"The home of the living writer" : the playwright and the Abbey Theatre

This thesis attempts to outline the practical relationship between Irish playwrights and the Abbey Theatre, from the early work of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, until the present day. It argues that the Abbey's reputation for being a writer's theatre tends to be contradicted by its distant association with Irish playwrights during the greater part of its history. Only during the early 1980s was there an active attempt to integrate the playwright within the company, creating a vibrant and active community for the development of new writing. Up until the 1980s the Abbey subscribed to the established twentieth-century view that the playwright was a literary writer, outside the creative centre of theatre. The Abbey's changing roles -- from literary theatre, to institutional national theatre and to director's theatre -- distracted the Theatre from acknowledging the valuable contribution individual dramatists could make, ensuring that the playwright remained vulnerable and isolated. The Abbey remained heavily dependent on its own historical inheritance and international reputation, satisfied with a repertoire of predictable classics. The Theatre's approach to playwrights changed in 1978, when Artistic Director Joe Dowling attempted to create what he termed `the home of the living writer'. With assistance from Script Editor Sean McCarthy, Dowling instigated a series of policies which went towards building a coherent writer's theatre within the Abbey, similar to London's Royal Court. Playwrights became members of the company, were assisted with the development of ideas and encouraged to contribute to the rehearsal process. These actions assured experimental playwright development, exemplified by the work of Tom MacIntyre, whose work proved that a playwright could evolve his own artistic identity within an established theatre

American social science and the psychology of development in India, 1940s-1960s

With the arrival of independence in 1947, India’s first generation of post-colonial leaders embraced the concept of ‘development’ as a central objective of nation-building and a raison d'être of the post-colonial state. The opportunity of freedom, it was argued, would pave the way for a dramatic process of economic, social and political transformation that would turn India from an impoverished, colonial society into a ‘modern’, prosperous and democratic one. Set against this backdrop, this thesis explores intersections and entanglements between the post-independence pursuit of development and the forms of knowledge produced by post-war American social science. Foregrounding the concept of ‘psychologized development’, the thesis focuses in particular on the ways in which Indian elites – including government officials, intellectuals, industrialists and more – drew on American psychological expertise in the hope of realizing development dreams. With its claims to understand the complex processes that shaped human action (and interaction), I argue, American psychological knowledge promised solutions to the most pressing contemporary problems, from the treatment of ‘communal’ tension to the engagement of rural communities in uplift programmes. Psychology revealed the foundations of effective economic entrepreneurship and the basis of sound industrial leadership. It even explained how new ideas and practices could be ‘diffused’ throughout society. For Indians, psychologized theories of human nature offered knowledge of great utility in the context of plans for rapid societal change. For Americans, they offered tools that would turn India into a model of democratic development in the context of a global Cold War. Using a case study approach, this thesis explores the diverse settings in which Indians and Americans came together to psychologize development. In doing so, it examines both the common themes and the recurring challenges that came with attempts to realize development through social science expertise. The resulting history offers new perspectives not just on the character and complexion of developmentalism in post-colonial India, but also on the forms of cross-border connection that shaped India’s post-1947 transition. The thesis makes novel contributions to a number of historiographical fields, including the history of American social science, the history of Indo-US relations, the history of development and global history.Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trus

Slowing the social sciences of sport: on the possibilities of physical culture

Within this paper, we address how the ‘knowledge market’ positions certain ways of knowing over others. We suggest that this questions the very worth and perceived value of the social sciences of sport, let alone allowing for discussion of the contemporary relevance, quality, position and potential impact of the field. To counter what we perceive as a regressive orthodoxy, we explore the dangers that can arise from narrowly conceived (yet often hegemonic) globally accepted structures, discourses and epistemes and suggest a slow counter: an approach couched in slow pedagogy and that can offer often competing approaches within the context of neoliberal educational rationalities. Through discussing how we have negotiated these conditions within our own institution, we propose what we imagine is a provocative vision of the potentialities of the field. In so doing, and while we are not suggesting this is the way ‘sport studies’ should or ought to be, we suggest that a slow sports studies can open up the critical potential of the field, promote democratic (body) knowledge and ensure the University as a space for vibrancy, innovation, critique, debate and equality

Embodying Sporty Girlhood:Health & the Enactment of Successful Femininities

This paper focuses on young women’s embodiment of health discourses and how these are “played out” in education and sporting contexts where varying physical cultures are en- acted. We draw on data from three qualitative projects that considered girls’ understand- ings of PE, football, and running within the context of their active schooling subjectivities. Health concerns increasingly frame young people’s participation in sport and physical activity and “girls” in particular have been encouraged to be more physically active. In- fluential “healthism” discourses continue to construct compelling ideas about “active cit- izenship” as moral responsibility and within broader, fluid and neoliberal societies young women are seen as the “magic bullet” (Ringrose, 2013) to overcome social issues and complex health problems such as obesity. Through critical feminist inquiry into the mate- rial-discursive rationalities of healthism in postfeminist times our analysis demonstrates that health and achievement discourses form powerful “body pedagogies” in relation to young women’s engagement with sport and physical activity. The body pedagogies we an- alysed were multifaceted in that they focused on performative potential of sport and phys- ical activity in the quest for the ever “perfectible self” (McRobbie, 2007, p. 719), and were also imbued with fear, anxiety and risk related to failure and ‘fatness’. These findings are significant as they show that current responses to “tackle” ill health that mobilise sport and physical activity as simplified and rationalised responses to the “threat” of obesity are problematic because they do not contend with this complexity as young women assem- ble their postfeminist choice biographies

Embodying Sporty Girlhood: Health and the Enactment of "Successful" Femininities

This paper focuses on young women’s embodiment of health discourses and how these are “played out” in education and sporting contexts where varying physical cultures are enacted. We draw on data from three qualitative projects that considered girls’ understandings of PE, football, and running within the context of their active schooling subjectivities. Health concerns increasingly frame young people’s participation in sport and physical activity and “girls” in particular have been encouraged to be more physically active. Influential “healthism” discourses continue to construct compelling ideas about “active citizenship” as moral responsibility and within broader, fluid and neoliberal societies young women are seen as the “magic bullet” (Ringrose, 2013) to overcome social issues and complex health problems such as obesity. Through critical feminist inquiry into the material-discursive rationalities of healthism in postfeminist times our analysis demonstrates that health and achievement discourses form powerful “body pedagogies” in relation to young women’s engagement with sport and physical activity. The body pedagogies we analysed were multifaceted in that they focused on performative potential of sport and physical activity in the quest for the ever “perfectible self” (McRobbie, 2007, p. 719), and were also imbued with fear, anxiety and risk related to failure and ‘fatness’. These findings are significant as they show that current responses to “tackle” ill health that mobilise sport and physical activity as simplified and rationalised responses to the “threat” of obesity are problematic because they do not contend with this complexity as young women assemble their postfeminist choice biographies

Embodying Sporty Girlhood:Health & the Enactment of Successful Femininities

This paper focuses on young women’s embodiment of health discourses and how these are “played out” in education and sporting contexts where varying physical cultures are en- acted. We draw on data from three qualitative projects that considered girls’ understand- ings of PE, football, and running within the context of their active schooling subjectivities. Health concerns increasingly frame young people’s participation in sport and physical activity and “girls” in particular have been encouraged to be more physically active. In- fluential “healthism” discourses continue to construct compelling ideas about “active cit- izenship” as moral responsibility and within broader, fluid and neoliberal societies young women are seen as the “magic bullet” (Ringrose, 2013) to overcome social issues and complex health problems such as obesity. Through critical feminist inquiry into the mate- rial-discursive rationalities of healthism in postfeminist times our analysis demonstrates that health and achievement discourses form powerful “body pedagogies” in relation to young women’s engagement with sport and physical activity. The body pedagogies we an- alysed were multifaceted in that they focused on performative potential of sport and phys- ical activity in the quest for the ever “perfectible self” (McRobbie, 2007, p. 719), and were also imbued with fear, anxiety and risk related to failure and ‘fatness’. These findings are significant as they show that current responses to “tackle” ill health that mobilise sport and physical activity as simplified and rationalised responses to the “threat” of obesity are problematic because they do not contend with this complexity as young women assem- ble their postfeminist choice biographies

Remembering learning to play:reworking gendered memories of sport, physical activity, and movemen

In this article, we explore young women’s memories of their experiences with sport, physical activity, and play during their childhood. Through collective memory work – sharing, discussing, writing, and analysing sporting memories/histories – we examine (re)constructions of young women’s experiences of gendered relations of power, bodily awareness, and regulation within movement-based practices. The approach taken explores relationships between theory and method, a feature of post- qualitative inquiry. Forming a collaborative memory workshop with six young women (aged 19–22) and two researchers, we illustrate how work-ing memories facilitates the interrogation of taken-for-granted assump-tions about women’s active bodies. Represented through two memories in this paper, their production, representation, and analysis were a collaborative effort, not solely representative of two individual experi-ences. Despite growing up within a period wherein women’s access to and engagement with sport and physical activity is more available, com-mon, and diverse compared to the youth of past generations, young women’s experiences explored here illustrate the ways in which move-ment-based practices are located within the confluence of postfeminist sensibilities including, intensely scrutinised gendered body cultures, potent neoliberal configurations, and discourses of empowerment. It is these new sporting and active femininities and the gendering experiences of physical culture that are explored within this paper through memory work and collective biograph