‘Green Tibetans’ in China: Tibetan geopiety and environmental protection in a multilayered Tibetan landscape

This article examines how certain Tibetans and Han Chinese converts to Tibetan Buddhism in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and Beijing are articulating various forms of environmental discourse, both in terms drawn from Tibetan ‘geopiety’, and/or from a Western model of environmental protection. In relation to these trends, I further explore how certain Tibetans are articulating their understanding of Tibetan Buddhism within an apparently localised context, while other Tibetans are more obviously appropriating from discourses originating in the West and/or wider Chinese society to become more ‘modern’, while at the same time retaining a conceptualisation of Tibetan Buddhism that is hybridised between traditional and modernist understandings. I also explore how some Han practitioners may seek to become more ‘Tibetan’ by endorsing localised forms of Tibetan Buddhism and/or ‘performing’ certain Tibetan modes of religiosity, while others, due in part to geographical distance from the Tibetan landscape and cultural context, endorse an understanding of Tibetan Buddhism which is more closely tied to discourses of environmental protection originating in the West. In both Tibetan and Han Chinese cases, informants reflect upon their own beliefs and identity by gazing at the Other (Tibetan, Han, or Westerner), and marking out differences and similarities between Self and Other.     

A personal reflection of risking and protecting lives during the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic

In this paper, I engage with my personal experiences and reflections regarding my fear of exposure to coronavirus in a collective and physically demonstrative society. I reflect on my ongoing struggle of coping with social and cultural pressures, for example, the avoidance of ‘touch’ that demonstrates care and affection irrespective of whether someone is ill with the virus. Developed during the third wave of the pandemic, this paper reveals the ambivalence and the emotional challenges involved therein as I tried to (re)negotiate social interactions. It reflects the resistance and denial of the people that coronavirus even exists as they tried to justify their illness by linking it with other known diseases. Hence, the majority disapproved of social distancing to avoid stigmatization and being distanced from others. I believe that expressions of ‘care’ and ‘affection’ requires reconsideration in such circumstances as an act of care itself to protect lives.     

In celebration of the closure of the Independent Living Fund

Over the last months we have heard calls to save the Independent Living Fund (ILF). Social media and Internet forums were flooded with emotional pleas to the government beyond its final days: parent carers and vocal disabled people calling for action to prevent themselves or loved ones being ‘imprisoned’ in their home, unable to use the toilet or having a life not worth living. ‘I will have no control, no choice and be unable to live in the community’, one person chanted. Others chanted ‘which side are you on’ (Channel 4 News). I found myself in a very unusual situation. Here I was, a campaigner for independent living all my adult life, a former Direct Payment Support Service Manager, social work lecturer and ILF recipient. Surely I would be devastated that the ILF had ended? My experience was entirely different, I celebrated.     

Reflections on conducting research on the ‘war on terror’: religious identity,subjectivity and emotions

In recent years there has been an increase in literature which has explored the insider/outsider position through ethnic identities. However, there remains a neglect of religious identities, even though it could be argued that religious identities have become increasingly important through being prominent in international issues such as the ‘war on terror’ and the Middle East conflict. Through drawing on the concept of subjectivity, I reflect on research I conducted on the impact of the ‘war on terror’ on British Muslims. I explore the space between the insider/outsider position demonstrating how my various subjectivities – the ‘non-Islamic appearance I’, the ‘Muslim I’, the ‘personal I’, the ‘exploring I’, the ‘Kashmiri I’ or the ‘Pakistani I’, the ‘status I’ and the ‘outsider I’ – assisted in establishing trust, openness and commonality. I conclude by demonstrating how the ‘emotional I’ allowed me to manage my own emotions and participants emotions.     

The indelible ink of the special stamp: an insider’s research essay on imprints and erasures

The medical profession ascribes otherness to people with disabilities through diagnosis and expertism, which sets in motion discursive powers that oversee their exclusion through schooling and beyond. In this paper, I present a narrative pieced together from personal experiences of ducking and weaving the deficit discourse in ‘inclusive’ education, when seeking employment and in day-to-day family interaction as a person with severely impaired vision. This work builds on previous qualitative research I conducted in Queensland, Australia with a group of young people with impaired vision who attended an inclusive secondary school. I frame this discussion using Foucault’s conception of normalising judgement against the hegemony of normalcy, and consider that inclusion for people with disabilities is reminiscent of a haunting. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how my ideology is formed, and how it in turn shapes a research agenda geared toward seeking greater inclusion for young people with disabilities in schools.     

Lights of disenchantment: a study of Max Weber’s thesis on the ‘disenchantment of the world’ from the perspective of visual studies

At the end of 1917, during a conference at Munich University, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) made a bold announcement: ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”.’ In this article, I provide an interpretation of the notion of ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Subsequently, I present visual material that might further illuminate Weber’s idea. In the third part, I strictly concentrate my attention on one argument suggested by Weber: in ‘disenchanted’ societies ‘mysterious incalculable forces do not come into play anymore.’ Through two exemplary sculptures by the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1884), I continue my visual excursus on the ‘disenchantment’ thesis by connecting Weber’s account on the intellectualisation of religious world-views with the autonomisation of the aesthetic sphere. The overall ambition of this article lies in providing an introductory account to an important intellectual problem and historical process through visual and textual analysis.     

Managing manipulation: tools and challenges in creative collaborations with intellectually-disabled people

There has long been an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality when it comes to the production of disability narratives on screen, driven by an assumption that non-disabled people cannot accurately interpret the disabled experience. Given the appalling history of representations by non-disabled filmmakers, it is easy to understand why many academics and members of the disability community favour the complete control of disability content by disabled people. But this approach has failed the many compelling ‘disabled voices’ that go unheard because they do not reach audiences. The most practical solution is to forge new models of creative collaboration between disabled and non-disabled people, something I attempted to do with my PhD film, a comedy feature entitled Down Under Mystery Tour. I discovered that the most important tool in such collaborations is the utilisation and management of manipulation, one that prioritises skill and experience and best expresses the unique perspective of intellectually-disabled collaborators.     

Coming to terms with inequality and exploitation in an African state: researching disability in Sierra Leone

In this article, I describe how during my anthropological research in post‐conflict Sierra Leone with a disabled community, I was confronted by experiences of inequality and exploitation. Many disabled people had previous disabling contact with other researchers, organisations and journalists. Others described difficulties surviving the disabling socio‐economic conditions and were not viewed as ‘development’ partners, despite the fact that their images and stories had played a big role in the rebuilding and ‘healing’ of the Sierra Leonean nation state. I ask whether we as researchers and an international community are still not colluding with structures and institutions that exploit disabled people in post‐conflict and post‐disaster countries.     

COMMENTARY (12 YEARS ON) ON ‘THE CONTRIBUTION OF OBSERVATION TRAINING TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN SOCIAL WORK’ BY JUDITH TROWELL AND GILLIAN MILES

This article aims to stimulate discussion about relationships between the lives of professionals and of service users. The idea is that when parallels are explored and developed, power dynamics between professionals and social workers are reduced, the quality of interaction and work with service users can be improved, and professionals can also be helped in overcoming difficulties in their own lives. I start with an outline of my own personal background and highlight my development throughout, including my emerging identity as a Buddhist. I discuss a case study involving ‘Sally’ and her family and our work together while I was a social work assistant in a Children and Family's team. I try to show the interconnections between the different difficulties that we faced and how that informed my work. I look at some of the benefits, pitfalls and boundaries of working from the point of view that service user and professional are both working to overcome their problems. I also interweave interactions I had at the time with Carlos, a drug user friend in a crisis and the impact he had on me. Because I include my own situation I have called this article a ‘case experience’.

Throughout I refer to Buddhist and psychoanalytic thinking and particularly to agreement between the two around ideas that inner‐resistance is the main barrier to personal evolution. I argue that faith is the key to unlocking resistance, and that faith should be understood as the development of a belief within people that they are able to progress rather than be destroyed in the face of inevitable problems.     

‘A place for men to come and do their thing’: constructing masculinities in betting shops in London

During fieldwork conducted with workers and customers in betting shops in London research participants consistently conceptualized betting shops as masculine spaces in contrast to the femininity of other places including home and the bingo hall. According to this argument, betting on horses and dogs was ‘men's business’ and betting shops were ‘men's worlds’. Two explanations were offered to account for this situation. The first suggested that betting was traditionally a pastime enjoyed by men rather than women. The second was that betting is intrinsically more appealing to men because it is based on calculation and measurement, and women prefer more intuitive, simpler challenges. I use interviews with older people to describe how the legalisation of betting in cash in 1961 changed the geography of betting. I then draw upon interviews with regular customers in order to show how knowledge about betting is shared within rather than between genders. Finally, I use my experience of training and working as a cashier to describe how the particular hegemonic masculinity found in betting shops in London is maintained through myriad everyday practices which reward certain kinds of gendered performances while at the same time suppressing alternatives. The article shows how particular spaces may become gendered as an unanticipated consequence of legislation and how contingent gendered associations are both naturalized and, at the same time, subjected to intense attention.     

Who needs Cantonese,who speaks? Whispers across mountains,delta, and waterfronts

This essay digs into the ‘dirtiness’ of cultural studies to prioritize praxis, or as the way my mountain folks collect summer lotus: putting our feet in the muddy water, and finding ways to get the stems underneath the smooth leaves. Using Cantoneseness as a case to locate such ‘dirtiness’, I draw on personal/familial histories as well as research projects to tell how conjunctures of Cantoneseness are politically and unevenly lived. This complex journey travels roughly from my childhood in the Yuebei mountains of northern Guangdong through my teenage and early adult years in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to my current location as a temporary resident in the East Pacific port of Vancouver. I selectively emphasize and speak on three different locations: first, the rural inland Cantonese location of Yuebei mountains – the borderland and hinterland experiences of my family and myself living what the mountains would offer and how these have changed; second, the industrial superior Cantonese location of PRD in Shenzhen and Guangzhou – my personal experiences and identities as a migrant youth, combined with a case study including interviews with migrant peasant-workers and their children; and third, the western transnational Cantonese location of East Pacific waterfronts in Vancouver and Richmond – my personal engagement with social activism as an ethnicized, international student, combined with a narrative study including interviews with social activists with different Cantoneseness and migration routes. While this mix of whispers speaks in its own way towards using cultural studies with more seriously (global) space-sensitive and (social justice) praxis-sensitive approaches, the primary focus is more modestly on my autobiographical accounts and research efforts as a specific case: to show some strategic locations of ‘Cantonescape’ on the one hand, and to invite wider conversations around cultural-spatial politics on the other.     

Extension and the disposal of the world: Double‐crossing systems,culture, self and language

Long indexed by sociological ideas of structure, the notion of extension is yet disparate and poorly disseminated – as evidenced by popular motifs such as ‘the world is at our disposal’ eschewing notions of emplacement and embeddedness and instead championing choice and individualised agency. On the assumption that this lacunae relates in part to paradigm debates over incommensurability, the proposal in this inaugural lecture is to explore double‐crossing as a methodological device by which to draw insights on extension from major ‘gatherings’ of Euro‐American thought, while respecting the orderings, institutional arrangements, situations and networks each approach imposes. In retracing the ‘disposal’ of the world through four theoretical perspectives germane to sociology – namely systems, culture, self and language – the objective is to illustrate the methodology of double crossing. Drawing on both my work on social and cultural theory and my field studies in market leaders, I first show how moving back and forth between the older and newer ground within each perspective helps to elicit what gets unsighted from either view. Secondly, inasmuch as the usual way of ‘making a clearing’ is argued as caught ‘in reaction’ from extant theory (ending up say talking of parts instead of wholes or consumption in place of production), I advance the methodology of double‐crossing by excavating the recessive arrangements and ordering implicit in each perspective and so illuminate the different ways extension is affected by how world is imagined and experienced.     

Applying critical race theory in social work education in Britain: pedagogical reflections

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on personal experiences of teaching white British and Black African students on a social work Master’s course in England. In this paper, I critically discuss the fire at Grenfell Tower in London (14 June 2017) and how it served as a pedagogical tool to open up critical discussions among students about racial in/justice, intersectionality and neoliberal racism. I also explore how Black students were enabled to share their experiences of immigration, racism, and racial inequality in Britain as part of these discussions. Inviting personal experiences of race in the classroom can be highly emotive; but, as this paper shows, these voices can also highlight institutionalized racism and provide a way for Black and ethnic minorities’ histories to be told and learned. These histories matter and can develop student consciousness about racial inequality for pursuing a social agenda. They also challenge claims that Britain is now a ‘post-racial’ society. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) provided a way to counter such claims and critique my ‘whiteness’ and socio-economic class in my teaching, as well as challenge the neoliberal ideologies and structures that reproduce and mask ‘white privilege’ and racial injustice in Britain today.     

Notes for contributors

My aim in this auto-ethnography paper is to explore particular visual images that invent and secure the power of the nation. Looking at a specific photograph that portrays my daughter's classmates during a school trip, I inscribe the relations between seeing, memory and the culture of national stereotypes. The triangular/pyramidal structure of the picture and its warm-eye (low-angle) perspective – a common depiction of heroic nationalism –instantaneously activated in my mind a specific chain of ‘super icons’ representing Jewish-Israeli images of wars and settling of the land. By recognizing the paradigmatic structure of Zionism photographing itself, my analysis discusses the way in which a corpus of national iconic images casts the ‘empty’ denotative image of the trip photo into the national order, producing the photo's unseen violence as simulacrum in the process of subjection and identification.     

Rock ‘n’ Roll Music as a Timepiece

This essay illustrates the value of time in understanding baby boomers' experiences of rock ‘n’ roll. In a distinctively interactionist style, I use time as a sensitizing concept in my research on this phenomenon. The orientation that guides this research is methodological tourism, by which the researcher treats something as common and taken‐for‐granted as rock ‘n’ roll music in everyday life as strange if not exotic. Structurally, songs about time constitute the most visible temporal structures in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. Interactionally, I will argue that the concept of the cohort is more useful than that of the decade for an interpretive analysis of musical nostalgia, a key feature of the phenomenon in question. Illustrations of the reflexive relationship between rock ‘n’ roll and time in middle age include using awareness of recent deaths of rock ‘n’ roll performers to interpret the existential significance of aging; using rock ‘n’ roll songs as benchmarks for significant events such as birthdays and anniversaries, as well as gift giving for these events; and using rock ‘n’ roll music to pass the time.     

How to teach intersubjectivity

This article presents my dialogical teaching since 2001 at the Department of Social Work at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. The following describes my approach to teaching ‘intersubjectivity’ to social work students and my experience with it with reference to Martin Buber's anthropology of the ‘interhuman’ and to relevant discussions within psychoanalysis. Part of this learning programme consists of implementing ‘groups of dialogue’ in order to facilitate the skill of becoming aware of ‘otherness’ and of oneself. My teaching challenges in that it invites people to develop an awareness of the ‘interhuman’ as a living concept of intersubjectivity for the sake of openness to human growth.     

Issues of educational support in primary school and secondary education in disadvantaged suburbs in France

From a critical sociological perspective, this article advances the debate between global schooling with political incentives and local meanings with localized educational practices and supports. It focuses on the role of education policies in the pursuit of social inclusion and social justice, but also shows how local actors adapt and experiment in managing the socio-cultural diversity of the students and the school contexts. First, I show the issues of educational support policies in the French context with a historical background and their re-appropriation by local actors. Second, I present the theoretical framework of my research (2008 to 2013), the methodology and initial results. Last, I analyze the main qualitative results of my comparative research in order to highlight ‘good’ or ‘bad’ educational support practices according to various criteria, starting with interactional socio-cultural posture between different actors.     

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.     

Mother Died Today or Maybe Yesterday: Reflections of L'etranger on Team‐Based Forms of Work Organization

One of the most enduring images of late twentieth‐century popular culture was the individualist and iconoclastic portrayal of the ‘grumpy old man’ Victor Meldrew in the BBC television series One Foot in the Grave. Richard Wilson's portrayal of the recently retired security worker is the antithesis of everything that contemporary organizations require from the idealized vision of employee as ‘team‐player’. As one who revels in the way that the epitaph ‘Victor’ is thrown at me at regular intervals both by my partner and children, at times when I think I am behaving normally, I thought it would be interesting for me to reflect, in public, on my relationship to contemporary workplace relations. It is my contention that Meldrew's characterization is not wholly based around the age dimension but is equally based upon his portrayal as an individual ill at ease with the mores of gregariousness. The essay therefore is a self‐reflective piece in which the author places himself in a particular milieu—that of L'etranger and uses this ‘placing’ in order to discuss the relationship between what he defines as ‘the outsider’ and the issue of age discrimination in contemporary blue‐collar environments. It is suggested that whilst the outsider or L'etranger is accepted under certain conditions within the managerial labour process this same level of organizational tolerance is not afforded to older workers within blue‐collar areas. It moves from a reflective, even autodidactic exploration of the relationship between the author and cultural articulations of L'etranger and uses this to inform an analysis of the acceptance of L'etranger within some aspects of the managerial labour within team based manufacturing units. In exploring these issues the essay then attempts to develop a third narrative in terms of now L'etranger, approaching the age of retirement fits in to the new academic labour process.     

Reinterpreting learning difficulty: a professional and personal challenge?

I want to explore in this article the ways in which people with a learning difficulty are constructed in a number of ways as disabled, as limited, as being special, and so on. Constructions can also be utilised for different purposes – to ensure that they have effective levels of support and to elevate the status of people with a learning difficulty. Positive constructs may articulate an ‘accentuation of the positive’ as Goodley and Armstrong prescribed. However, whilst I agree with this sentiment, one echoed in Swain and French’s important formulation of an affirmative model of disability, and one that I have also espoused, professionally I also feel that my experience of working with people with learning difficulties makes me suspicious of generalised statements about people, even those deemed positive. This may be especially true in a period of financial rationalisation, where such constructs may seem inevitable in the fight for effective support for people with a learning difficulty.