‘They Called Them Communists Then … What D'You Call ‘Em Now? … Insurgents?’. Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism

This paper addresses the question of the extent to which the colonial past provides material for contemporary actors' understanding of difference. The research from which the paper is drawn involved interview and ethnographic work in three largely white working-class estates in an English provincial city. For this paper we focus on ten life-history interviews with older participants who had spent some time abroad in the British military. Our analysis adopts a postcolonial framework because research participants' current constructions of an amorphous 'Other' (labelled variously as black people, immigrants, foreigners, asylum-seekers or Muslims) reveal strong continuities with discourses deployed by the same individuals to narrate their past experiences of living and working as either military expatriates or spouses during British colonial rule. Theoretically, the paper engages with the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In keeping with a postcolonial approach, we work against essentialised notions of identity based on 'race' or class. Although we establish continuity between white working-class military emigration in the past and contemporary racialised discourses, we argue that the latter are not class-specific, being as much the creations of the middle-class media and political elite

Locating the ‘radical’ in 'Shoot the Messenger'

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2013 @ Edinburgh University Press.The 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger is based on the psychological journey of a Black schoolteacher, Joe Pascale, accused of assaulting a Black male pupil. The allegation triggers Joe's mental breakdown which is articulated, through Joe's first-person narration, as a vindictive loathing of Black people. In turn, a range of common stereotypical characterisations and discourses based on a Black culture of hypocrisy, blame and entitlement is presented. The text is therefore laid wide open to a critique of its neo-conservatism and hegemonic narratives of Black Britishness. However, the drama's presentation of Black mental illness suggests that Shoot the Messenger may also be interpreted as a critique of social inequality and the destabilising effects of living with ethnicised social categories. Through an analysis of issues of representation, the article reclaims this controversial text as a radical drama and examines its implications for and within a critical cultural politics of ‘race’ and representation

The Color of Childhood: The Role of the Child/Human Binary in the Production of Anti-Black Racism

The binary between the figure of the child and the fully human being is invoked with regularity in analyses of race, yet its centrality to the conception of race has never been fully explored. For most commentators, the figure of the child operates as a metaphoric or rhetorical trope, a non-essential strategic tool in the perpetuation of White supremacy. As I show in the following, the child/human binary does not present a contingent or merely rhetorical construction but, rather, a central feature of racialization. Where Black peoples are situated as objects of violence it is often precisely because Blackness has been identified with childhood and childhood is historically identified as the archetypal site of naturalized violence and servitude. I proceed by offering a historical account of how Black peoples came to inherit the subordination and dehumanization of European childhood and how White youth were subsequently spared through their partial categorization as adults

‘Dead people don’t claim’: A psychopolitical autopsy of UK austerity suicides

One of the symptoms of post financial crisis austerity in the UK has been an increase in the numbers of suicides, especially by people who have experienced welfare reform. This article develops and utilises an analytic framework of psychopolitical autopsy to explore media coverage of ‘austerity suicide’ and to take seriously the psychic life of austerity (internalisation, shame, anxiety), embedding it in a context of social dis-ease. Drawing on three distinct yet interrelated areas of literature (the politics of affect and psychosocial dynamics of welfare, post and anti-colonial psychopolitics, and critical suicidology), the article aims to better understand how austerity ‘kills’. Key findings include understanding austerity suicides as embedded within an affective economy of the anxiety caused by punitive welfare retrenchment, the stigmatisation of being a recipient of benefits, and the internalisation of market logic that assigns value through ‘productivity’ and conceptualises welfare entitlement as economic ‘burden’. The significance of this approach lies in its ability to widen analytic framing of suicide from an individual and psychocentric focus, to illuminate culpability of government reforms while still retaining the complexity of suicide, and thus to provide relevant policy insights about welfare reform

Communication studies cartography in the Lusophone world

Within the Lusophone community of over 250 million speakers only a minority developed a sense of belonging based on their common language, a phenomenon that is still very real today. According to the Mozambican writer, Mia Couto, Lusophony is not a ‘loud’ reality, rather a “luso-aphonic” one, that is, a place of low voices, no knowledge and no acknowledgement of the commonalities between themselves in this vast geographic and cultural space. Recognizing precisely this gap, Communication research associations in Lusophone countries (Lusocom) have promoted the setting up of a research cooperation network primarily between Portuguese and Brazilian researchers, and then extending it to the Galician community, and subsequently to the entire Lusophone space. This movement is based on the assumption that linguistic diversity enriches science and that science should be globally and contextually relevant. Lusophony can be discussed from various points of view, all related to the cultural identity of the Portuguese-speaking countries. I would like to explain my point of view, focused on the social status of language. Then, I will refer to the English language has a dominant language. Finally, I would like to point out some challenges that, from my perspective, the Lusophone research groups have to face in a global world dominated by English and anglo-saxon paradigms. My approach is in fact focused on the perspective of language, understood as a cultural manifestation, the expression of thought, a relational space, and an instrument of symbolic organization of the world. Such understanding is coincident with the symbolic power of language (Pierre Bourdieu’s theory), and with the post-colonial perspective which questions the domination, submission, subordination and control of peripheries, minorities, diasporas, migrants…(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Bringing together coproduction and community participatory research approaches: Using first person reflective narrative to explore coproduction and community involvement in mental health research

Background A growing literature explores the coproduction of research knowledge. Barriers to coproduction in mental health research have been identified, especially for the people from marginalized communities. There is an established body of participatory research that has potential to inform coproduction in mental health research. Objectives To explore and articulate how learning from community participatory approaches to research enable barriers to knowledge coproduction to be overcome in mental health research. Setting An evaluation of a primary care mental health service, led by an experienced survivor researcher, supported by a health service researcher and involving a team of community co‐researchers. Design Cycles of reflective writing (first‐person narrative) by the authors, and feedback from the co‐researcher team, on their experiences of undertaking the evaluation were used to explore the ways in which community actors, including those from marginalized communities, might be meaningfully involved in producing research knowledge about mental health services. Results A space was created where community co‐researchers, including those from traditionally marginalized communities, felt safe and empowered to move beyond essentialized “service user” identities and bring a range of skills and expertise to the evaluation. There was meaningful rebalancing of power between traditional university and community roles, although the issues around leadership remained complex and more could be done to explore how our different experiences of race and mental health shape the research we do. Conclusions Potential was demonstrated for participatory research approaches to inform coproduction of knowledge in mental health research that fully reflects the diversity of identity and experience

Nazi Punks Folk Off: Leisure, Nationalism, Cultural Identity and the Consumption of Metal and Folk Music

Far-right activists have attempted to infiltrate and use popular music scenes to propagate their racialised ideologies. This paper explores attempts by the far right to co-opt two particular music scenes: black metal and English folk. Discourse tracing is used to explore online debates about boundaries, belonging and exclusion in the two scenes, and to compare such online debates with ethnographic work and previous research. It is argued that both scenes have differently resisted the far right through the policing of boundaries and communicative choices, but both scenes are compromised by their relationship to myths of whiteness and the instrumentality of the pop music industry