Keeping open by re‐imagining laughter and fear

Speaking to the debate on the nature of critique, this article is about the struggle to produce an account when listening to and retelling stories. It begins with the disconcertment over listening to a coherent story that emerges in interviews about the development of performance indicators for Dutch hospital care. The indicators are presented as solutions to the problem of unruliness in the healthcare world. Drawing on Helen Verran's work on generative critique I slow down the ‘problem‐solution‐found’ plot. Instead of contrasting the apparently coherent stories with the complexities of an ‘underlying’ practice of healthcare, I hold on to my initial disconcertment so that ‘fleetingly subtle’ interruptions become entry points for generative critique. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's understanding of the relation that fear and laughter have to alterity, I show how fear and laughter permit generative critique within seemingly coherent stories. In the case of indicator development, the interviewees ‘laugh away’ what they consider alter from quality and safety in healthcare: having no control over what is going on, polyglotism instead of a common language, and inaction as opposed to taking one's time. Paying attention to disconcerting interruptions generates sensitivity and questions rather than yet another set of (critical) problem‐solution‐found answers. How can ridiculed (laughed away) subjectivity be acknowledged as important entry points for including alterity in supervision? And how to position the acknowledgement, not as an antidote, but as a way of rendering the fear of alterity generative? Nurturing sensitivities is crucial for keeping open, which means resisting both the sticky tendency of normalizing accounts and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I conclude that keeping open by re‐imagining critique resonates with the creativity of collective life in actual times and places. Thereby it offers a promising potential for doing worlds differently.     

Saving the Savior

This article begins with an autobiographical reflection about what sociology has meant to me as an Iranian intellectual. Sociology has enabled me to think critically about my country's politics and culture, appreciating its strengths without overlooking its unjust and injurious aspects. That experience shapes my answer to the question “Saving Sociology?” If there is anything in sociology that I would like to save–in both senses “to keep” and “to rescue”—it is sociology as a critical, reflective discipline, a discipline that not only studies society but also contributes to its change. As the contemporary world moves toward a “global” society, we are increasingly facing the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Sociologists often investigate other societies or (like myself) look back at their own from a spatial and cultural distance. This situation has created a dilemma for many scholars: Should we criticize problems stemming from “indigenous” beliefs and practices of other societies? Cultural relativism argues that different cultures provide indigenous answers to their social problems that should be judged in their own context. While this approach correctly encourages us to avoid ethnocentrism, it has led to inaction towards the suffering of oppressed groups. Reflecting on the relativist approach to sexual dominance, I question some cultural relativist assumptions. Discussing how “indigenous” responses to male domination in many cases disguise and protect that domination, I will challenge the “localist” approach of relativism and argue for a universalist approach.     

Narratives of pain in later life and conventions of storytelling

In this article, I discuss conventions of storytelling by drawing on two accounts of the experience of chronic pain that challenged my hearing. To engage with these accounts and to reflect on my hearing/reading practices I use narrative analysis. Narrative analysis acknowledges the way people tell their stories as integral to the meaning they convey. But definitions of narrative are often linear and causal and are closely linked to the conventions of storytelling that are dominant in our culture. Recognising that link enables the listener/reader to go beyond; to follow disjointed, chaotic accounts that are not easy to hear, and to situate speakers within or outside of dominant discourses. I argue that such a hearing contributes to an understanding of the self that provides an alternative to the modernist idea of an autonomous, self-controlled and independent individual, an alternative that values the lives and narratives of older people.     

That time I punched a boy in the forehead: sibling stories ahead of research

In the past month, I have been building relationships with community members at a prairie-based research site in Canada by telling a story about my own sibling advocacy. Namely, the story about that time I punched a boy in the forehead when I was a kid. I observe that this story helps build trust between me and the families invested in a new research project. This is a current issue because recent research on the utility of sibling stories suggests that these narrative accounts, diverse as they may be, are foundational to knowledge creation about disability. Yet these stories are under threat of pathologization when they are understood through a clinical lens, rather than a critical disability studies lens. I conclude by suggesting that sibling stories ought to be claimed as pivotal to critical understandings of disability experiences.     

Drawing out culture: productive methods to measure cognition and resonance

Theories of culture and action, especially after the cognitive turn, have developed more complex understandings of how unconscious, embodied, internalized culture motivates action. As our theories have become more sophisticated, our methods for capturing these internal processes have not kept up and we struggle to adjudicate among theories of how culture shapes action. This article discusses what I call “productive” methods: methods that observe people creating a cultural object. Productive methods, I argue, are well suited for drawing out moments of shared automatic cognition and resonance. To demonstrate the value of productive methods, I describe my method of asking focus group participants to devise and draw AIDS campaign posters collectively. I then 1) show how this productive method made visible distinct moments of both automatic and deliberative cognition, 2) offer an operational definition of resonance and demonstrate how the process of drawing revealed moments of resonance, and 3) suggest how this method allowed me to investigate the relationship between cognition and resonance and their effect on action. To conclude, I discuss strategies for using productive methods and advocate for their use in measuring culture.     

Speaking out loud: Muslim women,Indian Delights and culinary practices in eThekwini/Durban

I asked, ‘Did your mother teach you to cook?’ Almost an hour later, time consumed by mutual reminiscences of Indian Delights, stories of the tastes and textures and colours of food and life in Durban, at last when I thought it would never be answered my question swam back up to the surface of our conversation: ‘You know, then I lived with my oldest sister, not my mother. Her mother-in-law taught me.’ Too heavy a shift of register, the answer dropped into the bubble of conversation we had made around ourselves, imposing another reluctant silence. I could not ask more, not then. Deliverance came through other stories. We talked about the subtly different combinations of spices that women even from the same family choose to use, and the embodied pleasures of walking into a kitchen steamed up with the smells of several dishes all cooking at once. And for the moment we avoided returning to a family narrative of separation, loss and melancholy.     

“As Far as They Knew I Came from France”: Stigma,Passing, and Not Speaking about the Holocaust

Today we recognize that storytelling plays an important role in helping survivors of traumatic episodes such as sexual abuse, military combat, or genocide refashion a sense of self and “work through” their traumatic experiences. But before the Holocaust was named and widely acknowledged and the diagnosis of post‐traumatic stress had emerged, survivors of Hitler's genocidal policies struggled to tell their stories in a world that did not particularly wish to hear them. While most accounts of Holocaust survivors’ postwar experiences focus on themes of redemption, adjustment, and integration, my analysis of interviews with Holocaust survivors suggests during their first two decades living in the United States they were often silenced by individuals they encountered. I use Goffman's analysis of stigma to document how and why this silencing occurred, and with what consequences, providing an account of the interactions survivors had with family members, neighbors and acquaintances, and the strategies of identity management that survivors devised.     

The Unlived Life Is Worth Examining: Nothings and Nobodies behind the Scenes

This paper explores how people talk about the things that have not happened in their lives. I argue that we can perform reverse biographical identity work upon our unmade selves by exploring the meanings of unlived, non-experience. Challenging one's own rehearsed life story is an act of narrative self-transgression, involving negative responsibility assumption. Drawing on my symbolic interactionist theory of “nothing,” I consider how negative social phenomena (no-things, no-bodies, and non-events) are interactively accomplished and retrospectively made sense of in personal accounts. Themes of lost opportunities, silence, invisibility, and emptiness emerge from an analysis of twenty-seven stories. These tales reveal a mixture of emotions: not only sadness, stigma, shame, and regret, but also relief, pride, acceptance, and gratitude. Narratives of nothing are often ambivalent in tone, reflecting the complexity of storied life behind the scenes.     

“Grandpa was fatally administered by the Bulgarians1”: Family narratives,national identity,and state history

Grandparents’ World War Two (WWII) stories are emotionally powerful, intimate accounts of firsthand experience that can shape grandchildren's ideas of state history, nation, and identity. This effect, I argue, manifests most intensively in critical times when national history and identity are threatened. Such was the case when former Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev relayed a controversial version of Macedonian national history and identity in a TV interview. In reaction, many Macedonian citizens shared fragments of their grandparents’ WWII stories. This study analyzes several more detailed versions of these grandparents’ narratives in order to ascertain the formative power of family WWII stories over one's personal sense of national identity. To do so, it will examine the positioning practices of the present-day narrators, the grandchildren of WWII participants, focusing on the manners in which they interactively reproduce their own sense of national identity vis-a-vis-these stories.     

The rejected voice: towards intersubjectivity in speech language pathology

Speech language pathology needs to be linked with philosophy. Those with communication impairments encounter many problems when engaging in conversation with others. Does only the speaker(s) bear the responsibility to make their speech intelligible? In order to answer this question, I suggest that a Wittgensteinian approach offers original insights into speech as an intersubjective phenomenon. By exploring my experiences of having speech difficulties due to cerebral palsy, I shall argue that the unintelligibility of my voice is not simply my failure to achieve the able-spoken standard(s) of speech, but also the failure of others to recognise my utterance as speech. I hope to offer a different account of the voice that defines the human voice as intelligible speech – one that provides a more appropriate philosophical diversity for understanding the ethics of articulation.     

“My God,What Am I Gonna Say?”: Class Reunions as Social Control

Autobiographical occasions are perceived as an apportunity to constitute an identity, to lay claim to one's own life, to the right to tell one's own story. Using high school class reunions as a case study, I argue that those social moments that require accounts of one's life also generate a major threat to the identities constructed, by constituting an informal process of social control. The requirement to narrate one's life story and cope with its limits is a force through which the social order is confirmed and one's identity within that order defined and assigned. While reunions create a community and an opportunity to speak up, they generate at the same time classification, hierarchy, and evaluation processes that might not otherwise appear in modern society.     

The transnational lives and third space subjectivities of British Nigerian girls

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 on British Nigerian young women who have gone to boarding school in Nigeria and returned to attend university in the UK, I use the concept of third space as a heuristic device for understanding their transnational subjectivities and practices. I argue that, for some, this third space is a transgressive one in which they can craft alternative subjectivities and narratives about African culture and political economy. Applying insights from decolonial theory, I seek to build on the transgressive nature of this third space. In positioning themselves variously as Londoners, Nigerians, dual and post‐nationals, they express key features of contemporary transnational European subjectivities. Yet, parental expectations that they marry Nigerians and members of the Nigerian diaspora serve to reproduce the racial distinctions and nationalist rhetoric of colonial modernity that their third space subjectivities contest.     

Body and Management Pedagogy

In this article I explore the impact of bodies in management education — why they have been ignored and what possibilities may be created when we understand them better. Bodies — including gestures, stature, posture and voice — shape and constrain how teachers and students act, what they think and what is taken away. The bodies of male and female teachers and students occupy different spaces and carry contrasting significations, resulting in different repertoires of embodied and disembodied pedagogical styles. Drawing on feminist scholarship, organizational research and my own bodily experiences and observations in management teaching, and despite the myth of disembodiment in rational classrooms, I suggest management pedagogy increasingly assumes and celebrates particular bodily performances. Rather than lament the constriction of stereotypical body regimes, I argue that making bodies more visible in management pedagogy has liberating possibilities for teachers and students and their learning.     

The embodied experience of episodic disability among women with multiple sclerosis

This paper explores the embodied experience of three women living with an episodic or fluctuating disability within the context of relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis. I argue that this shifting embodiment is subjectively, performatively, and interpretively experienced in discrediting ways across social, organizational, and local contexts in women's lives. Drawing on findings from my doctoral thesis, three interpretive themes inform the analysis: not looking disabled, more than meets the eye, and institutional bafflement. Respectively, these themes pertain to a woman's physical appearance, cultural assumptions about disabled embodiment, and the contestation of social, organizational, and local institutional practices shaping women's lives. These themes hold implications for an ‘embodied politics' in rethinking the manner in which episodic disability is experientially, conceptually, and socio-politically recognized as a legitimate tier of the experience of disability.     

Gender and Tobacco in (Globalizing) Asia – Exorcizing the Ghosts of Dualistic Thought?

This paper investigates the intersections between tobacco, gender and globalizing Asia. I argue that binary tropes like modernity/westernization‐tradition and masculinity–femininity are incessantly invoked in a burgeoning tobacco‐control literature focused on Asia. This tends to reify discursive and material gendered smoking stereotypes, as well as their underlying asymmetrical power relations. Responding to this I chart out three ways in which dualistic gender ideologies can be rethought. Firstly, I attend to varieties within gender categories to account for more nuanced articulations of gender identities. I do this by demonstrating the co‐imbrication between polyvalent masculinities and smoking practices. Secondly, I am attuned to intersecting facets of smoking subjectivities – situated within a specific Asian cultural fabric – that complicate the easy conflation of masculinity with power, and femininity with disempowerment. Lastly, I contend that fleshing out the embodied aspects of gendered smoking practices can assist us in confounding polarized gender categories and their associated attributes. I conclude my paper with a discussion on the uneasy relationships between Asia, Westernization, gender and a possible move away from a Western‐centric dualistic thinking.     

Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

In this paper, I present an autoethnographic story about my experiences of expressing breast milk at a Dutch university department. My story illustrates how interrelated and conflicting discourses about gender, motherhood, breastfeeding, embodiment and professionalism raised issues about (in)visibility, embodied control, spatiality and discipline of my body and shaped my experience as a newly maternal employee. This paper thus aims to include bodies and embodied experiences in organization studies and highlights the need to consider spatiality as an important topic of research. I address these issues in my writing and use insights from feminist poststructuralism to show how the experiences I describe are part of a larger cultural framework of power structures that produce the ‘leaky’ maternal body as the Other, subject to (self-)discipline and marginalization. I hope my story inspires reflexivity and empathic understanding of the complex reality of experiences related to expressing breast milk in the workplace.     

LA REPUBLIQUE METISSEE: CITIZENSHIP,COLONIALISM, AND THE BORDERS OF FRENCH HISTORY

During the past decades, debates about immigration and racism have raged in France, most recently through the sans-papiers movement through which undocumented immigrants have demanded documentation and the rights that flow from it. The important successes of the sans-papiers movement, I argue, are the result of the way they combined demands phrased through universalist discourse with expressions of cultural identity, bringing together approaches often considered incommensurable in French political culture. Taking as its contemporary point of departure the sans-papiers movement, this paper proposes that in order to better understand these debates we need to place them in the context of French colonial history. In particular, I focus on the ways the history of the French Caribbean have shaped the way race and citizenship are imagined in Republican political culture. I draw on my historical work to highlight the important ways French ‘universalism’ was in fact in many ways produced through the actions of slaves in the Caribbean. The struggles around slave emancipation and political equality in the Caribbean that developed during the French Revolution, I suggest, both produced a Republican tradition of anti-racist egalitarianism, and gave birth to a ‘Republican racism’ through which new practices of exclusion were articulated. To understand the contested meaning of citizenship in France at the end of the twentieth century, I suggest, requires such forays into the history of empire through which the possibilities of citizenship were formed.     

‘It's a macho thing,innit?’ Exploring the effects of masculinity on career choice and development

Through the analysis of qualitative data of the life stories of ten male returners to further education this article aims to support and develop some of the ideas presented in Gender, Work & Organization by both Simpson in 2005 and Lupton in 2006 on men in non‐traditional occupations. I employ the notion of multiple masculinities to understand my cohort's careers and demonstrate that over time early socialization can be overcome so that some men can make non‐stereotypical career decisions later in life. In offering an explanation as to why this might be the case, I argue that in late modernity some men can actively choose non‐traditional occupations, albeit within a gendered and classed labour market. I also offer insights into male identity in late modernity.     

Narrative in Intercultural Education

In this paper, I discuss the power of narrative in intercultural education. Apparently simple tales, anecdotes, and personal accounts all belong in a narrative universe, which interrogates our assumptions about culture, cognition, language, communication, learning and teaching. I argue that stories have much greater significance in learning and teaching than we usually accord them in educational literature and programmes, and can have ramifications for the intercultural relationships in classrooms.