Narrative Relations and Associations: Catherine Kohler Riessman’s Research Dialogism

In this paper, Esin and Squire provide their individual and collective reflections on the influence of Catherine Kohler Riessman's dialogical approach in research. Each researcher reinterpreted the dialogism in Riessman's approach in their own work, focusing on differing elements of it. While Esin examines her experience of relationality, reflexivity, and positionality in her work, Squire discusses her adoption of the approach to develop methodological interdisciplinarity in social science research. The authors then reflect on their dialogue in researching multimodal narratives, historical positioning in and beyond narratives, and power relations in the context of research

An investigation of combustion instability in aircraft-engine reheat systems

The principal objective of this study was to examine experimentally the effects of upstream temperature, velocity, gutter blockage, tailpipe length, and main and pilot fuel flows, on the form of combustion instability encountered in aircraft reheat systems which is sometimes referred to as 'buzz'. Tests were carried out at atmospheric pressure for upstream temperatures of between 200 and 500°C, and upstream velocities ranging from 140 to 200 ft/sec. Three values of stabilizer blockage were employed, namely 25, 30 and 35%. The tailpipe length was varied between 9 and 45 inches. Auto-correlation techniques were used in the frequency analysis of the buzz waveforms. It was found that a certain minimum tailpipe length is necessary in order to produce buzz which is then strengthened as the tailpipe length is increased. Buzz also becomes more pronounced with an increase in gas velocity but stabilizer blockage appears to have no discernible effect … [cont.]

Arbitration of Health and Safety Issues in the Workplace: Employees Who Refuse Work Assignments Because of Fear of AIDS Contagion

Horror stories concerning the abuse suffered by the AIDS victim in the workplace are plentiful. There have been numerous reports about employees who have refused to work with or touch the AIDS worker, or use the same bathroom, telephone, water fountain, or pencil. It was reported that one AIDS victim was not even allowed to use his pregnant co-worker\u27s word processor; she claimed she had once seen him sweat on the keyboard. Paul Cronan became painfully aware that his employer of twelve years, the New England Telephone Company, had breached his privacy by divulging in large group meetings of employees that he had AIDS. Shortly thereafter, Cronan received calls from co-workers who threatened to lynch him if he returned to work. Cronan sued his employer for breach of privacy and discrimination on the basis of his physical disability. The case was settled out of court. Cronan was reassigned to the company\u27s Needham, Massachusetts facility. In an interview, Ellen Boyd, spokeswoman for the company, described the work atmosphere as one where “fear was rampant among our employees.” A forecast by the National Academy of Sciences that the next ten years of the AIDS epidemic will be worse and more complex than the first decade has served to intensify public fear. This situation is exacerbated by widespread public frustration and helplessness; although the scientific community has reported substantial progress in learning about the disease, there is also a sense that the disease continues to outrun the gains in medical knowledge. Morbidity statistics have become the harbinger of an accelerated AIDS epidemic for the 1990s. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that 1 million to 1.5 million Americans harbor the AIDS virus and that by this year approximately 365,000 Americans will have been diagnosed as having AIDS, and 263,000 of those with AIDS will have died. How does all this translate to the workplace? It means more and more employers will be faced with the prospect of conflicting interests between AIDS victims and employees who, because of fear, refuse assignments that will bring them into contact with carriers of the virus. There are legal protections for the AIDS victim. But what, if any, protection does the fearful employee have? An employee who has been disciplined and discharged for refusing a work assignment because of fear of contagion from an AIDS victim may look to a collective bargaining agreement, or the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA), or section 502 of the Labor Management Relations Act and section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) for protection. Prospects for success under each weigh heavily on evidentiary questions in relation to tests or standards with which the statutes require compliance. This Article focuses on whether the arbitration provision within a collective bargaining agreement offers viable protection to an employee who is disciplined or discharged for refusing a work assignment with an AIDS victim

On the existence of infinitely many closed geodesics on orbifolds of revolution

Using the theory of geodesics on surfaces of revolution, we introduce the period function. We use this as our main tool in showing that any two-dimensional orbifold of revolution homeomorphic to S^2 must contain an infinite number of geometrically distinct closed geodesics. Since any such orbifold of revolution can be regarded as a topological two-sphere with metric singularities, we will have extended Bangert's theorem on the existence of infinitely many closed geodesics on any smooth Riemannian two-sphere. In addition, we give an example of a two-sphere cone-manifold of revolution which possesses a single closed geodesic, thus showing that Bangert's result does not hold in the wider class of closed surfaces with cone manifold structures.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures; for a PDF version see http://www.calpoly.edu/~jborzell/Publications/publications.htm

From Experience-Centred to Socioculturally-Oriented Approaches to Narrative

This chapter examines how we can study narratives as stories of experience, rather than events; considers the problems associated with experience-centred narrative research; looks at ways to tackle such problems, particularly, adopting a more socially and culturally-directed research framework;1 and returns to some research described in the previous chapter, while also referring to additional studies, and drawing on my research about people’s stories of living with HIV in South Africa

Press replay – Introduction to special section on rereading Valerie Walkerdine's ‘Video replay: Families, films and fantasy’

This introduction to ‘Video Replay’, the subject of this special section, outlines some of the main debates in which it has been significant and summarises that article's content. I then move on to sketch the fields that are addressed by the commentaries, which discuss ‘Video Replay's’ changing influence in the fields of psychoanalytic, psychosocial, media and cultural studies

Narratives, connections and social change

In this article, I suggest that narratives’ importance for social change may be understood by examining specific elements of narrative syntax — key rhetorical tropes within stories, and story genres. I argue that these stylistic elements generate social connections that themselves support and stimulate social change. I use Young’s (2006) theorisation of responsibility and global justice in terms of connection, to suggest how narratives may support or generate progressive social change. I then examine narrative tropes and genres of similarisation and familiarisation at work in narratives produced around the HIV pandemic, and the limits of those tropes and genres for supporting and catalysing social change

Narratives and the gift of the future

In this paper, I address the assumption that narratives work normatively, and argue that instead that narratives are as important for registering particularities and differences that evade normalisation. Such singularities can be understood as moral appeals from the future. I draw on notions of deconstruction as a future-and ethics-oriented technology, to suggest that narratives can work similarly, and I give some examples from my own recent study of visual autobiographies

Partial Secrets

The ability and right to have secrets may be a condition of social ethics (Derrida, A Taste for the Secret), but at the same time the nature of secrets is that they undermine themselves. Once told, secrets are no longer secret but are known. Even to name them as possibilities is to bring them into view as objects of knowledge. Secrets are thus always in some ways partial secrets, but their “openness” also connotes the lack of certainty of any knowledge about them, their evasiveness, their lack of fixity, and hence, their partial character and openness to change. In this article, I explore partial secrets in relation to a 2011 interview study of HIV support in the United Kingdom, where HIV’s relatively low prevalence and high treatment access tends toward its invisibilization. I suggest that in this context, HIV is positioned ambiguously, as a “partial secret,” in an ongoing and precarious tension between public knowledge and acceptance of HIV, HIV’s constitution as a condition of citizenship attended by full human rights, and HIV’s being resecreted through ongoing illness, constrained resources, citizenly exclusion, and the psychological and social isolation of those affected