Concerning bodies [stream convenors and panel chairs]

The 'Concerning Bodies' stream is a collaboration with Eric Daffron (USA) and Becky McLaughlin (USA) that is part of the London Conference of Critical Thought, Royal Holloway University of London, 6-7 June 2013. The stream has two parallel strands detailed below: Stream Title: Concerning Bodies This stream has two points of focus: firstly, the representation, and ethical implications, of bodies (both human and animal) in visual cultures and, secondly, the account of the body (and body parts) in Lacan and Foucault. Papers are invited that address any of the concerns detailed under these two headings: The Body and Ethics – Dead or Alive (Angela Bartram and Mary O'Neill): The body is an important site for analysis of the physical and the social condition. Whether human or animal, the body provides information and experience that communicates what it is to be alive – even in death. This has made the body a source material to be analyzed, scrutinized, dissected, and surveyed in the pursuit of knowledge. The human and animal body has historically been used in medical studies, art education, as a donor material, for reference, and creative practice. The appropriateness of the use of bodies in medical enquiry has historically been sanctioned because it has educational benefit. Could the same level of permission be applied to artistic enquiry? What legislates the appropriate use of the dead body in anatomy and biomedical classes and procedures? What informs the decision that the life room is a place for studies of the live human body only? What ethics govern artistic studies of the socio-physical body in art education and creative practice? We seek papers that discuss the role of critical theory in our understanding of the use of the body in visual culture both historical and contemporary, including, but not limited to: • somataphobia, • scopophilia, • scopophobia, • dissection, • necrophobia, • taxidermy Body Parts and Partial Bodies; Body Cuts and Cut Up Bodies: Lacanian and Foucaultian Approaches (Becky McLaughlin and Eric Daffron): Both Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault took the body as an object of critical inquiry but explored it in divergent ways. This panel will bring together scholars working from Lacanian and/or Foucaultian perspectives to interrogate not simply the body but, more specifically, parts of the body. Collectively, the papers selected for this panel will aspire to answer, among other questions: How do Lacan and Foucault cut up the body, what new forms of subjectivity emerge when we pay attention to particular body parts, and how can we bring Lacanian and Foucaultian theory to bear on ethical concerns about the body? Topics for paper proposals include but are not limited to: • fragmented bodies and bodily decomposition • mirror stage and self reflection • self-abuse and body cutting • disciplined and "docile" bodies • torture and punishment • "subindividuals" • sexuality, sexuation, and oversexed bodies • "technologies of the self" • the voice, the gaze, and the fetish • spanking and other sex games • amputation and disability • addiction and obsession, medicine and therap

New knowledge and the university

What forms of knowledge have legitimacy in the contemporary university? By using Actor-Network Theory to unravel the strands in a recent dispute about access to skeletons from a burial ground in Cape Town. This paper shows how circulating systems of references connect institutions, historical trajectories and differing sets of interests to form competing knowledge systems. Rather than falling back on a defence of established disciplines and academic authority, it is argued that there are considerable benefits in recognising the importance and validity of knowledge generated 'in community', and in the course of political discourse. Rather than undermining truth, such an approach will result in both better science and more in formed community action

The 'Good' Teacher? Constructing Teacher Identities for Lifelong Learning

The symposium will focus on trans-national constructions of the 'good' teacher through popular culture, through professional development orthodoxies and through professional practices such as professional growth plans, inspection and teacher regulation

Struggling to 'fit in': On belonging and the ethics of sharing in project teams

This paper explores the links between belonging and ethics, which remain largely underdeveloped in project studies and are overlooked in everyday practice of managing projects. It focuses on belonging as the process articulating identity-construction of an inter-organisational project team from a global management consulting firm that was working in IS design. As the team?s experienced ?sense of place?, belonging becomes the space which highlights preferred affiliations and exposes how ? individually and collectively ? ethics are played out in the context of the management of projects. Four in situ belonging-narratives (of opposition, pragmatism, reflexivity, and the habitual narrative) represent ethics as part of lived action and of a life-world that emerge from deconstructing and reconstructing ?the team? and an ideal worker in projects. The team?s struggles to ?fit in? were experienced both when resisting and when collaborating with the dominant collective narrative of belonging. Modes of belonging are constituted in the relationship between self, others, and ?otherness?, creating a situated ethical imagination of how to ?be professional?. Implications concern the politics of belonging and call for a renewed practical ethics that engages with the social nature of ?being?, to change the current view of professional identities in projects

Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Adopting a Grounded Theory Approach to Cultural-Historical Research: Conflicting Methodologies or Complementary Methods?

Grounded theory has long been regarded as a valuable way to conduct social and educational research. However, recent constructivist and postmodern insights are challenging long-standing assumptions, most notably by suggesting that grounded theory can be flexibly integrated with existing theories. This move hinges on repositioning grounded theory from a methodology with positivist underpinnings to an approach that can be used within different theoretical frameworks. In this article the author reviews this recent transformation of grounded theory, engages in the project of repositioning it as an approach by using cultural historical activity theory as a test case, and outlines several practical methods implied by the joint use of grounded theory as an approach and activity theory as a methodology. One implication is the adoption of a dialectic, as opposed to a constructivist or objectivist, stance toward grounded theory inquiry, a stance that helps move past the problem of emergence versus forcing

Reflexivity for sustainability: appreciating entanglement and becoming relationally reflexive

This paper attempts to open up new possibilities for reflexivity which can help promote adequate human responses to sustainability issues. It explores how predominant ideas about reflexivity are located within an individualistic perspective of bounded and independent selves. The relational thinking of Gergen (2009) and Hosking (2011) is discussed to consider the implications for approaching selves as unbounded and interdependent. It develops the concept of relational reflexivity which is argued to respect the social and material entanglements of selves and foster systemic intelligence and action

Three educational scenarios for the future : lessons from the sociology of knowledge

This review draws on social realist approaches in the sociology of knowledge and in light of them constructs three scenarios for the future of education in the next decades. The primary focus of the review is on one of the most crucial questions facing educational policy makers- the relationship between school and everyday or common sense knowledge. The different possibilities for how the school/nonschool knowledge boundaries might be approached are expressed in three scenarios - 'boundaries as given', 'a boundary-less world’ and the idea of ‘boundary maintenance as a condition for boundary crossing’. The educational implications of each are explored and the review makes the case for the third scenario. The factors likely to make one or other scenario dominate educational policy in the next 20-30 years are also considered