Frederick Law Olmsted and the cultural geography of southern slave autonomy

Frederick Law Olmsted’s account of his journeys through the southern states, undertaken from 1852 to 1857 reveals that Olmsted, in whom a sense of place was especially strong, characterised enslaved people’s relative freedom by place, delineating the plantation (even its slave quarters) as the areas of strictest control while liminal spaces at the edge of plantations, as well as roads, rivers, towns, markets and cities represented places of autonomy. These sites became places of resistance, with Olmsted contrasting his depictions of supposedly docile, naive, slow-witted slaves on the plantation, with those more articulate, confident and able whom he met on the margins. In revealing the potential of African-Americans to live as free people in the U.S.A., Olmsted reinforced the normalisation of the plantation for slave experience. This chapter will explore examples such as the landscape strategies of southern maroons and Olmsted’s slaves’ autonomy by road, river and sea.     

Lionel Smith in Barbados, 1833–1836: imperialist and abolitionist rhetoric in emancipation-era Caribbean governance

After 20 years of service in the British Army in India, Sir Lionel Smith, KCB (1777–1842) was appointed Governor of Barbados and Governor General of the Windward Islands in order to enact the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. During his three-year tenure, Smith relied on two major rhetorical strategies to advocate for the rights of free Afro-Barbadians and enslaved/apprenticed people. In general, Smith invoked utilitarian arguments, derived from his experience in India, when presenting free Afro-Barbadian men’s demands for equal voting rights, but also resorted to a more humanitarian mode, characteristic of abolitionist rhetoric, when arguing for judicial system reforms that would benefit enslaved and apprenticed people. This essay analyzes the ways in which Smith’s positions resonated with or diverged from those of the Colonial Office, and from those of Barbadian people of color, based on correspondence with the Colonial Office, including two documents written by free men of color, and one by an apprentice. Although Smith was eager to apply the British colonial policy he experienced in India to the impending social changes in the West Indies, the Colonial Office was not as willing to draw these parallels, responding more enthusiastically to Smith’s use of abolitionist rhetoric.     

The end of an era? The resignation of Iain Duncan Smith,Conservatism and social security benefits for disabled people

Iain Duncan Smith resigned as the UK’s Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in March 2016. While not invisible from the debate following his resignation, the fact that changes to social security policy for disabled people were central to Duncan Smith’s time as Secretary of State and central to his (at least public) reasons for resignation was lost in a focus on the internal machinations of the UK’s Conservative Party. In this short article, Duncan Smith’s resignation is used to examine the location of additional cost social security benefits for disabled people in Conservative thinking in contemporary Britain.     

Young precariat and a new work order? A case for historical sociology

This article assesses Guy Standing's (2011) account of ‘the precariat’ as a ‘new class' to the many exercises undertaken in youth studies since the 1980s to make sense of the changing patterns of youth employment. While Standing's focus on the experience of fragmented and casualized work in many economies which now implicates young people has value, there are significant problems with his account that highlights the some difficulties in thinking in somewhat abstracted ways about ‘structural’ change processes that do not sufficiently consider the question of time. The case of Australia's of labour market regulation since the 1890s is used to test the validity of Standing's focus on the novelty of neoliberalism after the early 1980 to explain the emergence of precarious employment. Standing's claim that insecurity is central to the ‘new precariat’ because they lack the different kinds of security enjoyed by the ‘working-class’ after 1945, highlights the need for an interpretative framework attentive to the longer term role of state policy and the interplay of historical and local processes. The case is then made for developing a historical sociology that engages with what is now happening in respect to young people and their employment security.     

Gruppendynamik in virtuellen Teams

The article analyses the group-dynamic phenomenon’s in virtual teams. The individual and his required competences, the way a group gets together and cooperates, the importance of common goals and the quality of different technical communication channels are discussed. In addition to the theoretical analysis, experiences from people who have experience in virtual cooperation (managers, consultants and project-managers) are summarized; their quotations reflect the working atmosphere. Many hints and suggestions for managers and consultants are given!     

Identity and everyday experiences of homelessness: Some implications for social work

It is important for the complexities of homelessness to be considered when constructing policy or practice relating to people who are without safe and stable accommodation. These complexities can be loosely categorised around the definitions, causes and experiences of homelessness. While definitions and causes are topics of current debates, study of the lived-experiences of homelessness remains an area that is largely under-researched. This paper explores some of the implications for social work and social workers when the individual's understanding and experience of her/his identity as a ‘homeless person’ and consequent relationships with service providers are not factored into policy and practice. This article draws on the findings of a study of homeless adults in inner city Adelaide to illustrate the author's arguments. It outlines the importance of listening to service users' perspectives in order to assess whether dominant constructions of social work, homelessness and ‘homeless people’ are meeting the needs of and improving outcomes for individual clients. More broadly, it is hoped that making these perspectives visible will assist in the development of ‘client-focused’ practice and policy.     

Expectations and realisations: the employment story of a young man with cerebral palsy

Britain has laws and a range of policies which promote the employment of disabled people. The lack of progress to get disabled people into paid work has resulted in huge dissatisfaction for some. Evidence of disability and employment problems is often expressed as hard data, but what of the personal experiences of trying to find employment? This article is based on interviews with ‘Nick’, a young man with cerebral palsy who wanted to recount his preparation for work, including work experience, through school, the Connexions service and the local Employment Office. He explained how he felt his voluntary work and work experiences were not fully planned and ultimately unsatisfactory. Nick found paid employment, but soon discovered that there were too many problems for him to continue. He reflected on his experiences, including his own initial confidence, his despair at the ending of his paid employment and the realities of what employment means for him.     

Hearing/seeing dread: thought of distortion and transformation in Kafka’s The Burrow and Odradek

In Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow, an unidentified subterranean creature struggles while digging in a burrow, constantly engulfed in anxiety for potential intruders. His obsessive anxiety starts to be materialised in his hearing of a noise everywhere and at constant intensity. Incessantly speculating the cause of this noise, his dreadful imagination first finds it as a swarm of small fries, eventually growing into a single gigantic monster threatening his burrow, as if desiring an irresistible entity that goes beyond the idea of the individual. Inspired by this story of a creature suffocating from his lonesome effort of nesting, this paper discusses how an individual sensation of dread could potentially transcend to an ability to imagine social totality, drawing on the philosophical readings of Kafka’s other character Odradek by Benjamin and Adorno. I further argue that this process is aesthetic, correlating Freud’s idea of the uncanny with Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience which examine the negotiation between individuation and socialisation in an experience of desubjectification. By sketching out the anxious hearing in The Burrow in reference to the disturbing seeing of object-creature Odradek, I discuss the feeling of dread that marks the transformation of individual entities into a transcendent social/collective being.     

The death of informants or when a fieldworker outlives the community studied

This paper analyses the phenomenon of the death of informants. Based on his own experience with the long-term (1999–2016) research of Voyvodovo – the only Czech village in Bulgaria, the author shows what the death of one’s informants means for the research and the researcher. The author argues that any long-term fieldwork entails emotional involvement of the researcher, and so the departure of his or her informants has a deep impact on the researcher’s well-being. The articles also address methodological consequences of the death of informants, namely, the case when the death of all of them leads to a situation that the group ceases to exist. The author shows that with the last member’s passing away Malinowski’s ‘native’s point of view’ is lost forever. The author also suggests that the topic of death of informants should be included into educational curricula for fieldwork training.     

‘The Greatest Thing in North America’: Delmore Schwartz and Europe

Abstract

An argument is presented that Delmore Schwartz’s celebrations of his European literary heritage accentuate the ways in which he might be regarded as a specifically American poet: he cannot help but Americanize his European sources. These engagements also, however, unsettle the notion of a purely American poetry since they suggest that American writing can only be understood in relation to English and European traditions. Taking his concept of ‘international consciousness’ as its premise, the study examines how Schwartz’s allusions simultaneously serve to align his poetry with European works and to distance it from them. It also assesses Schwartz’s admiration for the international perspectives of modernist mentors (particularly T. S. Eliot), observing how this aspect of their work influences his own. A reading of ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’, a poem in which Schwartz characteristically sets individual experience against a worldwide stage, is also given.     

Poetry of the Swamp: Blok’s “Folks” Cycle Bubbles of the Earth

Gogol'’s “A Few Words about Pushkin” has traditionally been viewed as evidence that Gogol' idolized Pushkin as a national poet par excellence. This article argues that behind Gogol'’s deference for Russia’s greatest poet lie layers of polemic and subversive iconoclasm. Though he initially proclaims Pushkin Russia’s national poet, Gogol' goes on to use his trademark rhetorical tools to effectively strip the poet of the honour. In doing so, he attempts to influence the reception of his own writings, which at the time predominantly concerned Ukrainian themes, in ways that would encourage his Russian audience to consider him—and not Pushkin—as Russia’s premier national writer. Countering Pushkin’s Russocentric model of national culture, Gogol' champions instead a centrifugal conception of national-imperial identity that places Russia’s imperial periphery at the center of the “Russian” experience.     

New Hobos or Neo-Romantic Fantasy? Urban Ethnography beyond the Neoliberal Disconnect

This article describes an anomalous social space within the field of homelessness in San Francisco, that of “pro” recyclers, homeless men who spend much of their time collecting recyclables for redemption. Unlike the panhandlers, broken shelter-dwellers and small-time hustlers of San Francisco’s Tenderloin and other skid row zones, the recyclers orient much of their existence around work. By working within a unique economic niche provided by the state-supported recycling industry, and by drawing on support from sympathetic residents and advocates, the recyclers create an unusual homeless subculture which, as they themselves argue, has more than a little in common with the hobo jungles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To interrogate the sociological (and political) implications of this case study I use Loïc Wacquant’s eloquent manifesto against sociological “neo-romanticism.” While agreeing with some of Wacquant’s analysis, I argue that his emphasis on the moralism of contemporary urban ethnographers blinds him to the very real concerns with morality and ethics among poor people themselves. The recyclers’ concerns with mutual respect and the pleasures of labor represent, I believe, not post hoc justifications of desperate survival strategies, but a dogged, often passionate collective effort to create a truly different experience and understanding of homelessness itself.     

Disabled students’ narratives about their schooling experiences

An ongoing interest in disabled learners’ voices has been reflected in a number of studies that explore students’ experiences of schooling, as part of the quest to understand how inclusive education can be achieved. These studies, however, have been conducted mainly in industrially developed countries, while very few studies exist from industrially developing countries such as Greece in which disabled people’s voices are under-represented not only in political processes but in research as well. The aim of this study was to investigate disabled students’ educational experience, their social interactions with peers and teachers, the choice of school and the support they received for responding to curricular demands and complexities. The results of the study confirmed that disabled students can provide invaluable information on matters involving their education, and showed how personal experiences of disability are influenced by the socio-cultural experiences lived in different social arenas, such as that of education.     

Becoming,Being and Having Been: Practitioner Perspectives on Temporal Stances and Participation across Children’s Services

This article is based on a study of the changing meanings and experiences of citizenship and participation for young people in transition from primary to secondary school. One of the primary concerns of the study is to better understand how different professional practices impact upon young people’s uptake of participation and adoption of civic identity. To gain some insight into this area the article first looks at the contexts in which participation work is developing and the interrelationships between these developments across children’s services. How different practitioner’s conceptualise participation is tied into different assessments of young people’s or children’s capacity. Recasting questions of capacity as dialogues across differing temporal stances can offer practitioners new ways to reflect upon the power negotiations within their relations with young people. The key role temporality plays in configuring power relationships and transactions is explored as it arises within practitioner life history interviews. The shifts between temporal stances that young people experience as they interact with different practitioners are illustrated through fieldwork data.     

There are two sides to every story: young people’s perspectives of relationship issues on social media and adult responses

This paper reports on a recent research project undertaken in the UK that investigated how young people negotiate their identities and relationships online, including how they experience interventions by adults. Drawing on qualitative interviews with young people in two schools and a voluntary youth organisation in England, we argue that young people engage rather successfully in practices of self-governance. Our findings based on this sample of young people’s agentic practice and care for their peers challenge some dominant perceptions of young people’s online practices as risky and/or harmful to themselves and/or others. Furthermore we found a lack of evidence concerning the effectiveness of, and need for, interventions orientated around surveillance and zero tolerance.     

Transmissions of Aliveness and Deadness in the Hours (2002)

In this close reading of a series of connected sequences in Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, I attempt to demonstrate how a child’s lifelong and catastrophic internalization of an early, traumatic experience of his mother’s emotional unavailability may be captured on camera.     

‘A frog in a well’: the exclusion of disabled people from work in Cambodia

Based on ethnographic research conducted in north‐west Cambodia in 2000–2001, this paper examines why disabled people experience systematic marginalisation in the labour market. Although there are no official data on the relationship between disability and employment status in Cambodia, this research suggests that disabled people are more likely than their able‐bodied counterparts to be unemployed, in low status occupations, earn less or be out of the labour market altogether. Consequently, disabled people are more likely to live in poverty, experience social isolation and poor mental health. I argue that disabled people’s social status effectively shapes their work patterns through (mis)conceptions that associate ‘disability’ with ‘inability’ to work and to be employable. This paper illustrates how geographical processes fix disabled people in their socio‐spatial place, which together with ideological and structural inequalities distinguish and entrench their poverty from that of other social groups.     

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.     

‘I open the coffin and here I am’: disability as oppression and education as liberation in the construction of personal identity

This article presents a case study focused on the experiences of Rafael, a resilient young musician. The research is based on 180 records made through interviews, focus groups, observations and documentary collection, involving 190 informants. The data analysis shows that social systems create subordinated and stigmatised conditions of experience for people with disabilities which lead to social exclusion and reification. This understanding of disability as oppression (which is the ‘coffin of the dead’) can be combated by means of education, understood as resistance to inequality. This can be effected by questioning the social order and power relationships, thus striving to produce the possibility of being a subject. In this way Rafael has been able to construct his identity relatively autonomously, challenging social mandates that led him to exclusion and denied his existence as a subject. In his own words: ‘I open the coffin and here I am’.     

Are all communities communities in the mind?

Studies of community undertaken over a period of some forty‐five years by the author and his colleagues are re‐considered to show how the significance of ‘communities‐in‐the‐mind’ has been inadequately appreciated. The distinction made by Clifford Geertz between ‘experience‐near’ and ‘experience‐distant’ is used to sharpen up certain assumptions and approaches of community sociologists, including Frankenberg. Some possible explanations for the decline in the perceived importance of comminity studies from the late 1960s are discussed in the context of the growing centrality of social class in sociological analysis in the 1970s and 1980s. Reference is made to recent research on personal communities by Liz Spencer and the author to illustrate how an ellision between ‘experience‐near’ and ‘experience‐distant’ approaches may be achieved. It is concluded that the imputed community‐on‐the‐ground, often based on materialistic assumptions, should not be conceptually privileged over the real community‐in‐the‐mind.