3,691 research outputs found
Planetary Hinterlands:Extraction, Abandonment and Care
This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water
The Wendland Movement: Anti-nuclear energy resistance in Gorleben
Abstract not currently available
Towards a Pedagogy of Human Connection : Understanding Teachersâ Experiences of Connection During a Pandemic
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools shuttered quickly and re-opened slowly. These decisions impacted the well-being of teachers and students. Upon re-opening, schools in New Jersey adopted a range of instructional approachesâincluding virtual and hybrid modelsâthat prioritized safety and diminished human connections. This came at a time when rates of isolation and loneliness were increasing and the US was already experiencing a crisis of connection. To understand teachersâ experiences with human connection during the winter and second spring of the COVID-19 pandemic, this dissertation study recruited nine high school teachers from one school in New Jersey who met a total of nine times from January, 2021 through June, 2021, to discuss their experiences of connection. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis and a theoretical frame of human connection, this study found that teachersâ experiences were best described as dis/connections. Teachersâ pursuits of connection were undertaken to support learning and develop relationships. However, these efforts were not always reciprocated by students, administrators, or parents during the pandemic context, leading to experiences of disconnection. Multiple obstacles yielded a âwallâ of disconnection, however, teachers adopted practices and perspectives to overcome this wall. Successful experiences of connection were marked by reciprocity and mutuality, supported by a capacity for vulnerability. Additionally, the group itself became a site for professional connection during a time of isolation. Teachersâ experiences of dis/connection during the pandemic reflected the political realities of teachersâ lives and the ways that mutual vulnerability and authenticity are necessary in schools and classrooms if human connection is expected to thrive. Implications from this study include the emergence of a framework for a pedagogy of human connection that aims to humanize teaching and learning in a context of cultural and social dehumanization
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Gender Policy-as-Practice with Young Children: The Politics of Gender-Justice in Early Childhood Education
Trans and queer children are experiencing discrimination starting in the earliest years of schooling. In a paradoxical era of increased support for transgender and queer children on the one hand, and persistent gender violence on the other, this study examines how the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) gender policy is taken up in Early Childhood Education practice.
In particular, I ask: (a) What are early childhood teachersâ understanding of NYCDOEâs policy? (b) How do the larger social and material contexts, shape teachersâ enactments of the policy? (c) What do teachersâ understandings and enactments of NYC gender policy look like in their everyday classroom practices?
I use a critical policy-as-practice conceptual framework that does not take policy for granted but understands that embedded in all the policy processes, there is always a great deal of negotiation of power, where some stakeholders are empowered and other perspectives are silenced. Through semi-structured interviews with district policymakers, school administrators, and early childhood teachers, this study unveils how different actors took up NYCDOEâs gender policy in their practice, in accordance with their own ideas, motivations, and broader social and material contexts.
Findings indicate that the policy formation processes excluded the knowledge and perspectives of school communities and grassroots trans activist movements. Principals and teachers had little knowledge of the Guidelines on Gender and resources available, while several policy content and procedures reproduced gender and racial violence. Moreover, the sediment construct of childhood innocence shaped early childhood teachersâ gender-justice practices. Shifting understandings of gender, without revising understandings of childhood, this study concludes, hinders the possibility of transformative change
âMen are the alphas. Men can't be hurt. Men can't be victimsâ - Narrative, identity, and male victims of female perpetrated intimate partner abuse.
This thesis details the process and analysis of the âHard to Tellâ study, a qualitative, narrative study examining how male victims of female perpetrated intimate partner abuse (IPA) tell their story, and what it might mean for their identity. The study consisted of life-story interviews with 18 self-identifying male victims. Between them they described the full range of abuse, including physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, financial, controlling, coercive, and legal and administrative. The differing nature of these forms of abuse meant that some were easier to describe in narrative form, which carried significant implications for their ability to make sense of their experiences and explain it to others.
Analysis was informed by a complex and dynamic understanding of identity, including key concepts from Narrative Identity Theory (McAdams, 2018; Bamberg, 2011) and Positioning Theory (Korobov, 2010; 2015). In telling their story, these male survivors were driven to defend against powerful cultural narratives of masculinity and male perpetration that contrasted with their experience as a man and as a victim. In doing so they drew upon other cultural narratives such as mental ill-health and childhood trauma to attain a valid identity position. Cultural narratives such as those of coercive controlling abuse and narcissism, enabled them to identify their abuse and sidestep gendered assumptions of perpetration.
This thesis proposes a model of identity work within autobiographical narration that incorporates key components of the individual, audience, context, and culture. A prominent feature of these menâs stories was the role played by third parties, who enabled them to reframe their experience as an abuse narrative and begin a process of escape and recovery. This places professionals at the heart of this model, as audience and co-producer within a critical process of narrative sense making and identity validation
Of Fears and Bodies in Early Romantic Poetry
This thesis approaches psychophysical expressions of different and changing fears in the Romantic poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This period was chosen because of the immediate and rapid effects of the French Revolution on the formation and perception of the English nation, along with the newfound need to search for meaning that many people felt within a rapidly changing world. The writings of the Romantic poets under question in this thesis, namely William Blake, William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joanna Baillie, and Anne Bannerman, reflect this quest to understand personal and political fears, as well as the coping mechanisms that take fear as a dominant emotion of the times and turn it into a Gothic space for the exploration of personal and political anxieties through Gothic bodies and the interaction between bodies of fear and bodies in fear presented within the spectrum of terror and horror.
More specifically, I will explore the interaction between the self and Gothic bodies of fear in different psychophysical manifestations in a selection of Gothic poetic texts. For these writers, the fears generated through the contact with abject bodies that haunt self and nation can destabilise preconceived ideas of self and society and facilitate healing and re-evaluation. To this end, I will follow contemporary theorisations of varying fears to acknowledge the fact that fear comes in many shapes, degrees, and kinds for these writers, and so do the Gothic bodies that reside in their writings, from Blakeâs horror bodies to the spectral bodies that haunt the poetry of Baillie and Bannerman. The importance of fear as an emotion in this context is related to its strong physical impact and its relevance for the contemporary socio-political arena in matters of personal and political threat, safety and control. This thesis will focus on the various responses of early Romantic writers to these anxieties
The Texture of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism and Abolitionist Speculation
Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually stands in a dialectical relationship to abolitionist speculation, or, the active imagining of a world without prisons and police and/or the conditions necessary to actualize such a world. In much the same way that carceral realism embeds itself in realist literary forms, abolitionist speculation plays a constitutive role in the utopian literary tradition.
In order to elaborate these concepts, this dissertation begins with a meta-consideration of how cultural productions by incarcerated people are typically framed. Building upon the work of scholars and incarcerated authorsâ own interventions in questions of consciousness, authorship, textual production, and study, this chapter contrasts that typical frame with a method of abolitionist reading. Chapter two applies this methodology to Edward Bunkerâs 1977 novel The Animal Factory and Claudia Rankineâs 2010 poem Citizen in order to develop the concept of carceral realism and demonstrate how it has developed from the 1970s to the present. In order to lay out the historical foundations of the modern prison, chapter three looks back to the late 18th century and situates the emergence of the penitentiary within debates regarding race, citizenship, and state power. Returning to the 1970s, chapter four investigates the role universities have played in the formation of carceral realism and the complex relationship Chicanos and Asian Americans have to prisons and police by analogizing the institutionalization of prison literary study to the formation of ethnic studies. Chapter five draws this project to a conclusion by developing the concept of abolitionist speculation, or the active imagining of a world without prisons or the police and/or the conditions necessary to realize such a world, which I identify as both a constitutive generic feature of utopian literature and something that exceeds literature altogether. In doing so, this dissertation establishes an ongoing historical relationship between social reproduction of prisons and literary forms that cuts across time, geography, race, gender, and genre
Contextualizing Trumpism: Understanding Race, Gender, Religiosity, and Resistance in Post-Truth Society
From within the discipline of religion and culture studies, this thesis contextualizes the intersecting discourses surrounding race, gender, and religion underpinning âTrumpismâ as an exclusionary populist rhetoric in the United States with similar trends emerging in Canada, Europe, and parts of the Global South. In the US, Trumpism represents not only the political style and rhetoric of its namesake, but the mentality of a distinct voter base compelled to âmake America great again.â Pressurized by contemporary social realities and a sensationalist media culture, Trumpian rhetoric can be understood as a âwhitelashâ response to changes in the American social fabric enmeshed in a cultural history of (white) Christian nationalism. To better understand the cultural and political undertones embodied by Trumpism, this research project presents four Focused Cultural Examples (FCEs) to engage critical discourse/media analysis in dialogue with academic literature. Each FCE examines an event or cluster of topics at the intersections of race, gender, and religion, including antithetical political movements and counter-narratives which challenge and resist Trumpism and what it represents. The synthesis chapter includes brief Canadian comparisons and considers some strategies for building more equitable and informed communities
Reflections on Philanthropy for Social Justice A New Era of Giving
Philanthropy in India is growing steadily, with a surge in funds and practice advancements. The question remains, how can this redistribution of wealth be effectively harnessed to achieve transformative social change and more inclusive development? In A New Era of Giving, thought leaders from India and abroad share their insights and perspectives on the challenges and issues to be addressed to make a shift from a charitable model of support to an approach that prioritises social justice
The Forum: Global Challenges to Democracy?:Perspectives on Democratic Backsliding
There is a widespread perception that we are witnessing a period of democratic decline, manifesting itself in varieties of democratic backsliding such as the manipulation of elections, marginalization and repression of regime opponents and minorities, or more incremental executive aggrandizement. Yet others are more optimistic and have argued that democracy is in fact resilient, or that we are observing coinciding trends of democratic decline but also expansion. This forum highlights key issues in the debate on democracy's decline, which center on conceptual and measurement issues, agreement on the phenomenon but not its nature or severity, the importance of international factors, the emphasis we should put on political elites versus citizens, and the consequences of backsliding for global politics. Staffan I. Lindberg provides an empirical perspective on the scope and severity of democracy's decline, and argues that polarization and misinformation are important drivers for this current wave of autocratization. Susan D. Hyde highlights the detrimental consequences of reduced support for democracy by the international community, which has affected civil society organizationsâimportant arbiters of democracyâespecially severely. Challenging some of these conclusions, Irfan Nooruddin claims that any gains for democracy after the end of the Cold War were short-lived, failing to sustain democracy because of an overemphasis on elections and a disregard for structural factors. Finally, Larry M. Bartels argues that we need to look to political elites and not citizens if we want to protect democracy in the United States and elsewhere, which has important implications for how we study democracy and its challenges.<br/
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