentiating painting from other fine art practices and creative forms it produces a powerful sense of the significance of the painting in making meaning. The research leads me to the identification of a painting as an intersubjective object, in that my own subjectivity and those of others meet and operate there to generate and develop meaning. This theoretical construction can be employed in discussion of other art works, as well as my own

    A narrative inquiry into the construction, composition and performance of coaching identities

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    This thesis inquires into how successful, independent coaches construct, compose and perform their professional identities. It focuses on the narratives employed and the performances given in pursuit of this. In reflecting on these performances it suggests an alternative discourse to that which is dominant in the coaching literature and on coach training programmes. Rather than “off-the-peg” coaching identities being arrived at through the prospective coach giving allegiance to specific, pre-existing coaching approaches, genres and markets, it suggests that in practice a more individualistic and idiosyncratic process occurs that proceeds from the multi-faceted personality and biographical history of the individual coach. It employs a constructivist, integrative methodology that blends a dialogical/performance approach to narrative research with a worlds-based approach to the critical evaluation of theatre performances. Eight established and successful coaches were interviewed, and accounts of these encounters have been written up and presented here in a case study format. In analysing the interviews a typology of three narratives were identified that existed across all the interviews. These were characterised as assumption, foundation and encounter narratives. The coaches’ performances appeared to function through aligning and making transparent a number of initially disparate and opaque realms or worlds. This research suggests that the capacity to construct substantive individualistic coach identities and give improvised and perspicacious performances is central to effective coaching and supersedes such elements as employing evidence-based approaches, drawing from lists of competencies, and co-modification of the self in order to meet market expectations. This study contributes to an alternative discourse of coaching that suggests there should be greater emphasis on personal development and identity working for aspiring coaches along with a move towards greater emphasis on relational depth, pluralistic practice and a developmental focus in their work with coachees. It concludes by suggesting that a culture of fragmentation and ambiguity within the terrain of coaching, sometimes characterized as the Wild West of coaching, has positive aspects that are beneficial to the character of coaching. Abstrac

    A War of Words: The Forms and Functions of Voice-Over in the American World War II Film — An Interdisciplinary Analysis

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    Aside from being American World War II films, what else do the following films have in common? The Big Red One; Hacksaw Ridge; Harts War; Mister Roberts; Stalag 17; and The Thin Red Line — all have voice-over in them. These, and hundreds of other war films have voice-overs that are sometimes the thoughts of a fearful soldier; the wry observations of a participant-observer; or the declarations of all-knowing authoritative figures. There are voice-overs blasted out through a ships PA system; as the reading of a heart-breaking letter; or as the words of a dead comrade, heard again in the mind of a haunted soldier. This thesis questions why is voice-over such a recurring phenomenon in these films? Why is it conveyed in so many different forms? What are the terms for those different forms? What are their narrative functions? A core component of this thesis is a new taxonomy of the six distinct forms of voice-over: acousmatic, audioemic, epistolary, objective, omniscient, and subjective. However, the project is more than a structuralist taxonomy that merely serves to identify, and define those forms. It is also a close examination of their narrative functions beyond the unimaginative trope that voice-over in war films is simply a convenient storytelling device. Through interdisciplinarity — combined with a realist framework — I probe the correlations between: the conditions, codification, and suppression of speech within the U.S. military, and the manifestations of that experience through the cinematic device, and genre convention of voice-over. In addition, I present a radically new interpretation of the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) as being both a choric meta-memorial to James Jones; and a Greek tragedy — with its replication of the stagecraft of Aeschylus, in its use of the cosmic frame, and the inclusion of a collective character, which I have named ‘The Chorus of Unknown Soldiers’. The overall result is a more logical, and nuanced explanation of the forms, functions, and prevalent use of voice-over in the American World War II film

    Exploring The Experiences Of Adjunct Clinical Dental Hygiene Faculty With Peer Mentorship As They Transition From Clinician To Educator

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    The work-role transition from clinician to educator involves the dental hygienist creating a new identity as a dental hygiene educator. Insider guidance through peer mentorship may help support and acclimate new faculty during this work-role transition. The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry was to explore the experiences of adjunct clinical dental hygiene faculty with peer mentorship as they transitioned from the role of clinician to educator. Five participants who met the criteria for this study completed semi-structured, virtual interviews via Zoom. These interviews were restoried into narratives, categorized, and then manually coded into themes. The categories included development of teaching skills, confidence levels, and lack of formal orientation. The themes identified were acclimation, expectations, and support. Each of the five participants had similar experiences regarding lack of formal orientation in their new role, which contributed to lack of confidence. While the participants expressed their frustrations with the unique challenges that they faced as novice dental hygiene instructors, they each expressed a similar sense of gratitude for colleagues whom they considered to be unofficial mentors. Recommendations for further action include that all new dental hygiene faculty be provided with standardized institutional orientation, that all adjunct clinical dental hygiene instructors who are first-time teachers be assigned a mentor, and that all new dental hygiene faculty undergo a formal assessment process to ascertain their level of knowledge and skill
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