Explorations in knowing: thinking psychosocially about legitimacy

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.In this paper, we look at what engaging with psychoanalysis, through psychosocial accounts of subjectivity, has contributed to our struggles for legitimacy and security within our ways of knowing. The psychosocial, with its insistence on the unconscious and the irrational, features as both a source of security and of insecurity. We use three examples drawn from our own empirical research to explore the entanglement of the researcher with the researched and how this can offer a re-imagined sense of legitimacy for our work. In elaborating our argument, we discuss our experiences of 'being captured' by data and participants, and of negotiating the ethics of analysing participants' accounts. © 2014 The Author(s). Published by Pedagogy, Culture & Society

Women\u27s Center History

This departmental history was written on the occasion of the UND Quasquicentennial in 2008.https://commons.und.edu/departmental-histories/1085/thumbnail.jp

Subtracting difference: troubling transitions from GCSE to AS-level mathematics

This article provides an approach to understanding the widely acknowledged difficulties experienced by young people in the transition from pre-16 to post-16 mathematics. Most approaches to understanding the disenchantment with and drop-out from AS-level mathematics focus on curriculum and assessment. In contrast, this article looks at the role of relationships, taking a psychosocial approach. It draws on data from a three-year qualitative study into why young people choose mathematics. It argues that educational practitioners and policy makers are responding to stories of failure and drop-out by excluding more people from access to mathematics. There is less and less room for difference within our mathematics classrooms. This happens because of the ways that discourses around mathematics fix how we think of the subject, who can learn it and what kind of relationships are possible between learners and mathematics. Instead the article argues for unfixing these through policies and pedagogies of difference

Re-thinking the Legacy 2012: The Olympics as commodity and gift

This paper opens discussion about the nature of Olympic ‘legacy’ and articulates a contradiction in the way ‘legacy’ is conceived - between ’gift’ and ’commodity’ (Mauss 1954).The The paper argues that establishing working definitions and parameters for ‘legacy’ is a difficult task. Defining ‘legacy’ is problematic especially if conceived as an entirely predictable or measurable set of objectives. Indeed, the definition of ‘legacy’ is partly constitutive of the legacy itself, a component of achievements that the city might make. Such a ‘legacy definition’ will become a functional term in the complex planning and evolving conceptions underpinning urban change for some time—if successfully negotiated and if governable. As such, ‘legacy’, and the activities and values entailed to it, can come to provide a catalytic ‘vocabulary of motives’ and a legitimating discourse enabling politicians, communities and their individual representatives to justify investments, evolving strategies and activities connected to and connecting developmental gains in a more or less healthy fashion. It is because of this that legacy and its various meanings come to matter

Telling choices: an exploration of the gender imbalance in participation

In this thesis I address the research question: how is it that people come to choose mathematics and in what ways is this process gendered? This question arises out of the on-going gendered pattern of participation in mathematics beyond compulsory education in England and out of wider concerns about the ways in which inequalities are reproduced through individuals' choices. I draw on the findings of a qualitative research project, involving interviews with 43 young people (all but one aged between 16 and 19) and observations of their AS-level mathematics classes. The research participants are drawn from seven classes in three London institutions: a comprehensive school, a sixth form college and a further education college. Working within a framework drawing on feminism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, I argue that identity in general, and gender in particular, is a project and one that is achieved in interaction with others. By analysing the interviews as narratives of self, I examine in detail the ways in which choosing to do or to reject mathematics can become part of this project; that is how this choice can be read as a way of doing gender. I analyse the ways that students work the socio-cultural discourses about mathematics into their own identity work. The discourses that are most central to this process construct mathematics as 'hard', a proof of intelligence, certain, objective, associated with genius, and a signifier of social incompetence. I argue that these are oppositional and gendered. They inscribe mathematics as masculine. Thus they make it more problematic for girls and women to identify with the subject and so to succeed at and to choose it

Language, Power and Reality TV: the dynamics of race, class and gender in the UK Big Brother Jade-Shilpa row

Reality TV is often presented as an unproblematic social phenomenon which is consumed and digested by an unthinking and unsophisticated general public. We, however, argue that Reality TV is both a pervasive and important cultural form, and as such it is vital that researchers and teachers engage with it. We return to the controversial UK Big Brother 2007 arguments involving Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty. We explore how the dynamics of class, gender and race played out in this case. Using this example, we look at how celebrity culture, ideas of truth and dominant discourses of White working-class culture position both the housemates and their audiences. We further argue that the coverage of the event foreclosed any discussions of White middle-class racism by drawing on discourses that denigrate the White working-class

Troubling "understanding mathematics-in-depth": Its role in the identity work of student-teachers in England

Copyright @ The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.comThis article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.In this paper, we focus on an initiative in England devised to prepare non-mathematics graduates to train as secondary mathematics teachers through a 6-month Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC) to boost their subject knowledge. The course documentation focuses on the need to develop “understanding mathematics in-depth” in students in order for them to become successful mathematics teachers. We take a poststructural approach, so we are not interested in asking what such an understanding is, about the value of this approach or about the effectiveness of the MECs in developing this understanding in their participants. Instead we explore what positions this discourse of “understanding mathematics in-depth” makes available to MEC students. We do this by looking in detail at the “identity work” of two students, analysing how they use and are used by this discourse to position themselves as future mathematics teachers. In doing so, we show how even benign-looking social practices such as “understanding mathematics in-depth” are implicated in practices of inclusion and exclusion. We show this through detailed readings of interviews with two participants, one of whom fits with the dominant discourses in the MEC and the other who, despite passing the MEC, experiences tensions between her national identity work and MEC discourses. We argue that it is vital to explore “identity work” within teacher education contexts to ensure that becoming a successful mathematics teacher is equally available to all.King’s College Londo

How do surgeons think they learn about communication? A qualitative study

Context Communication education has become integral to pre‐ and post‐qualification clinical curricula, but it is not informed by research into how practitioners think that good communication arises. Objectives This study was conducted to explore how surgeons conceptualise their communication with patients with breast cancer in order to inform the design and delivery of communication curricula. Methods We carried out 19 interviews with eight breast surgeons. Each interview centred on a specific consultation with a different patient. We analysed the transcripts of the surgeons’ interviews qualitatively using a constant comparative approach. Results All of the surgeons described communication as central to their role. Communication could be learned to some extent, not from formal training, but by selectively incorporating practices they observed in other practitioners and by being mindful in consultations. Surgeons explained that their own values and character shaped how they communicated and what they wanted to achieve, and constrained what could be learned. Conclusions These surgeons’ understanding of communication is consistent with recent suggestions that communication education: (i) should place practitioners’ goals at its centre, and (ii) might be enhanced by approaches that support ‘mindful’ practice. By contrast, surgeons’ understanding diverged markedly from the current emphasis on ‘communication skills’. Research that explores practitioners’ perspectives might help educators to design communication curricula that engage practitioners by seeking to enhance their own ways of learning about communication

Young people's uses of celebrity: Class, gender and 'improper' celebrity

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01596306.2012.698865.In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young people's everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebrity's social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young people's perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered discursive device within young people's identity work. We illustrate how young people draw upon class and gender distinctions that circulate within celebrity discourses (proper/improper, deserving/undeserving, talented/talentless and respectable/tacky) as they construct their own identities in relation to notions of work, aspiration and achievement. We argue that these distinctions operate as part of neoliberal demands to produce oneself as a ‘subject of value’. However, some participants produced readings that show ambivalence and even resistance to these dominant discourses. Young people's responses to celebrity are shown to relate to their own class and gender position.The Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering and Technology