Little angels: The mediation of parenting

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Multiple Choice Question Corpus Analysis for Distractor Characterization

International audienceIn this paper, we present a study of MCQ aiming to define criteria in order to automatically select distractors. We are aiming to show that distractor editing follows rules like syntactic and semantic homogeneity according to associated answer, and the possibility to automatically identify this homogeneity. Manual analysis shows that homogeneity rule is respected to edit distractors and automatic analysis shows the possibility to reproduce these criteria. These ones can be used in future works to automatically select distractors, with the combination of other criteria

Does the Supreme Court Follow the Economic Returns? A Response to A Macrotheory of the Court

Today, there is a widespread idea that parents need to learn how to carry out their roles as parents. Practices of parental learning operate throughout society. This article deals with one particular practice of parental learning, namely nanny TV, and the way in which ideal parents are constructed through such programmes. The point of departure is SOS family, a series broadcast on Swedish television in 2008. Proceeding from the theorising of governmentality developed in the wake of the work of Michel Foucault, we analyse the parental ideals conveyed in the series, as an example of the way parents are constituted as subjects in the ‘advanced liberal society’ of today. The ideal parent is a subject who, guided by the coach, is constantly endeavouring to achieve a makeover. The objective of this endeavour, however, is self-control, whereby the parents will in the end become their own coaches.

Visual activism and social justice: using visual methods to make young people’s complex lives visible across ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces

Much critical social justice research, including work employing visual methods, focuses on young people’s use of public spaces leaving domestic spaces relatively unexplored. Such research tacitly maintains modernist notions of the public/private distinction in which the private sphere is considered less relevant to concerns of social justice. However, UK crime and social justice policy has increasingly intervened in the home lives of the poorest British families. Further, such policies have been legitimated by drawing on (or not contesting) media imagery that constructs these family lives almost entirely negatively, obscuring their complexity. Drawing on childhood studies research, and a project that employed visual methods to explore belonging among young people in foster, kinship or residential care, this paper examines participants’ often fragile efforts to find or forge places in which they could feel at ‘home’ and imagine a future. In so doing, it invites visual activists to reconsider their understanding of public and private spaces in order to contest prevalent unsympathetic policy representations of poorer young people’s lives, to focus greater attention on their need for support, and to extend imaginations of their futures

The High-Superior-Tension Technique: Evolution of Lipoabdominoplasty

Because abdominoplasty is associated with complications such as seroma and necrosis as well as epigastric bulging and a suprapubic scar located too high, the demand for this procedure is not as high as it otherwise might be. However, although these negative effects were common many years ago, their incidence has decreased dramatically with modern abdominoplastic techniques. One approach using a combination of abdominoplasty and liposuction or lipoabdominoplasty has resolved many of the problems faced with earlier techniques, offering aesthetically pleasing results and excellent reliability. The keys to successful lipoabdominoplasty, first developed as the high-superior-tension technique, are extensive liposuction, preservation of lymphatic trunks, preaponeurotic epigastric dissection, major muscle fascia plication, two high-tension paraumbilical sutures, hypogastric tension sutures, and closure of the dead spaces. The most recent updates to this technique are described in this article

Interrogating networks: towards an agnostic perspective on governance research

Networks have rapidly become the dominant trope in governance theory and practice. While scholarship highlights important benefits, there has been insufficient systematic interrogation of the potential pathologies in network governance. This paper addresses the lacuna. We begin by discussing different kinds of network analysis and distinguishing the specific claims of network governance theory. We then pull together the scattered critically oriented literatures on the topic, identifying major problems with network modes of governance: hypocrisy, distrust, marketization, subjugation, antiproceduralism, fragmentation, and ‘netsploitation’. We finally argue for a more agnostic approach to governance research, capable of taking account of these pathologies and thereby putting networks in their place. This means avoiding the fetishization of particular modes of governance and giving more careful attention to the settings in which they each can be useful

Scripts people live in the marketplace: an application of script analysis to Confessions of a Shopaholic

This paper shows how Script Analysis can produce new marketing theory by applying it to contemporary shopping behaviour via British novelist Madeleine Wickham’s novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic. We show how Becky Bloomwood, the central character, is a Scripted Shopaholic for whom shopping is the activity around which everything else in her live falls in and out of place. In presenting a Scripted Shopaholic Racket System, we theorise: how shopping is used to structure time and relationships with others; the role of injunctions and attributions and related discounting in fulfilling shopping scripts; and, the possibility of freedom from excessive shopping scripts. We therefore bring together psychoanalysis, literary texts, and shopping theories to generate new insights about why people shop (and often shop too much), and how such behaviours might be transforme

Discourse, affect and affliction

While much recent theorizing into affect has challenged the primacy of discourse in understanding social life, this paper is premised on the intertwining of affective experience with discursive meaning. Furthermore, appreciating the entwining of affect and discourse facilitates broader understanding into the illness experience, medical decision-making and experiences of healing. Today, the biomedical discourse carries particular affective weight that can saturate experiences of affliction. Cultural understandings of disease similarly shape affect that may emerge in affliction. Social meaning, more specifically stereotypes pertaining to identities, interweave with emotion also in the context of medical practice. The doctor-patient relationship is an affect-laden encounter where the entwining of affect with social assumptions carries important, yet poorly understood, repercussions for treatment decisions and for the furthering of health inequalities. Both the elusiveness and the power of affect that unfolds in relation to discursive meaning rest on the way in which affect dwells in and resounds through the body

Imagining the Lives of Others: Empathy in Public Relations

This paper asks how we might theorise empathy in public relations (PR) in the light of a widespread ‘turn’ towards emotion in the academy, as well as in popular discourse. Two distinct notions of empathy are explored: ‘true’empathy as discussed in intercultural communication, is driven by a human concern for the other in order to understand experiences, feelings and situations that may be different from our own; whereas ‘instrumental’ empathy, reflecting a self orientation, is said to characterise much neoliberal market discourse in which corporations are urged to understand their customers better. Thus, while empathy may seem highly desirable as a means to enter into dialogue with an organisation’s publics, particularly during times of social upheaval and crisis, it is important to pay attention to empathy in public relations discourses including whose goals are served by empathetic engagement; and the type(s) of empathy called upon within a PR context. A literature review identified a socio-cultural definition of empathy as ‘imaginary effort’. A review of the public relations literature, however, found that while empathy is considered an important principle and personal attribute, notions of empathy, with a few exceptions, are under-explored. Nonfunctionalist, socio-cultural research which examines the meanings that practitioners associate with empathy is distinctly lacking; therefore in order to gain further insight into empathy, two sources of data were explored. The analysis of a popular online practitioner blog showed that other-centred empathic skill is discursively framed as instrumental in achieving clients’ business objectives. The analysis of three empathy statements drawn from 12 in-depth interviews with practitioners revealed complex empathic discourse in practitioner-client relationships. While the findings are limited to illustrative analyses only, this paper challenges researchers to develop conceptualisations and perspectives of empathy as imaginary effort in public relations