9 research outputs found
Hierarchies of Pain
Trauma has become a pervasive cultural model for representing individual and collective injuries and suffering. This process has produced what may be called a trauma aesthetic, a set of recognizable tropes in widespread use in trauma narratives. This chapter examines the adoption of this aesthetic in graphic narratives, focusing on the special capacities of the form. Familiar tropes, such as dissociation and the somatic trace, are presented in complex combinations of visual and textual components, often exploiting the differential appearance of text and image to introduce a dynamic of belatedness or disarticulation. This chapter analyses five works ordered according to their diminishing reliance on âtraumaâ. The trauma aesthetic is used, though not explicitly, in Catherine Meurisseâs La LĂ©gĂšretĂ© (2016) about the Charlie Hebdo attack, Jean-Philip Stassenâs DĂ©ogratias (2000/2006) about the genocide in Rwanda, and Emmanuel Lepageâs Un printemps Ă Tchernobyl (2012) about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. By contrast, it is absent from Mazen Kerbajâs Beirut Wonât Cry (2007/2017) about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and Josh Neufeldâs A.D. about Hurricane Katrina (2009). These worksâ reliance on formalized and sanctioned trauma tropes not only is influenced by narrative characteristics, such as temporal distance from the event or the presence of a single narrator-protagonist but may also be motivated by the prestige conferred by trauma as recognized suffering, affecting the canonization and translatability of the graphic narratives in question
The Muslim problematic: Muslims, state schools and security
Muslims are folk-devils that mark the ubiquitous moral panic. For some, the idea of the Muslim problematic signifies a long and worrying trend of creeping âIslamificationâ of state schools. For others, the discourse of the Muslim problematic reflects the ongoing racial patholigisation of Britainâs minoritised communities. One thing is for certain, the current debate marks a significant moment in the nature and function of the neoliberal state as it reframes race relation policy in Britain in the light of the security agenda. The Trojan Horse affair, surrounding claims of infiltration of radical Islam in state-run schools, marks a significant moment in the embedding of the security agenda in Britainâs inner city schools through the medium of the Prevent agenda. It argues that one of the best ways of understanding the security agenda is by locating it within a broader sociological and historical context of the functioning of the racial state
Negotiating multiple identities between school and the outside world: a critical discourse analysis
This article examines interview talk of three students in an Australian high school to show how they negotiate their young adult identities between school and the outside world. It draws on Bakhtinâs concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia to argue that identities are linguistically and corporeally constituted. A critical discourse analysis of segments of transcribed interviews and student-related public documents finds a mismatch between a social justice curriculum at school and its transfer into studentsâ accounts of outside school lived realities. The article concludes that a productive social justice pedagogy must use its key principles of (con)textual interrogation to engage students in reflexive practice about their positioning within and against discourses of social justice in their student and civic lives. An impending national curriculum must decide whether or not it negotiates the discursive divide any better
The world of the British hifz class student : observations, findings and implications for education and further research
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork that took place in 2004 in a boys' hifz class which met in a north-east London mosque. Drawing on the results of semi-participant observations and semi-structured interviews, the research findings are collated under five themes: the routines and rhythms of the hifz class; routes into the hifz class; the students' perceptions of what they were doing; the 'sacrifice' of becoming a hafiz; and hifz class and the rest of students' lives. Though the analysis is largely of the subjective responses of hifz class members and cannot therefore give definitive answers to research questions, the author points to some of the implications of this work and offers pointers for further research work in this field
Thigh abscess and necrotizing fasciitis following an inside-out transobturator tape intervention: a case report
âBeing thereâ the experience of shadowing a British Muslim Hospital chaplain
This article critically evaluates âshadowingâ as a qualitative research method. Sometimes described as the relatively straightforward opportunity to observe and record the actions and behaviours of a single individual during the course of their everyday working activities (McDonald, 2005), this article demonstrates that shadowing is often a highly disruptive and to some extent performative undertaking, both for the researched and for the researcher. Yet, it is precisely the disruptive potential of shadowing that makes it a valuable data collection method, offering the opportunity to gain significant insights that would be largely unobtainable via any other method. Following a brief discussion of shadowing as a research tool and an introduction to the âMuslim Chaplaincy Projectâ, the remainder of the article describes the experience of shadowing an individual Muslim hospital chaplain in detail. What becomes apparent is that shadowing has the potential to blur into other qualitative data collection methods (e.g. interviewing), especially when those we are shadowing have developed roles that engage them in various discursive communities, and a range of cooperative networks. Shadowing such individuals complicates our understanding of how this method operates in practice