Structuring of Modern and Postmodern Identities with Reflections on the Pedagogical Implications in a Multicultural World

This essay explores the different discourses that intersect to define and explain the concept of "identity" and consists of two distinct parts. The former being an attempt to eclecticize the discourses around identity and the structuring of identity under modern and post-modern conditions. The latter consisting of reflections on the methodological and pedagogical implications in a fragmenting postmodern and multicultural condition. This essay is a theoretical attempt to deconstruct the notion of the essentialized, stable, static and coherent modernist subjectivity/identity and tries to explore the construction of a multilayered, non-unitary, fragmented, plural postmodern subjectivity/identity. The essay aims to discusses the current politics of `identity´, `difference´, `recognition´ and `multiculturalism´ and explores the intricate enmeshing of concepts such as identity, ethnicity, minorities and nationalism. It further tries to construct the representation of identities within a world-systems paradigm. Modernity is seen as being convergent and a result of capital accumulation resulting in globalisation. Post-modernity is seen as a condition of fragmentation due to capital flight, resulting in discontinuities between different forms of collective and individual life. The deconstruction of modernist identity has methodological and pedagogical implications. This fragmentation and disintegration of stable hegemony has emancipatory potential within research. It has led to the decline of writing the "Other". Writing the "Other" is seen as a violence, as it silences and disallows the other from representing themselves. Mere ethnographic observation needs to give way to a dialogic methodology. This has resulted in a focus in research on self-definition, self-identification, autobiographical and local narratives and a replacement of flawed grand narratives. It has also led to a new awareness of pluralism and diversity and articulation of a cultural politics in which culture is bound up with power and resistance. Feminist identity perspectives have strengthened research methodologies by creating empowering and self-reflexive research designs - concerned with producing emancipatory knowledge and empowering the researched. Pedagogically, from the perspective of postmodernism, modernist authority privileges western patriarchal culture and represses and marginalizes the voices of the subordinated. Hence the essay suggests the need for practicing "critical pedagogy" that views education as a political, social and cultural enterprise, and "border pedagogy" that incorporates the notion of difference as an ideal. In practice the culturally divergent fragmented postmodern condition calls for advocating policies of multiculturalism and multiligualism in education

Expert authority in crisis: Making authority real through struggle

here is an emerging consensus both within the social scientific research community and more widely in the public domain that expert authority is “in trouble.” However, there is much greater disagreement over the scope and scale of this trouble and what it might mean for the nature, status, and significance of expert authority in the 21st century. This paper identifies and assesses three different narratives concerning the crisis in expert authority. These constitute the delegitimation narrative, the demystification narrative, and the decomposition narrative. They can be seen as responses to the breakdown in the implicit social contract between experts, publics, and states under the extreme and continuous pressures exerted on expert authority by disjunctive change. We evaluate these various interpretations of the crisis in expert authority, particularly in terms of what they suggest about the future potency and stability of the concept of expert authority. In this process of evaluation, we also highlight the emergence of reflexive expert authority and its implications for organizational governance as potential outcomes of this ongoing crisis in the legitimacy and status of expert workers. Consequently, the paper provides a general analytical framework for understanding the emergent narratives around expert authority in democracies and highlights how all three narratives point to serious problems in sustaining this authority in the face of destabilizing change. Furthermore, in developing the notion of reflexive expert authority, we contend that theorization of expert authority needs to privilege the deeper dynamics of trust and control at the core of its analytical focus within organization theory

State of play: the political ontology of sport in Amazonian Peru

Building on the importance of "play" in traditional sociality, organized team sports such as soccer are instrumental in promoting a new moral and political order among Urarina people of Peruvian Amazonia, one grounded in notions of roles, rules, and the abstract individual. As a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, highly amenable to ritualization and bureaucratization, sport is central to the process by which the state expands its territory and influence. Like warfare, but unifying rather than fragmenting in its effects, sport harnesses the energy and vitality of youth and co-opts them for other ends

Topic management :the 'about what-ness' of interaction in student university meetings

PhD ThesisThis study adopts a multimodal conversation analytic approach to the study of educational talk-in-interaction. Specifically, it investigates the management of topical talk in student university meetings within the context of problem-based learning. The analyses draw on a close micro-analytic account of topic initiation, topic development, topic termination and topic transition. It also examines various multi-semiotic resources that the participants utilise during the ongoing sequences of interaction, including gaze, gesture and body posture, as well as orientations to meeting artefacts such as meeting agendas as transition-relevant objects. This approach is consistent with the position that interaction is holistic and multifaceted (Nguyen, 2012). In this respect, and to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, this is the first study to investigate topic management in student university meetings from a multimodal perspective. It looks at how participants utilise verbal and non-verbal resources to perform an organised sequence of actions according to a certain context to secure a particular outcome. The data is taken from the Newcastle University Corpus of Academic Spoken English (NUCASE) (Walsh, 2014), a one-million-word corpus of academic spoken English, recorded in various sites across the university and incorporating small group sessions from the three faculties of the university: Humanities and Social Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Science, Agriculture and Engineering. The NUCASE data comprise spoken interactions recorded in seminars, student group meetings, tutorials, PhD supervisions, staff-student consultations, English language classes and sessions involving informal learner talk. The aim of this corpus is to provide a ‘snapshot’ of spoken academic discourse across a range of higher education contexts where there is interactivity. In this study, five transcribed hours of video and audio recordings were analysed, comprising a series of group meetings involving a single group of six undergraduate students working on their final year project for a BSc in Naval Architecture Some of the analyses illustrate that topic management and multimodal resources are intertwined. This is evident in the chairperson’s organised sequential moves through the utilisation of multi-semiotic resources and orientations to meeting artefacts. These sequential moves are employed to signal and make the disjunctive topic transition to the next topic of their meeting. It also illustrates how topic transitions are accepted and oriented to by the co-participants. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates the extent to which multiple bodily movements co-occur, which is still not well explored in topic management. It suggests that certain interactional and multimodal resources are utilised by the primary speaker to include a certain participant in topic development. It also reveals the utilisation and interplay of bodily resources to display different forms of topic resistance. Finally, the analyses show how the ii timing, placement and the design of a turn are very crucial to manage the topics of the meetings. The analyses in this thesis have implications for the study of topic management by clarifying the relationship between topic management and multimodality which can deepen our understanding of how topics are managed not only in meeting interactions, but also from a broader perspective. Finally, the analyses have direct implications for higher education research by examining student university meetings as a truly multimodal enterprise and considering how students manage their meeting interaction with no tutor presence

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)

After the archive : framing cultural memory in ex-Yugoslav collections

Upon Yugoslavia’s breakup into five successor states in the 1990s, its national archives also divided according to the new national borders. This re-ordering of institutional history took most dramatic form in the systematic destruction of the archival records held by Bosnia-Herzegovina; incendiary shells destroyed the holdings of its National Library in 1992. In contrast to the national divisions that “balkanized” and obliterated the archives, ex-Yugoslav compilations draw works from and about the region together. This dissertation analyzes the collections that formed as “alternative archives” in response to Yugoslavia’s dissolution and tracks how individual works within these collections are translated and reframed as they circulate internationally. It argues that distinct texts gathered together into the unit of the collection can effectively convey the complexity and contradiction of ex-Yugoslav cultural politics. Whereas compilations of texts of texts identified as representing various nationalities approximate international alliance through unities such as “internationals women’s solidarity,” “European unification” and “Yugoslav reunification,” close reading of the texts juxtaposed within the collections can also complicate the progressive solidarity that frames them. Ex-Yugoslav collections of print and film, and the situated interpretations they engender, provide a rich archive of responses to the post-Cold-War transition toward globalization and Europeanization in the midst of ethnic and religious extremism. In this project, I describe the “collection” as the product of gathering individual texts together, arranging them, and framing them with a unifying narrative. Literary anthologies, library archives, museum exhibits and film programs at festivals thus all function as collections, or archives, of cultural materials formed during and after Yugoslavia’s dissolution. I argue that the works in these collections reflect forms of organization and alliance that disrupt the common sense of existing geopolitical alignment and put pressure on normative desires for a post-Yugoslav future based on European attachments.Englis

Influence and infection : Georges Bataille and the fate of critique

The thesis argues for the pertinence of the Kantian 'topography' of the mental faculties and the power of critical thought in assessing the philosophical importance of Georges Bataille' s writing. Such an argument runs counter to the received tradition of interpretation of Bataille's work, which has, given the influence of Derrida, construed these texts as works of phenomenological philosophy. The thesis shows that Derrida's interpretation must, by virtue of its exclusivity, be incorrect. Bataille is concerned with the trajectory of thought - that is with the dynamics or energetics of thought - rather than with the articulation of the logic of representation, an articulation which characterises phenomenological thinking. The thesis argues that Bataille's concern with the energetics of thought represents an extension of Kant's critical project. This relation is borne out by the new uses to which he puts the Kantian terminology of continuity, transcendence, subjectivity and communication. Rather than simply exaggerating the power of critique, which Kant countenanced as an influence on the mental processes, Bataille dissolves the critical difference and fuses the status of all thought with its energetic and thermic trajectory. For Bataille, thought is associated with the free contagions or infections of thermic communication. Thus Bataille's relation to Kojeve and Hegel is -only part of a wider move in designating the energetic nature of critique over and above its restricted and conceptual uses. Critique does not survive this definition. The thesis shows the nature of the critical project as it is articulated by Kant in the critiques of pure reason and judgement and how Bataille's major concepts come to inhabit this terrain whilst subjecting themselves and it to the dissolution which is the result of the rational groundlessness of critique. Bataille's treatment of this topography shows that it can be used to infer the attributes of a philosophy of intensities and change

Exporting the standard measure: the function of travel in selected writings of Richard Harding Davis

Through a close reading of selected publications of the American travel writer Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) this thesis illustrates how travel writing is essentially cartographic in nature and will examine how travel writing creates maps in and through discourse. Further, this thesis contends that an approach informed by concepts within the Deleuze and Guattarian framework is ideally suited to a critical engagement with travel writing as it is concerned with the occupation of and traversal through space and a pragmatic approach to semiotics. The theoretical perspective is taken from select works of Deleuze and Guattari. Specifically, it adapts Deleuze and Guattari's approach to a pragmatic semantics and the consideration of reciprocal processes at work within discourse in order to consider and interrogate the discursive mapping at work within Davis's travel, amongst wider reflections on Davis's travel writing. The first chapter undertakes a critical survey of Davis and demonstrates the critical neglect of him. The second justifies the choice of Deleuze and Guattari as the theoretical base of the thesis. The third chapter considers Davis's domestic travelogue, The West from a Car Window (1892) and engages with the mythologised West that permeated the culture of which Davis was a part. The fourth chapter interrogates the discursive rendering of Belize and Venezuela as they appear in Davis's travelogue Three Gringos in South America and Venezuela (1896) wherein Davis demonstrates two very different and distinct discursive practices. The fifth chapter provides a close reading of some of Davis's substantial war correspondence, specifically Cuba in War Time (1897), With both Armies (1900), and With the Allies (1914), and considers the manner in which discourse represents the contest for, invasion and eventual occupation of space. The thesis builds on the idea that travel writing is necessarily a translation of an ostensibly foreign culture, territory or people via a domestic regime of signification, and examines this act of translation as a discursive cartography, a mapping of territory, culture and people