35,577 research outputs found

    Migrant African women: tales of agency and belonging

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    This paper explores issues of belonging and agency among asylum seekers and refugee women of African origin in the UK. It discusses the ways these women engendered resistance in their everyday life to destitution, lack of cultural recognition, and gender inequality through the foundation of their own non-governmental organization, African Women’s Empowerment Forum, AWEF, a collective ‘home’ space. The focus of this account is on migrant women’s agency and self-determination for the exercise of choice to be active actors in society. It points to what might be an important phenomenon on how local grassroots movements are challenging the invisibility of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives and expanding the notion of politics to embrace a wider notion of community politics with solidarity. AWEF is the embodiment of a social space that resonates the ‘in-between’ experience of migrant life providing stability to the women members regarding political and community identification

    Net generation culture

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    Walking women: shifting the tales and scales of mobility

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    Narratives attached to walking practices, influenced by the Romantic, Naturalist and avant-garde movements, continue to frame and prioritise aestheticised acts of walking as heroic, epic, individualist, and conquering. This reiteration of dominant knowledge risks obscuring certain types of walking and other ways to think about and recognise walking art’s potentialities. Encountering work by contemporary women artists and interviewing them about their motivations and experiences suggests the need for a radical mobilization of the rhetorics of scale, a task we begin here. The walking art works we introduce propose a destabilisation of values, unsettling familiar analytical and interpretative approaches: the local is magnified to the scale of the epic; the epic is one small step after another; the familiar is a site of risk; and walking a means for building relations rather than escaping them. Whilst assumptions about who walks, in what way and with what value are confronted, so too is the nature of the task in hand, as the walking body remains entangled in monumental historical and social structures, including the spatial

    Investigating VTubing as a Reconstruction of Streamer Self-Presentation: Identity, Performance, and Gender

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    VTubers, or Virtual YouTubers, are live streamers who create streaming content using animated 2D or 3D virtual avatars. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of VTuber creators and viewers across the globe. This practise has drawn research attention into topics such as viewers' engagement behaviors and perceptions, however, as animated avatars offer more identity and performance flexibility than traditional live streaming where one uses their own body, little research has focused on how this flexibility influences how creators present themselves. This research thus seeks to fill this gap by presenting results from a qualitative study of 16 Chinese-speaking VTubers' streaming practices. The data revealed that the virtual avatars that were used while live streaming afforded creators opportunities to present themselves using inflated presentations and resulted in inclusive interactions with viewers. The results also unveiled the inflated, and often sexualized, gender expressions of VTubers while they were situated in misogynistic environments. The socio-technical facets of VTubing were found to potentially reduce sexual harassment and sexism, whilst also raising self-objectification concerns.Comment: Under review at ACM CSCW after a Major Revisio

    Experiences of Education for Democratic Citizenship in Italian Schools in Recent Years: Research Lines. In: INVALSI–CIDREE. Building Democracy in Europe Through Citizenship: EducationEuropean Year of Citizenship Through Education: General Assembly 2005 CIDREE, Frascati 17th November 2005

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    The research assumes the definition of Education for Citizenship proposed by the Council of Europe: “is a set of practices and principles that aim to make young people and adults better equipped to participate actively in democratic life by assuming and exercising their rights and responsibilities in society” . The main questions of the research are borrowed from the area ‘Curriculum Teaching and Learning’ of the ‘Tool for quality assurance of EDC in schools’ : - Is there evidence of an adequate place for EDC in the school’s goals, policies and curriculum plans? - Is there evidence of students and teachers acquiring understanding of EDC and applying EDC principles to their everyday practice in schools and classrooms? - Are the design and practice of assessment within the school consonant with EDC? The information/data-base is –mainly- the on-line documentation of schools (good) practices, collected by National Institute for the Documentation of Innovation and Research in Education and by other organizations. Evidences. In italian schools, according to the examinated documents, EDC seems to be - an educational principle firmly sustained - a teaching content relevant in specific educational activities - carried on already from nursery schools; developed by the whole school within compulsory education; mainly an initiative of one or few teachers in secondary school, added to social studies classes - developed thanks to the “meeting and melting” of different interests: - from inside (specific problems or care) - from external institutions (ministerial or international, mainly european) - from external organizations and groups (local authorities, non-profit organizations, lobbies) - focused on the development of an active, participate, overnational citizenship that leads to a social and political status more than a legal one - crosscurricolar and interdisciplinary activity in nursery and primary schools; while in secondary schools it often moves from one specific subject to the others (pluridisciplinary approach) - carried on by active teachers working together and with experts and militants from outside the school too. - Developed through active teaching/learning strategies including discussions, teamworks, workshops, researchs and scientific, literary and artistic productions (monographs, exhibitions, shows, multimedia), simulations and fieldworks - aimed to the dissemination, implementation and sharing of values and awareness, information and knowledge of citizenship; the practice of skills and competences is focused on specific activities or on daily life - evaluated more by qualitative appreciations on the experience, its contents and values, than using structured and formal instruments - concluding, it’s more a teaching/learning topic than a daily school practice Suggestions. The report suggests that EDC is a complex, multilevel and integrated action strategy within the school and in interaction with society. So, starting from daily school practice and rules, EDC should be developed throught crosscurricolar activity and as social and civics studies subject and with specific projects, together. Concluding, the author proposes a plan of action-researches aimed to develop EDC practice in italian schools, using the strategy and methodology suggested by the Council of Europe in the quoted ‘Tool for quality assurance of EDC in schools’. That is a bottom-up approach and not only a top-down one

    Regulating Healthy Gender: Surgical Body Modification among Transgender and Cisgender Consumers

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    Few bodies consistently portray natural or unaltered forms. Instead, humans inhabit bodies imbued with sociocultural meanings about what is attractive, appropriate, functional, and presentable. As such, embodiment is always gendered. The social, extra-corporeal body is a central locus for expressing gender. Surgical body modifications represent inherently gendered technologies of the body. But psychomedical institutions subject people who seek gender-crossing surgeries to increased surveillance, managing and regulating cross-gender embodiment as disorderly. Using mixed research methods, this research systematically compared transgender and cisgender (non-transgender) people’s experiences before, during, and after surgical body modification. I conducted a content analysis of 445 threads on a message board for an online cisgender surgery community, an analysis of 15 international protocols for transgender-specific surgeries, and 40 in-depth interviews with cisgender and transgender people who had surgery. The content analysis of the online community revealed similar themes among cisgender and transgender surgery users. However, detailed protocols existed only for transgender consumers of surgery. Interview findings showed that transgender and cisgender people reported similar presurgical feelings toward their bodies, similar cosmetic and psychological motivations for surgery, and similar benefits of surgery. For both cisgender and transgender people, surgery enhanced the inner self through improving the outer gendered body. Despite these similar embodied experiences, having a cisgender gender status determined respondents’ abilities to pursue surgery autonomously and with institutional support. Ultimately, this research highlights inequalities that result from gender status and manifest in psychomedical institutions by identifying the psychosocial impacts of provider/consumer or doctor/patient interactions, relating gendered embodiment to regulatory systems of authority, and illuminating policy implications for clinical practice and legal classifications of sex and gender

    The Rise of the New White Nationalism in America

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    White nationalism has been a part of United States history since the dawn of the nation but remained a secondary issue in comparison to white supremacy. Within the last thirty years however, white nationalism has been on the rise in the United States, and is slowly becoming mainstream rhetoric within politics, as well as in social and economic discussions. What has caused this rise in white nationalism? Has the popularity of social media and the internet since the 1990s influenced its growth? With the use of primary sources such as speeches, books written by white nationalists, and insider internet sources, one can see that the motivations behind white nationalism have shifted away from the oppression of other races, with underlying ideas of white superiority, to a view of victimhood, with racial protection cited as a primary justification. Using academic journals and scholarly books analyzing the history and development of white nationalism, it is apparent that white nationalism has risen and fallen through American history, with the most recent development being a result of social media and meme culture that has brought it out of the fringes of society and into mainstream society and discussion. The importance of this topic is reflected in the fact that what was once considered dangerous and inflammatory rhetoric has become something more accepted and embraced in a society that used to be labeled as post-racial and color-blind
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