Negotiating the inhuman: Bakhtin, materiality and the instrumentalization of climate change

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness

Gendered educational leadership: beneath the monoglossic façade

Recent gender retheorisation has drawn on Mikhail Bakhtin's literary and linguistic theories of monoglossia and heteroglossia to reconcile seemingly contradictory gender discourses. Thus, girls/women and boys/men as they are biologically sexed might be discussed within a poststructural gender theory discourse that disconnects gender from the body. The concepts of gender monoglossia, gender heteroglossia and polyglossia have been applied here to empirical research into the construction of gendered leadership as it was seen to be done by one woman head teacher. The accounts of members of staff expose heteroglossia in the articulation of their understandings of gendered leadership beneath the construction of a monoglossic façade. They also reveal an understanding of polyglossic simultaneity as the head teacher is observed to ‘switch’ seamlessly between modes of doing gendered leadership depending on context and circumstances. There is also evidence of polyglossic simultaneity in the reports that might lead to the rejection and/or redefinition of gender theory discourses

Poetry as hybrid pedagogy in mental health nurse education

Poetry has emerged as a significant resource in nurse education in recent times. Over the last four years for example, this journal has hosted a number research and theoretical- conceptual papers that discuss and evaluate the use of poetry in undergraduate nurse curricula. In these papers, their authors express the explicit aim of advancing nurse education through helping students to explore their feelings about practice issues over a range of contexts. Included among these are reflective writing (Coleman and Willis, 2015), compassionate practice (Curtis, 2013), the development of emotional intelligence (Jack, 2015), the promotion of liberal nurse education (McKie, 2012) and clinical practice artistry (Chan, 2014), and the use of poetry to remove barriers to perception (Rolfe, 2012). From a related but qualitatively different emerging contemporary perspective, our aim in this paper is to promote poetry as hybrid pedagogy in mental health nurse education. We do so in order to challenge longstanding epistemological assumptions guiding aspects of the conventional range, content and delivery of the mental health nursing curriculum. We wish to highlight the value of adding the poetic work in context, of academics who have hybrid, ‘hyphenated’ identities to this curriculum. In our case, this is reflected in the fact that we explicitly teach and write from the standpoint position of mental health/nurse lecturers-ex- mental health professionals-survivors of the UK psychiatric system (Grant et al., 2015a). We will explore this topic area further and in a more nuanced way in this current paper. In specifically focusing on poetry as hybrid pedagogy, one of our own co-written and previously unpublished poems will be used in a theoretical and analytical context to advance our argument for the use of this approach in mental health nurse education. In the final section of our paper, our attention will turn to some of the benefits and one possible drawback for this approach, emerging from our discussion

Peasant settlers and the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916

Framing Young Children’s Humour and Practitioner Responses to it Using a Bakhtinian Carnivalesque Lens

This article presents findings from a pilot study offering an alternative framing of children's humour and laughter in an early childhood education setting. It employs a Bakhtinian carnivalesque lens to explore the nature of children's humour in an urban nursery, and investigate the framing of children's humour and laughter outside the popular paradigm of developmental psychology. In addition, it addresses the challenge that children's humour can present for early childhood practitioners, turning to Bakhtin's analysis of carnival to frame children's humour as carnivalesque. This conception is then offered as a part of a potential explanation for practitioners' occasional resistance to children's humour, proposing that dominating, authoritative discourses within early childhood education play a significant role in this. The article draws on a number of theorists, including Bakhtin more widely, to address reasons why humour is not valued pedagogically within the UK early childhood field, and suggests that further research in the area is imperative, in order that we gain a better understanding of the place and significance of children's humour within early childhood practice

Post-humanitarianism: humanitarian communication beyond a politics of pity

This article offers a trajectory of humanitarian communication, which suggests a clear, though not linear, move from emotion-oriented to post-emotional styles of appealing. Drawing on empirical examples, the article demonstrates that the humanitarian sensibility that arises out of these emerging styles breaks with pity and privileges a short-term and low-intensity form of agency, which is no longer inspired by an intellectual agenda but momentarily engages us in practices of playful consumerism. Whereas this move to the post-emotional should be seen as a reaction to a much-criticized articulation between politics and humanitarianism, which relied on ‘universal’ morality and grand emotion, it is also a response to the intensely mediatized global market in which humanitarian agencies operate today. The article concludes by reflecting on the political and ethical ambivalence at the heart of this new style of humanitarian communication, which offers both the tentative promise of new practices of altruism and the threat of cultural narcissism