Cultural studies as praxis: (making) an autobiographical case

This autobiographical essay ‘takes cultural studies personally’, drawing on experience, identity and the personal to indicate how and why the author is proponent of and is working on developing a model of cultural studies as social justice praxis despite the constraints academia in general and of the university as an institution in particular. The paper travels roughly from the author’s student and teacher days in Sierra Leone through his graduate student days in Canada to his current role as university teacher in the USA. He selectively concentrates on his experience as a teacher of literature (and African multi-role utilitarianism), education and cultural studies (using one of his cultural studies courses and students’ questions about the utility of cultural studies as example), his shifting and overlapping racial/ethnic identities (African/black) and the politics of identity, and his thoughts on the place of theory in cultural studies and a black approach to theory (black ambivalent elaboration) as contributory factors. While this account acts in its own way as an argument for conceptualizing cultural studies as praxis, the primary focus is more modestly on my own autobiographical account as a specific case. In fact, an autobiographical approach is employed precisely to be specific and in the attempt to avoid the pitfalls of over­generalization and the authority of authenticity.     

Visual mediation of critical illness: an autobiographical account of nearly dying and nearly living1

This article is concerned with the portrayal of the impact of critical illness on the author's life. An autobiographical approach is used to illustrate how imagery mediates personal trauma. A personal journey over a four‐year period, from the onset of illness towards recovery, is portrayed in the form of snapshots of critical events. Running parallel to the visual dimension is the application of mountain climbing as a metaphor for first understanding critical illness and then as a vehicle to aid recuperation. The journey is described in a narrative style that represents one reality.     

Reconsidering table talk: Critical thoughts on the relationship between sociology,autobiography and self-indulgence

Those who use autobiographical perspectives in the practice of sociology and related disciplines have noted, with concern, the association of their work with self-indulgence (Devault, 1994; Jackson, 1990; Okely, 1992; Kreiger, 1991). This paper elaborates this concern by directing analytic attention to the nature of the charge of self-indulgence. The paper reads as an autobiographical defense of autobiographical sociology. It uses the naming of my own work as self-involved as a point of departure for explicating the implications of this regulatory practice. The device of irony is used to expose how self-indulgence, as a critique invoking highly insular relations of readership, authorship and subject/object distinction, relies on the conventions of a traditional masculine academic discourse.     

Awakenings: Autobiography,Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery

Taking a formal, sociocognitive approach to narrative analysis, I explore autobiographical stories about discovering “truth” in political, psychological, religious, and sexual realms of social life. Despite (1) significant differences in subject matter and (2) conflicting or oppositional notions of truth, individuals in different social environments tell stories that follow the same awakening formula. Analyzing accounts from a wide variety of social and historical contexts, I show how individuals and communities use these autobiographical stories to define salient moral and political concerns and weigh in on cultural and epistemic disputes. Awakening narratives are important mechanisms of mnemonic and autobiographical revision that individuals use to redefine their past experiences and relationships and plot future courses of action while explaining major transformations of worldview. Awakeners use two ideal‐typical vocabularies of liminality to justify traversing the social divide between contentious autobiographical communities. Further, awakeners divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a figurative interaction between the split personas of a temporally divided self. Individuals use this autobiographical formula to reject the cognitive and mnemonic norms of one community and embrace those of another. Advancing a “social geometry” of awakening narratives, I illuminate the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of “truth.”     

Teaching Students to Perform Assessments

In recent years, assessment methods and skills have been increasingly emphasized in the social work literature. Little information, however, has been provided about how to teach students assessment skills in a classroom setting. This article addresses that gap in the literature and presents an integrative skills assessment approach for teaching students to perform assessments. This approach is based on technical eclecticism and combines assessment methods and skills from three practice models: (1) psychosocial, (2) cognitive—behavioral, and (3) systems. Knowledge and skills about measurement, computerized assessment models and expert systems also are included in this approach to teaching assessment skills. The authors provide suggestions and tools for teaching assessment skills in a classroom, including an integrative skills assessment protocol and several techniques that may be used to teach students to gather assessment data. In teaching assessment skills, possible links may be developed with the field practicum and the classroom experience of students. In addition, the authors suggest that students benefit from the integrative skills approach. The approach is comprehensive, flexible, competency based, technological, and empirically based. However, shortcomings are that the approach is a clinical practice approach that excludes other forms of practice and that the integrative skills assessment approach does not help students develop skills for performing the rapid assessments frequently required for brief interventions.     

Recalling a Difficult Past: Whites’ Memories of Birmingham*

This article examines the intersection between collective memory and autobiographical memory through in‐depth interviews with twenty whites who came of age in the midst of key events in the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. Most interviewees report few autobiographical memories of the events of the Civil Rights Movement and the racial conflict surrounding these events. Instead, many center their recollections on the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The forgetting of autobiographical memories has been aided by a coalition of silence among whites about the era of integration and by reiterated media images that shaped recollections of the past. These white southerners have been able to renarrativize their pasts to forget memories that link them with the ideology of segregation and to reconstruct the self to be usable in the present. The article demonstrates ways that autobiographical memory is a social construction rather than an act of retrieval.     

“Tell Something About the Pictures”: The Content and the Process of Autobiographical Work Among Scrapbookers

Viewing the popular process of making “scrapbooks” as a particular type of autobiographical occasion, I analyze interviews with scrapbookers and others who make up the scrapbooker's community, including industry workers and biographical others (i.e., family and friends). By considering scrapbooks within the autobiographical community in which they are created, I am able to scrutinize the structure of the narratives they contain, the role of the audience in their creation, and the emergence of norms of remembrance among scrapbookers. The narratives recorded in scrapbooks emerge from the bottom up and suggest that scrapbooking is a way to demonstrate the biographical stability necessary to craft an authenticity narrative. Further, I explore how scrapbookers “do autobiography” by uncovering their decision‐making process regarding what is worth memorializing. Scrapbookers work through a mnemonic checklist assessing special events and everyday life for its “scrapworthiness.” This paper's contribution centers on describing the process and the content of these atypical autobiographical occasions.     

The narrative self in autobiographical accounts of illness

The paper analyzes autobiographical acounts of the experience of chronic illness and its treatment to develop a sociological theory of the self. It is suggested that ‘self’ is not a biologistic or psycologistic thing. Rather self is autobiographical narrative – hence the narrative self. It is argued that four elements constitute such narrative selves in autobiographical discourse: evaluative relationships between events in time; cosmology; power relationships; and conceptualisation of self as object.     

Maternal Reminiscing Style and Children’s Developing Understanding of Self and Emotion

Individual differences in how mothers structure reminiscing about shared past experiences with their preschool children are related to children’s developing autobiographical memory skills and understanding of self and emotion. More specifically, mothers who engage in highly elaborative reminiscing have children who come to tell more coherent and emotionally expressive autobiographical narratives, and these children also show better understanding of self and are better able to regulate emotion than children of less elaborative mothers. This body of research is reviewed and relations between maternal reminiscing style and children’s developing self and emotional understanding are explicated. This paper was written while the first author was a senior fellow in the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University, sponsored by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Pew Charitable trusts.     

Cognitive Value Commitments in Formal Theoretical Sociology

This paper aims to communicate some of the value commitments that characterize my approach to formal model building in theoretical sociology. It does this through a narrative method, an autobiographical account of shifts in intellectual interests through various phases of my career: from history to philosophy, from philosophy to sociology, from sociology to mathematics and back, followed by several long-term formal theoretical research programs. One of these, pertaining to the formal representation of institutionalized social action systems, is described in terms of its linkage to interpretive sociology, while also noting its limitations from a theoretical science point of view. By interweaving intellectual biography and intellectual history, the paper also provides some contextual background for appreciating the work of the other contributors to this symposium.     

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.     

Fate and Agency in Job Loss Narratives

While sociologists have emphasized the social sources of autobiographical narratives, there has been relatively little sociological reflection on the way that autobiographers themselves make selective use of accounts of social forces and pressures to explain their actions. This paper examines the way individuals' use of social pressures as explanations of their behavior are related to the structure of autobiographical narratives as a whole. The paper draws on empirical examples from interviews with people who are unemployed. Focusing on heroic and tragic narrative structures, I argue that the overall narrative structure is shaped by a number of factors, including the events of historical experience, the rhetorical intention of the autobiographer, and the structuring effects of social location.     

Autobiographical sociology

In autobiographical sociology a sociologist probes one or more past personal experiences as a way of identifying and analyzing something sociologically relevant. The general nature and importance of autobiographical sociology, as well as illustrations of and guidelines for it, are explored.     

A life career in the polarities of dissent

This autobiographical sketch is divided into five major sections. A first indicates how participation in certain sectors of institutional life in a small industrial community (in central PA between World Wars I and II) might be conducive to non-conformity. A third shows how early personal experiences could commit one to religious dissent, involving a CO. position, entering civilian public (rather than military) service, and volunteering as a subject in a semi-starvation experiment in a laboratory at a major Midwestern university, which simultaneously permitted work on an M.A. in sociology. A fourth (after discharge from service) brought a return to normal civilian life, marriage, and completion of sociology doctorates (by both spouses). The fifth summarizes the pursuit of a career specializing in sociological theory (especially history of American theory) and development of a classificatory-periodizing scheme considerably at variance with the conventional approach in the history of theory.     

ASSESSING THE NEEDS OF TRAUMATIZED CHILDREN TO IMPROVE OUTCOMES

This paper is about the development of an outcomes‐based treatment approach in work with traumatized children and of an assessment model to measure progress. In particular, it shows how a spider diagram is used to give a powerful, visual representation of a child's progress. The work described has been carried out by SACCS — an independent UK organization providing treatment based in residential and family settings for children who are severely traumatized by abuse and neglect. This trauma has had a massive impact on their development socially, physically, emotionally, academically and spiritually. The children have complex needs which are extremely difficult to work with. However, the potential for recovery from their injuries remains. I will use a single case study of a child to illustrate the process of assessment and measurement of recovery. The treatment approach used is broadly psychodynamic. The concept of an outcomes‐based approach and the measurement tool described also has widespread relevance in social care.     

‘Not quite history’:The Autobiographies H. Selby Msimang and R.V. Selope Thema and the writing of South African history

This paper examines the kind of contribution autobiographical writings may make to an historical reworking of the events in which the writers are involved. Autobiography, being the very conscious revaluation ‐ often re‐creation — and presentation of the self, is a most problematic genre. Its narrative perspective is subjective; its authentication almost entirely personal, rather than documentary. These limitations should flash red lights at the historian: not to stop, but to proceed cautiously. For, problematic as self‐presentation may be, it is an additional source, speaking in a particular voice. It leads us beyond the petitions, letters, commissions and court records, vital as they are, into those sensitive areas of psyche: emotion, pride, deception and creativity, where many historians fear to tread. Much South African historical writing oversimplifies the role of individual character in helping to shape movements and events. Rather than depicting the complex ways in which subjects and societies interact, many historical studies have read off the politics and motivation of the individual from the organisation to which he or she belonged. Msimang and Thema are significant individuals, at once representative and idiosyncratic; deeply involved in SANNC politics, but also furthering their own careers. Their autobiographical writings both reveal and attempt to conceal important moments in their pasts and in so doing, exemplify the ways in which autobiographical writing may speak to the historian.     

Systems approaches to risk assessing healthcare, how far have we come?

Systems approaches and their relevance to risk assessment are considered through an examination of a number of recent applications in England. The importance of visual mapping of systems is emphasised. This approach encourages participation from those within the system with less technical knowledge but with important information to add to a risk assessment. Other advantages outlined include the ability to readily identify system boundaries, map processes and record both strengths and weaknesses of existing or planned system changes. The use of risk assessment methods with this approach should be cautious, as any one method may only identify a sub-set of all risks.     

Whole Curriculum Mapping of Assessment: Cartographies of Assessment and Learning

Approaches to curriculum design often occur at the unit or course level within social work education. Only rarely have ‘whole of curriculum’ approaches been discussed in the literature. This paper describes the creation of a ‘whole of curriculum approach’ to social work teaching and learning within an Australian University. The project involved the creation of a methodology and conceptual framework to map assessment across an entire social work curriculum. In doing so, the mapping exercise provided a way to evaluate the sequencing and integration of assessment tasks across the four-year degree pathway, and judge the effectiveness that such assessments fit with theories and research on assessment more broadly, and with the graduate outcomes for a social work degree. This paper outlines the background to the 2013 assessment project and its alignment to the curriculum mapping. It argues and explains how a systematic approach to mapping and improving social work curriculums can be achieved.     

Learning social work law: An enquiry-based approach to developing knowledge and skills

This paper, written jointly by tutors and students, discusses an enquiry-based approach to learning and assessing law as part of social work qualifying training in England. It is argued that social work law is an area of learning particularly suited to an approach in which enquiry and analysis skills are promoted through practical problem solving. The paper considers the theoretical rationale for this approach and identifies how this conceptual frame informs the learning and assessment structure. It identifies how students present evidence for assessment of their skill and knowledge development, through both written and verbal submission, and considers the learning outcomes achieved. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the approach as an example of knowledge and skill development through problem solving and reflection.     

Acquired disability in young women: a challenge for identity?

ABSTRACT

Youth can be described as a transitional phase for the formation of identity. As young people often hold taken-for-granted assumptions regarding their future, disability may pose a challenge for their identity development. This paper analyses the retrospectively written autobiographical narratives by three young women who became disabled during their adolescence. The structure of the narratives is approached with sociologist Arthur Frank’s typology of illness narratives and identity through data-driven content analysis. This paper suggests that chaotic stories may hinder the development of identity, as the identity is described as delayed, hidden, silenced or neglected.