Radicalising ‘disability’ in conflict and post-conflict situations

In this article, a radical social model of disability lens is taken to illustrate what counts as ‘disability’ within a neoliberal mindset. The South African and disabled activist Vic Finkelstein describes both an ‘outside-in approach’ that looks at the material conditions of how ‘disability’ is constructed and an ‘idealist’ ‘inside-out’ approach, or how people describe experiences of inequality and disablement. The ‘outside-in’ approach is where the focus of a social model of disability should be in terms of trying to understand how global capitalism or neoliberalism is (dis)ablest and creating impairment. The ‘inside-out’ approach is ‘idealist’ and where the other ‘components’ of the model such as ‘rights’ are located. This article begins with an overview of the relationship between disability and conflict. The article then moves to an inside-out framework to examine how disability is still viewed and created through a medical humanitarianism. Using an outside-in framework, I illustrate how states become disabled through neoliberalism. Lastly, I discuss how ensuring greater participation and rethinking neoliberalism in terms of sustainability may provide us with a way forward in a humanitarian setting and rethinking of disability.     

Feeling special: Language in the lives of Polish people

In this article I use findings from an ESRC funded project on language and identity in the narratives of Polish people to challenge a narrow approach to language in debates about integration. I argue that decisions about learning languages are influenced by wider concerns of self and other identification rather then simply being issues of instrumental need. I show how research participants viewed speaking Polish as an important part of being Polish, that is, of their identity. They recognised that changing the language they spoke involved questioning the way they presented themselves and how they related to others. I discuss how language was used to differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘others’, including in terms of values and the ways in which these perceptions of difference influenced social interactions.     

SCALING GOVERNMENTALITY

This article explores contemporary uses of museum co-production for public policy through a sustained theoretical engagement with Tony Bennett's work on museums as an ‘object of government’. The specific focus is a theoretical discussion of the ‘logic of culture’ as it relates to new UK policy uses of participants' ‘experience’ as the desired site of authenticity at the very same time as the process of expressing this authenticity is located as a site for reform. It is argued that Bennett mobilizes two techniques of scale (fixing the analytic lens of governmentality and drawing on a strong scalar correspondence of power) in order to secure a relatively disciplinary reading of governmentality and to foreclose the resistant possibilities of cultural politics. Drawing on the differences between practices associated in UK museums with ‘access’ (which works through the dis-intensification of the difference between the museum and everyday life) and with ‘social impact’ (which requires a re-intensification of this difference in order to increase the visibility of effect), this article concludes by countering Bennett's more disciplinary uses of Foucault with the Foucault of ‘The Subject and Power’. It is argued that the ‘logic of culture’ can be calibrated to varying intensities in considering the coming-into-relationship between the museums and those-to-be-involved. It is specifically argued – following Foucault's spatializaton of ‘thought’ as distance (limit-attitude) and ‘counter-conduct’ as proximity – that the ‘logic of culture’ might be actively re-calibrated to use the spatialized dynamic of distance and proximity to create spaces which might allow the museum and its associated policy – not just those involved – to be affected by the co-production encounter.     

Geometry,Logic and Social Studies

This article presents an approach that teachers can use to strengthen students’ ability to make sense of the past at museums. Specifically, we propose a photography exercise to help students to learn from museums and to view museums critically, weighing both the objective realities and subjective interpretations offered by museums. To get the most from a lifetime of museum-going and history learning, students should learn to view museums as reflecting the kinds of perspectives, decision-making, and challenges that accompany any effort to make sense of the past.     

Becoming Global (Un)Civil Society: Counter-Hegemonic Struggle and the Indymedia Network

In this article we ask how ‘civil society’ actors and organizations can become constructed and treated as ‘uncivil society’. We contest the notion that ‘uncivil’ necessarily equates with the dark qualities of violence and organized criminality. Instead, we take a Gramscian perspective in suggesting that what becomes ‘uncivil’ is any practice and organization that substantially contests the structuring enclosures of hegemonic order, of which civil society is a necessary part. To trace this, we consider ways in which a global grass-roots media network called Indymedia has established and maintained itself as a counter-hegemonic media-producing organization. In this case, a conscious positioning and self-identification as counter-hegemonic has been accompanied by the framing and sometimes violent policing of nodes and practices of this network as ‘uncivil’ by cooperating state authorities. This is in the absence of association of this network with organized violence or crime. We intend our reflections to contribute to a deepening theorization of the terms ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’ as they are becoming used in social movement and globalization studies.

En este artículo preguntamos cómo pueden los actores de la ‘sociedad civil’ y las organizaciones llegar a configurarse y ser tratados como ‘sociedad incivil’. Nosotros refutamos la noción de que lo ‘incivil’ necesariamente equivale a las características oscuras de violencia y criminalidad organizada. En cambio, tomamos una perspectiva de Gramscian, sugiriendo que lo que se vuelve ‘incivil’ es cualquier práctica y organización que refuta sustancialmente los confinamientos estructurados del orden hegemónico, del cual la sociedad civil es una parte necesaria. Para rastrear esto, nosotros consideramos las formas en que una red de medios de base popular llamada Indymedia se ha establecido y mantenido a sí misma como una organización contrahegemónica de producción de medios. En este caso, un posicionamiento consciente y de autoidentificación como contrahegemónica, ha sido acompañado por la configuración y a veces por vigilancia violenta de nodos y prácticas de esta red como ‘incivil’ al cooperar con las autoridades estatales. Esto es en ausencia de una asociación de esta red con la violencia o la delincuencia. Nosotros pretendemos que nuestras reflexiones contribuyan a profundizar la teorización de los términos ‘civil’ e ‘incivil’ en la medida en que se están usando en los estudios sobre movimientos sociales y globalización.

在本文中我们设问“公民社会”的行为者和组织如何被建构并被视作一个“非公民社会”。本文对“非公民”必然等同于暴力和有组织犯罪的黑暗性质这一概念提出质疑。本文取而代之采用一种葛兰西式的分析,即认为造成“非公民”的是本质上挑战霸权秩序（公民社会是其必要部分）的任何行动或组织。为了求证,我们考察一家叫“独立媒体”的全球草根媒体网络确立并维护其作为一个反霸权媒体生产组织的方式。其中,伴随着一种反霸权的刻意定位和自我认同的,是与之合作的国家当局形塑甚至有时狂暴地管束这一网络的节点和实践,视其为“非公民”。这表明该网络和有组织暴力或犯罪之间缺乏关联。本文意在当“公民的”及“非公民的”概念被用于社会运动和全球化研究时,使我们的反思在能有助于加深这两个术语的理论化。     

Bewilderment: Preparing prisoners for 'real' work in the fictional world of prison

This article explores the history of employment training programmes for prisoners and three contemporary examples of practice. It argues that the history and current practice can be seen as a movement between two competing discourses. One that treats prison work as relevant for how it passes time and the other for how it prepares a prisoner for release. These are referred to as a ‘constative’ position‐one where the activity is only related to the here and now‐and the ‘performative’‐where the activity is said to ‘rehearse’ the prisoner for action to be performed at a later date. By examining projects that use drama workshops to examine employment issues with prisoners, the article argues that these positions are limited. It claims that the link between prison activity and performance outside is far more complicated than a simple shift of new competencies from one arena to another. This transition is met more often by the ‘bewilderment’ of the title than by a smooth transition. The article concludes that drama workshops in fact have a potential to offer a more powerful intervention than simple behaviour rehearsal and that they could provide one means for bridging the gap between the fictional arena of prison and the ‘real’ world. Este artículo explora la historia de programas de capacitacioén laboral para presos y de tres ejemplos contemporáneos de práctica. Sostiene que la historia y la práctica actual pueden considerarse como un movimiento entre dos discursos competidores. Los dos consideran relevantes las actividades laborales en la cárcel, el uno porque ayuda a pasar el tiempo, y el otro porque prepara al preso para la puesta en libertad. Se refiere a los dos discursos como (1) la posición ‘constativa’, en la cual la actividad laboral se relaciona únicamente al momento actual y (2) la posición ‘performativa’, en la cual la actividad laboral sirve de ensayo para actividades que desempeñaráel preso en una fecha por venir. Al examinar proyectos que recurren a talleres del drama para examinar temas laborales con los presos, este artículo sostiene que están limitadas estas posiciones. Alega que la conexión entre la actividad en la cárcel y el desempeño fuera de la cárcel supone algo mucho mas complicado que un sencillo cambio de nuevas competencias de una arena a otra. Sostiene que esta transición se caracteriza mas por el desconcierto que provoca que por su suavedad. El artículo concluye que los talleres del drama pueden ofrecer una intervención mas poderosa que los sencillos ensayos de conducta, y que podrían ofrecer un medio de salvar la distancia entre la arena ficticia de la cárcel y el mundo ‘verdadero’.     

Extracting the commons

This article investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction. The article looks at how extraction is enacted through three distinct practices: prospecting, enclosure and unbundling, studied through three different cases. The cases involve resources that are material and immaterial, renewable as well as non-renewable, ‘natural’ as well as man-made. Prospecting is exemplified by patenting of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, enclosure is exemplified by debates over copyright expansionism and information commons, and unbundling through conflicts over mining and gas extraction. The article draws on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation with protesters at contested mining sites in Australia and with digital rights activists from across the world who protest against how the expansion of copyright limits public access to culture and information. The article departs from an understanding of ‘commons’ not as an open access resource, but as a resource shared by a group of people, often subjected to particular social norms that regulate how it can be used. Enclosure and extraction are both social processes, dependent on recognising some and downplaying or misrecognising other social relations when it comes to resources and processes of property creation. These processes are always, regardless of the particular resources at stake, cultural in the sense that the uses of the commons are regulated through cultural norms and contracts, but also that they carry profound cultural and social meanings for those who use them. Finally, the commonalities and heterogeneities of these protest movements are analysed as ‘working in common’, where the resistance to extraction in itself represents a process of commoning.     

Visual accountability

In this article, we draw attention to the way in which accountability relations are manifested in and through the use of visual evidence. Through their status as representations of what is the case, evidentiary visual images frequently provide a basis for giving accounts and for raising questions regarding distributions of accountability. At the same time, and in a similar manner to numbers (Munro, 2001), such images become part of organized relations of accountability that can be noted as having ‘hailing’ effects: they call for and prefigure a certain kind of response and dispersing of responsibility. Here we examine how the use of visual evidence is embedded in discursive and material practices that variously create or inhibit possibilities for questioning, or interrogating, this evidence. Drawing on elements of ethnomethodology and actor‐network theory, we use ‘interrogation’ as the basis for depicting a three‐part analytical schema focused on opening up, closing down and temporality to explore how visual accountability is worked out in surveillance, traffic management and breast screening images.     

(Auto)Ethnography and cycling

This article discusses the formation, salience and reformation of everyday bodily routines and resources in relation to cycling; it also examines how we can study them ethnographically in different places. I discuss forms of embodied, sensuous and mobile ethnography that can illuminate how routines, habits and affective capacities of cycling are cultivated and performed. The article argues that autoethnography is particularly apt at illuminating the embodied qualities of movement, and it sits within established ethnographies of ‘excising’ and ‘mobile bodies’. In the second part of the article, I draw upon ongoing autoethnographies of cycling in a familiar place (my hometown, Copenhagen) and by learning to cycle ‘out-of-place’ (in London) and ‘in-a-new–way’ (when commuting long distance on a racer bike). The study challenges static notions of the body by analysing how cyclists’ (and researchers’) affective capacities develop as they practice cycling.     

From ‘Asylum-Seeker’ to ‘British Artist’: How Refugee Artists are Redefining British Art

This essay takes a case-study approach to examine how culture may be transferred from immigrant cultures to a so-called host culture. Considering the work of three visual artists who came to the UK as refugees but who are now considered ‘British artists’, it examines the effect this curatorial definition may have on gallery viewers. The author proposes that looking at work that previously might have been viewed as ‘exotic’ or ‘foreign’ but that is now classed as British forces viewers to reassess and renegotiate their understanding of the nature of ‘Britishness’ and indeed of place-Britain. Drawing on the ideas of Edouard Glissant and also of contemporary geographers about the nature of place, the study proposes that place-Britain, like all places, is in a constant and never ending state of production. The work of artists from refugee populations, shown now as ‘British art’, becomes a dynamic part of this process and a means by which new elements are transferred and added to an ever-changing British cultural fabric     

Occupational Cultures and the Embodiment of Masculinity: Hairdressing,Estate Agency and Firefighting

Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project, this article explores the implications of different occupational cultures for men's masculine identity. With a focus on embodiment and individual agency, it explores the argument that it is within ‘scenes of constraint’ that gendered identities are both ‘done’ and ‘undone’. In this article we examine embodied experience in occupational cultures commonly stereotyped as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (hairdressing, estate agency and firefighting), showing how men conform to, draw upon and resist the gendered stereotypes associated with these occupations. What we argue is that gendered conceptions of ‘the body’ need to be differentiated from individual men's embodiment. Instead, processes of identification can be shown to emerge via embodied experiences of particular kinds of gendered body, and in the ways in which men negotiate the perception of these bodies in different occupational contexts.     

Performative identity regulation in rehabilitative home care work: an analysis of how experts’ embodied mediation of the managerial ideology ‘activates’ new frontline identities

ABSTRACT

This article explores how therapists when introduced as new so-called frontline ‘experts’ in home care work, become both discursive and embodied mediators for the managerial ideology of rehabilitation, and how their presence regulates the care aides’ subjectivities at work. We show how the managerial discourse of rehabilitation mobilizes the care aides to transform their identity from traditional nurturing to rehabilitation, as a result of promoting the latter as more professional. While the traditional managers/nurses promote the identity transfer through more classic discursive regulation at a distance from ‘the office’, the therapists do so through what we label performative regulation. Performative regulation is exercised by the therapists performing the desired role at the frontline and thus embodies the ideal and transfers it by embodied practices, not directives. With this notion of performative regulation, the article emphasizes the material, physical, embodied and performative dimensions of professional identity regulation.     

Notes on contributors

This article focuses on the organizational practices of the music industry to contribute a neglected dimension to our understanding of rap as a commercial activity and cultural form. It initially situates the production of rap within the context of the corporate strategies and business practices of musical entertainment companies, stressing how rap production is located within the context of corporate ‘black music divisions’ and the major labels' relationships to smaller companies. At the same time, the study considers how musical production is shaped by broader culture processes and practices that are not directly within the control or understanding of the company. As corporate organization intersects with and attempts to make sense of surrounding culture, I argue that the actions of recording companies are a direct intervention into and contribution to the way in which the social world is rationalized and fragmented and through which different cultural experiences are separated and treated unequally. This argument is focused on the theme of ‘the street’ and ‘executive suite’ through which I suggest that, while it is important to acknowledge the struggles of rap artists and entrepreneurs for both recognition and independence from the corporate world, it is also important to highlight deliberate attempts to maintain a distance between the corporate world and the genre culture of rap. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the articulations between musical genre, occupational practices and broader cultural formations, highlighting a significant series of connections and relational practices which connect production and consumption and the articulations through which corporate organization is linked to broader cultural formations.     

Cultural Education: Redefining the Role of Museums in the 21st Century

In this paper, I argue that in the face of a crisis about the value of culture, cultural education has been represented by some of its advocates as a new way of legitimising the cultural sector. It enables museums, for example, to appear more inclusive and democratic, more relevant to young people and others who do not normally visit museums, and more responsive to the needs of the society. However, defining the value of culture through an emphasis on cultural education, paradoxically, has the potential to undermine the basis of the museum's existence as a public institution. With reference to my research into New Labour's cultural policy, particularly in relation to museums, this paper highlights discourses that have given cultural education a more significant role in the cultural sector. I show how cultural education, with ‘cultural inclusion’ as its main objective, has evolved in the context of an existential crisis in the museum sector over the past 30 years, appearing to offer a means through which they can redefine their role and value in the society as anti‐elitist organisations supporting social change. I then go onto show how this apparent solution to the problem might further undermine the unique value of museums.     

城市博物馆的民俗陈列研究——以《香港故事》和《京城旧事:老北京民俗展》为例

在城市生活日益向信息化、智能化发展的时代,城市博物馆的民俗陈列,记录了百姓对旧生活的记忆、展示过去的民间生活历史。香港历史博物馆的《香港故事》和首都博物馆的《京城旧事:老北京民俗展》两个展览是城市博物馆民俗展示的典型代表,为国内博物馆界一致认可。本文以这两个展览为例,讨论城市博物馆如何选择民俗陈列的内容和展示手段,并探讨在城市现代化生活背景下民俗陈列的价值和特点。     

The comfort of strangers: social work,modernity and late Victorian England—Part II

This is the second of two related articles on the history of social work in late Victorian England. In the previous article I showed that the emergence of social work was best understood by aligning it with the complex cultural system of modernity. In this paper the influence of modernity on the formation of social work is taken further by focusing on the way that regimes of practice were shaped by material, physical and visual elements. A distinctive set of spatio-temporal elements are identified that have hitherto been overlooked in ‘histories of social work’. The paper shows how the power of place, and the power over place in early social work, relates directly to the modern experience of Victorian England while shaping the remit of contemporary social work. Home visits, for example, meant that social workers could for the first time attempt to ‘regulate at a distance’, and involved what is referred to as the ‘domestication of stranger relations’. The paper further explores the way in which the history of social work can benefit from exploring the experience-content of early social workers and how organizational imperatives for charity relief were often formed from the bottom-up during this period. At the end of the paper there are some considerations about the way in which a European approach to the history of social work can be instructive and beneficial.     

Nailing One’s Colours: Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire

Taking the view that national art museums should represent the multifarious populations they serve, this article explores racial material in Tate Britain’s high-profile exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (2015). The exhibition gave extensive coverage to two aspects of empire: hybrid fusions and the myth of white heroism, but gave limited attention to colonization as a maximally coercive system built on racist imaginings and abuse. Through cross-examination of the exhibition’s content and absences, I explore whether Tate Britain is setting out the ‘building blocks’ for more diverse practice.     

A methodological approach to the materiality of clothing: Wardrobe studies

The material is not just ‘a carrier’ of different types of symbols, but an active element in the practices. Bringing this to the fore requires new research methods. This article discusses a methodological approach, we call it a wardrobe study, which allows for the analysis of the way in which clothes relate to each other on the whole or within parts of the wardrobe. More specifically, we discuss how this method can contribute to increasing the materiality of clothes studies. The theoretical point of departure for this approach is a practice theory in which the material enters as an integral part. First, the article briefly discusses developments within the study of dress and fashion. Second, the methods combined and developed in wardrobe studies are discussed. The emphasis here is primarily not only on the weaknesses of the individual methods in practice-oriented dress studies, but also on how they jointly can contribute to the wardrobe study.