Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)Possible Selves of the Black American Art Teacher

In this paper, I explore the pairing of the concepts of fictive kinship and agency in order to explore racial identity narratives of the Black American art teacher. Expanding on the anthropological concept of fictive kinship, where bonds of connectedness between people help to shape selfhood, I consider the powerful impact that visual culture has on shaping identity narratives and the professional aspirations of Black American art teachers. I identify fictive kinship connections as salient in creating spaces which affect agency in the conceptualization and achievement of the self as an artist. I further use the concept of fictive kinship to highlight distinct intersections between the personal and the visual and use interview quotes to trace moments in the lives of three secondary Black art teachers where these bonds have impacted their decision to fully embrace an artist identity. I include implications for art education and how we might begin to think critically so we are able to transform the experiences of our students, helping them advance their aspirational pursuits

Pictures of lesbian and gay parenthood in Italian sociology. A critical analysis of 30 years of research

The article analyses sociological research on lesbian and gay parenthood conducted in Italy over the past 30 years. By focusing on the typologies of the homosexual households of the participants in research projects, this work discusses how empirical academic and non-academic research has depicted same-sex families with children in the Italian context. An initial mainstream inattention towards lesbian and gay parents by sociological research at the beginning of the Nineties gave way to a particular interest in that experience, focusing on the newest form of homosexual parenthood defined as same-sex couples who are able to access assisted fertilisation technology and surrogacy. The new pattern can be said to have overshadowed the experience of homosexual parents whose children were conceived within heterosexual relationships. This simplification concerns to th

Fictional and Fragmented Truths in Korean Adoptee Life Writing

This article explores the ways that life writing allows transnational, transracial Asian adoptee authors to navigate their complex experiences of truth and authenticity. It also addresses the transformations adoptee authors make to the memoir genre in order to accommodate the particularities of their experiences. I analyze Jane Jeong Trenka’s foundational Asian adoption memoir, The Language of Blood, and Kim Sunée’s lesser-known text, Trail of Crumbs, paying attention to the ways that the authors’ hybridized and deliberately constructionist approaches to genre parallel some of the identity issues that are brought out in their respective books. I explore the significance of the scrapbook form in The Language of Blood and the recipe book structure in Trail of Crumbs, arguing that Trenka and Sunée create hybridized life narratives because, like many transnational, transracial Asian adoptee life writers (and subjects), their identities are so inescapably predicated on assemblage. I argue that these authors reconsider some of the customary structures, styles, and themes found in traditional memoirs, and in so doing they participate in the postmodern project of de-essentializing truth claims that is crucial to their negotiations of their identities as Korean adoptees

Researching the construction of a formbild

This paper is a presentation and a discussion of the research methods used in the author’s research project at Oslo School of Architecture and Design (Gulliksen, 2006). The aim of the research was to describe how a group of people, in this case: students and teaches, come to agree upon what a good quality form is. The chosen way of explaining the notion of form quality in design engaged a socio-constructivistic approach, based in the theories of Bourdieu and Foucault and others. It rendered form quality as something constructed by the individual in interaction with artefacts and other individuals. The object of the study was to explore the mechanisms of this construction, separated into dynamical aspects (the actual construction) and the hierarchical aspects (the restrictions) of the constructive mechanisms. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis of communication (verbal, visual and more) about form was the methodology chosen. This paper discusses certain fundamental methodological questions concerning the use of this perspective and this methodology in a design process. It asks in what way it is convenient to study something as material as an artefact’s form as something as immaterial as construction, communication and text. The paper is based on specific examples from the thesis presenting the research, ending with a short conclusive discussion concerning the opportunity this perspective gave to avoid a dichotomist basis (in the artefact it self or in the eyes of the beholder) for theories concerning form quality, and to sustain a focus on the communicational and relational aspects of the designing process. Keywords: Form Quality, Formbild, Socio-Constructivism, Discourse Analysis, Methodological Considerations</p

What do we need to add to a social network to get a society? answer: something like what we have to add to a spatial network to get a city

Recent years have seen great advances in social network analysis. Yet, with a few exceptions, the field of network analysis remains remote from social theory. As a result, much social network research, while technically accomplished and theoretically suggestive, is essentially descriptive. How then can social networks be linked to social theory ? Here we pose the question in its simplest form: what must we add to a social network to get a society ? We begin by showing that one reason for the disconnection between network theory and society theory is that because it exists in spacetime, the concept of social network raises the issue of space in a way that is problematical for social theory. Here we turn the problem on its head and make the problem of space in social network theory explicit by proposing a surprising analogy with the question: what do you have to add to an urban space network to get a city. We show first that by treating a city as a naïve spatial network in the first instance and allowing it to acquire two formal properties we call reflexivity and nonlocality, both mediated through a mechanism we call description retrieval, we can build a picture of the dynamics processes by which collections of the buildings become living cities. We then show that by describing societies initially as social networks in space-time and adding similar properties, we can construct a plausible ontology of a simple human society

'Yep, I'm Gay': Understanding Agential Identity

What’s important about ‘coming out’? Why do we wear business suits or Star Trek pins? Part of the answer, we think, has to do with what we call agential identity. Social metaphysics has given us tools for understanding what it is to be socially positioned as a member of a particular group and what it means to self-identify with a group. But there is little exploration of the general relationship between self-identity and social position. We take up this exploration, developing an account of agential identity—the self-identities we make available to others. Agential identities are the bridge between what we take ourselves to be and what others take us to be. Understanding agential identity not only fills an important gap in the literature, but also helps us explain politically important phenomena concerning discrimination, malicious identities, passing, and code-switching. These phenomena, we argue, cannot be understood solely in terms of self-identity or social position