Interview With Michael Kerr

The following article was written by Dr Michael Kerr in response to questions put to him by Barbara Fraser; Linda Mackay and Lu Pease when he visited Australia two years ago. These three family therapists took it upon themselves to prepare this interview in recognition of Dr Kerr's unique vantage point on Bowen Theory and family therapy. Michael Kerr was trained by Murray Bowen in the 1970s and subsequently went on to work as faculty at the Georgetown Family centre. He succeeded Bowen as director of the centre where he has devoted his professional life to the understanding, application and extension of theory. He is the co‐author with Dr Bowen of Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory (Kerr & Bowen, 1988), which remains the most esteemed text on this theory. He is also the editor of Family Systems: A Journal of Natural Systems Thinking in Psychiatry and The Sciences. Bowen's Family Systems Theory grew out of years of research from the 1950s‐1970s, which included observations of inpatient families with a schizophrenic member and using data from Bowen's own interactions with his family of origin (Bowen, 1978). The theory continues to be influential in family therapy with its most well‐known contributions being the process of triangling, the intergenerational transmission of family patterns and the concept of differentiation of self. (Brown, 1999). The following discussion from Dr Kerr brings a fresh perspective on the current applications and developments of this systems theory     

Possibilities Might Be More Encompassing than Solutions: An Interview with Bill O'Hanlon

Bill O'Hanlon has authored or co-authored seventeen books, including Taproots; Solution-Oriented Hypnosis; An Uncommon Casebook; Shifting Contexts; Rewriting Love Stories. He has published 32 articles or book chapters. Bill has produced or co-produced two computer programs and several audiotapes and videotapes about therapy. His books have been widely translated. He is co-editor of The Journal of Collaborative Therapies and is on the advisory board of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. He says that his teaching ‘may cause severe disruption to old beliefs and unhelpful patterns and you may have no place to go but toward the life that has been your heart's and soul's desire’.     

Joshua A. Fishman 1926–2015

Joshua Fishman died in March this year. He was founder‐editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, one of the early and central journals of sociolinguistics. Alongside this major editorial involvement, which he maintained to the end, he also edited several of the field‐defining book collections which helped shape the growing field in the 1960s and 70s. He might well have viewed the founding of the Journal of Sociolinguistics in 1997 as unfortunate or competitive, the more so since our opening manifesto questioned the role of traditional sociology in our field. But Fishman responded graciously and positively to the invitation from me and Nikolas Coupland to join our inaugural Editorial Board. He remained on the Board, and was warm in his support and advice. The one piece he published with us was in 2000, a very personal obituary for Charles Ferguson which was notable for the respect and warmth it displayed. The editorial team is indebted to Fishman's longtime collaborator, Ofelia García, for this memoir on him and his significance in sociolinguistics. The Editors     

Mediating affect in John Pilger’s Utopia: ‘the good life’ as a structure of whiteness

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought of as an affective structure, theorizing whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. In this context, Utopia [2013. Film. Directed by John Pilger. Australia: Antidote Films] specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The article develops by unpacking this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film's journey to Rottnest Island – formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers – to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective surfaces of whiteness by analyzing the film's encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ [Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and Indigenous ‘slow death’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press]. Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia [Nicolacopoulos, T. and Vassilacopoulos, G., 2014. Indigenous sovereignty and the being of the occupier: manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins. Melbourne: Re.press]. Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession – including, in the form of life – disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding and state-induced impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of the affective relations that mediate whiteness.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviewed in this article Reply to David McNamari's review of School Organisation and Pupil Irwolvement The Child's Right to Play by Arvid Bengtsson Poverty, Inequality and Class Structure edited by Dorothy Wedderburn Elites and Power in British Society edited by P. Stanvrorth and A. Giddens Research into Retailing and Distribution edited by D. Thorpe Public Housing in Europe and America edited by J. S. Fuerst Fact in Fiction: The Use of Literature in the Systematic Study of Society by Joan Rockwell Nursing in Contemporary Society by Una Madean The First Shop Stewards' Movement by James Hinton Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: The Effects of Methodism in a Durham Mining Community by Robert Moore Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society: Selected Writings edited with an Introduction by Robert N. Bellah Deviance and Social Control edited by Pajil Rock and Mary Mclntosh Traditiondtism, Conservatism and British Political Culture by Bob Jessop The Intemationd Urban Crisis by Thomas L. Blair Black Migrants: White Natives by Daniel Lawrence The Family: An Introducton by J. Ross Eshleman     

Love the Sin—Pedagogy,Pupils, and Psychology Commentary on Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pelligrini

This article examines the author's reactions to teaching Janet Jakobsen's and Ann Pellegini's Love the Sin in a course titled “Contemporary Issues in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies” at Dartmouth College. He examines not only the students' reactions and the points at which they can or cannot grasp the book's arguments, but also his own responses to their reactions. At the center of the essay is his realization that the students, having been brought up in a liberal mode of “tolerance,” have little access to Jakobsen and Pellegrini's social or political concept of “sexual freedom”; and, while they completely eschew state regulation of sexuality, they do not view it as an essential human right, but rather as a private matter.     

Couch the Bricoleur: Using Ethnographic and Laboratory Traditions to Establish Data Careers

Carl Couch reinvigorated the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction by combining the theoretical and methodological tenets of ethnography and laboratory science. He thus resembled a bricoleur, or researcher who masters several seemingly diverse practices in order to create a seamless whole. Couch's new Iowa School also produced a bricolage, or a sum total of research findings, that I call a data career. This article pays tribute to Couch the bricoleur and his bricolage by elaborating on his data career and discussing how he created ethnographies in the laboratory. I further link the notions of bricoleur, data careers, and ethnographies in the laboratory with Couch's democratic vision. I contextualize this vision in light of a particular representative-constituent study (RCS) which served as a metaphor for Couch's pragmatic outlook.     

Looking‐Glass Self: Goffman as Symbolic Interactionist

My thesis is that for most of his career, Erving Goffman was a symbolic interactionist in the Cooley line. The only sustained theoretical structure in Goffman's work before 1974 follows Cooley's conjecture of the looking‐glass self. Cooley assumed shared awareness, that we “live in the minds of others.” He also realized that shared awareness is virtually invisible in modern societies and proposed pride or shame as the emotions that resulted. Goffman emphasized embarrassment over shame and implied a fourth step beyond Cooley's three: the management of embarrassment or shame. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is dense with these emotions. Goffman proposed conceptual definitions of the embarrassment and shared awareness that are central to Cooley's idea. The conjunction of shared awareness and emotion in Goffman's examples may be the main feature that arouses reader sympathy. Two hypotheses are formulated here, along with techniques that might be used to test or apply them.     

I Believe… in What? Arvo Pärt's and Alfred Schnittke's Polystylistic Credos

Abstract

From the late 1960s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, numerous composers, especially those belonging to the generation born in the 1930s and commonly referred to as non-conformist, 'avant-garde' or 'unofficial', produced over 100 religious musical works. Some of these composers, such as Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) and Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) employed the controversially flamboyant polystylistic compositional idiom to express their faith in God. Because the merits of the employment of mimetic polystylism in the realm of sacred music have rarely been analysed, my aim is to demonstrate that, in the Soviet context, it was a very appropriate vehicle for conveying religious sentiments by musical means, as it enabled the composers to express their beliefs, but also to narrate related stories. I shall address this issue by analysing three pieces: Arvo Pärt's Credo for piano solo, chorus and orchestra (1968), and the Credo movements from Alfred Schnittke's Requie m (1975) for three sopranos, contralto, tenor, mixed choir and instrumental ensemble, and Second Symphony 'St Florian' (1979) for mixed chamber choir and large orchestra. The reason for choosing the Credo 'genre' is that by definition it is a manifesto of the composer's faith in God, and hence it bears exceptional moral and spiritual weight.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.     

INQUIRY

The following interview with Awash Teklehaimanot was conducted in June 2005. Dr. Teklehaimanot is Director of the Malaria Program at Columbia University and a member of the Task Force on Malaria for the UN Millennium Project. He is a senior staff member of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, where he provides leadership in the development of the global Roll Back Malaria program. Dr. Teklehaimanot has extensive international experience in public health with particular focus on Africa. He provides technical support to malaria-endemic countries, coordinates a number of WHO-funded research activities in Africa, and spent several years as the director of Ethiopia's National Malaria Control Program. He is a professor of clinical epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and has been lecturing at the Harvard School of Public Health since 1992.     

Translator's Introduction to Max Weber's Essay on Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology*

The essay on “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology” is Max Weber's first systematic statement of his own sociology. Weber had written earlier as an economist and as a methodologist of the social sciences. But in this essay, he sets forth the method and indicates the scope of his interpretive sociology. He delineates the boundaries between it and two neighboring disciplines (psychology and law) and defines some basic concepts or categories of social action. The essay first appeared in 1913 in Logos, an interdisciplinary journal of which Weber was an editor.     

Reading Wacquant: social work and advanced marginality

Professor Loic Wacquant was born in Montpelier in 1960. He was educated in France before completing a Ph.D. in Chicago in 1994. He is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. His work is concerned with the impact of neoliberalism in the area of welfare and penal policy. Wacquant has published a number of highly influential books the most notable of which are Les Prisons de la misère (1999, translated in 20 languages; new and expanded English edition, Prisons of Poverty, 2009), Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2000), Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008) and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009). These works, along with the major papers listed in the bibliography, form the core of Wacquant's analysis of the impact of neoliberal welfare and penal policy. These papers consider three key areas: advanced marginality, race (ethno-racial domination) and the rise of the penal state. His significance as a commentator for social work, specifically, lies in his critical engagement with these three areas that have so shaped the development of modern welfare and penal policy. The article concludes that Wacquant's work provides a clear analytical framework for the study of the organisational and social contexts of contemporary practice. His work also calls for a more politically engaged social work practice—a form of practice that will move away from social work as a narrow bureaucratic activity dominated by risk management and return to core social work values.     

Retirement and marital decision making: Effects on retirement satisfaction

This study explores how partner's employment and preretirement decision‐making structures affect retirement satisfaction, using pooled data from Waves 1 to 4 of the Health and Retirement Surveys. Based on resource theory, the analyses indicate that retired husbands are least satisfied if their wives remain employed and had more say in decisions prior to the husband's retirement. Retired wives are least satisfied if their husbands remain employed and had more say in decisions prior to the wife's retirement. These results suggest that retirement transitions undermine married retirees’ satisfaction if they enhance the other partner's influence in the relationship. More research should address linkages between work and family realms during transitions such as retirement and explore the negotiation processes surrounding such transitions.     

What is this moment we are caught in?

Our response to the question ‘What is this moment we are caught in?' is articulated through our collaborative reading of Berlant's (2011) Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Cruel optimism, Berlant suggests, is a desire for something that undermines its own potentiality. As queer academics we expose the cruelty of our desires to live a good academic life, and we do so from our different positions as postdoctoral fellow, tenured academic and PhD candidate. In labouring to consolidate relationships and practices that hold the promise of our own sustainability, we give accounts of the material and affective work we perform to constitute what Berlant calls an intimate public, a collective space of mediation that functions as a key tactic to manage our academic life. These accounts take the form of three vignettes, each inflected by the specificities of our different positions and histories of becoming academics. We use Berlant as a point of departure to both interrogate practices of self‐management and find possibilities for a collective response to the moments in which we find ourselves caught.     

Queer visual pleasures and the policing of male sexuality in responses to images of David Beckham

Since he stepped out in a sarong in 1998, David Beckham's sexuality and gendered image has been a popular topic of discussion in the media. He has also attracted academic attention for the expanded range of masculinities he seems to represent. Some academic studies of Beckham have employed ‘queer theory’ to analyse the destabilising of gender that his public presentations seem to embody but little attention has been paid to the specifically visual dynamics of images of Beckham. In this essay, I take Sam Taylor-Wood's David (2004) as a starting point to suggest the types of visual pleasure that images of Beckham might be seen to offer to both male and female audiences. For the remainder of the essay I focus on an Armani male underwear advertisement from the 2007–2008 campaign. Informed by discourse analysis and queer theory, I identify a set of ‘queer’ responses to the advertisement, suggesting they represent the ‘policing’ of male sexuality, which often accompanies potential signifiers of homoeroticism. I conclude by considering how and why Beckham has retained his status as a heteronormative masculine icon despite his continued appearance in homoerotic images.     

Jacques Ellul's Conversions and Protestant Theology

Jacques Ellul was converted to Marx and then to Christianity 4 years later. He lived with this contradiction until his death in 1994. Marx and the Bible were dialectical in his mind, with his sociological pole rooted in Marx and his religious commitments in Karl Barth. God's otherness and His freedom in Barth are the central components of Ellul's theology and theological method. Thus, he was not a pessimist but dialectically saw God's perfect freedom as the source of human freedom over against technological necessity. For life to be meaningful in high-tech societies, a total personal transformation is necessary. Ellul challenged Christians to prophetic witness—not as fatalists but to confront la technique without compromise.     

Of Race/Religion,Nation and Violence: Incident at Vichy and Final Solutions

Abstract

Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy (1964) and Indian English playwright Mahesh Dattani's Final Solutions (1992) invite comparison in that they each deal with a historic moment that demonstrates contextually how violence can be common to racism, (organized) religion, and national imagining. While Miller's play externalizes human cruelty by locating it in the Nazi experience, Dattani's — centred around the recent Hindutva movement in India — clearly evokes the image of the Holocaust, without equating it with Nazism, though. Yet similarities between the plays abound — suspect secularity of the nation-state, insecurities around one's racial/ethnic/religious identity, denial of responsibility, and the eventual need for human communication. The endings of both plays posit a certain notion of justice, but without clarifying whether it can be realized through 'the true humanly valuable concepts' of decency and love or whether it functions more as 'a claim made by the oppressed'. This tone of self-criticality underscores the persistent need for restraint in the exercise of power.