To Encounter a Child: Maternal Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Reading

This article offers an outline and preliminary analyses of key aspects of Lisa Baraitser's (2009 Baraitser , L. ( 2009 ). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption . London, UK, and New York , NY : Routledge . [Google Scholar]) Maternal Encounters as a situating opening piece in a special feature arising from an intensive seminar on Baraitser's work held in Dublin in September 2010. The first section opens out some of the psychoanalytic implications of Baraitser's theory of maternal subjectivity. The second section considers the importance of temporality and the interruption of the “seamless” thinking subject for the emergence of a maternal subject and considers Baraitser's maternal subject in relation to some key queer and feminist positionings of maternity. The final section assesses the text's contribution to philosophical debates. First, it discusses how Baraitser attends to the everyday in developing an aesthetics of ordinariness. Second, it looks at deconstruction and inhabitation. Finally, it considers cultural phenomenology, objects, and the magic Baraitser locates in things.     

On Being a Strength Coach: Child Welfare and the Strengths Model

Strength coaches help athletes assess their strengths and build on them. Likewise, social workers dealing with children and families in the child welfare system, rather than looking for pathology, can learn to help clients discover and develop their strengths, even while dealing with a child welfare bureaucracy. This article gives examples of the strength coach approach.     

Nativity Seen in the Anthropocene: Contemporary Fieldwork and Subjective Challenges

Ongoing political changes, diasporic mobilities and new communication modalities present anthropologists with novel challenges for conducting ethnographic field work. As both configurations of and expectations for varied forms of social identity change, so too has the notion of the native, what Arjun Appadurai once called the technical preserve of anthropologists. Through reflection on contemporary field work experiences in Kazakhstan, the Philippines and South Korea, this set of papers considers how changing political and cultural regimes, diasporic mobilities and social media also tag the native anthropologist, a concept which can be to the advantage of the researcher, but also can create new problems and complexities for research.     

Fieldwork and the commodif ication of culture: why the natives are restless

Ľauteur aborde la question de la recherche anthropologique sur le terrain à la lumière de la conception marxiste du procès de travail. Cette démarche met en évidence deux contradictions fondamentales: soit entre ľappropriation privée du produit ethnographique et la nature collective de la recherche sur le terrain, ďune part, et entre la valeur ďéchange que ľanthropologue assigne à la culture et la valeur ďusage qu'elle possède pour les indigènes, ďautre part. Ces contradictions sont source ďaliénation et de résistance à la recherche anthropologique, lesquelles ont un impact direct sur le travail ethnographique de même que sur ľimplication politique de ľanthropologue en général.
The paper presents a model of anthropological fieldwork based on Marxist assumptions about the labour process. An argument is developed that this process contains two fundamental contradictions: 1/ that between the collective nature of fieldwork and the private appropriation of the ethnography; and 2/ that between the native view of culture as use value and the anthropological view of culture as exchange value. These in turn are argued to foster native alienation and resistance to anthropological research, with consequent changes in both the structure of fieldwork and in the extent of political involvement of anthropologists.     

The contagion of stigma: Fieldwork among deviants

Noting the emergence of ethnographic or fieldwork methods as the preferred methodology of many researchers in the sociology of deviance, this article focuses on a particular problem which occurs when such methods are adapted to the study of deviant groups, namely the strains that develop in researchers' relationships with professional colleagues and significant others, particularly family and friends, outside of academia. The article is based on the authors' observations of others' reactions to their research on the homosexual or gay subculture, informal conversations with sociologists who have done fieldwork among stigmatized groups, and more general observations of the ways in which sociology is practiced. The authors seek to increase awareness of the problem, especially among those who will do similar studies in the future; and to offer practical suggestions that may be employed to reduce the possibility of labeling and its accompanying problems.This article is a version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society, Minneapolis, 1979. We thank Karen Peterson, Murray L. Wax, and anonymous referees for criticisms of earlier drafts. The authors' names were ordered arbitrarily. Their contributions are equal.     

Seeing Agnes: Notes on a Transgender Biocultural Ethnomethodology

In this article, I revisit Harold Garfinkel's classic ethnomethodological account of Agnes, a transgender woman he met in the 1950s. I situate this case in its larger historical context, within the arc of a contemporary transgender studies, and incorporate recent material from bio‐neuro‐cultural studies of gender and sexuality. Within this framework I ask: what can ethnomethodology learn from transgender studies and what can it contribute.     

Seeing like a city: how tech became urban

Theory and Society - The emergence of urban tech economies calls attention to the multidimensional spatiality of ecosystems made up of people and organizations that produce new digital technology....     

Privileging Fieldwork Over Interviews: Consequences for Identity and Practice

Qualitative sociologists typically privilege fieldwork over interviews. What happens to fieldworkers who now ask questions but no longer hang out? What about those who rely exclusively on intensive interviewing while participant observation remains the standard? The authors examine the negative consequences of privileging fieldwork for identity and practice, the unique contributions of in-depth interviewing, and the differences in the tales that fieldworkers and interviewers tell. An inclusive identity anchored to the analytical assumptions fieldworkers and interviewers share would increase qualitative researchers' confidence and lead them to do better work.     

A Story of Love and Debt: The Give and the Take of Linguistic Fieldwork

When a linguist goes into the field to work with a previously undescribed language, they aim at discovering what the language is like. What we linguists take away is knowledge—reflected in our publications, presentations and scholarly reputation. What we also get is the feeling of love for the languages and for the people, and the sense of indebtedness for what we learn and get given. The language communities expect us to produce dictionaries, story books and pedagogical materials. Academia and the communities place different expectations on linguists engaged in fieldwork research. I examine these, using the example of my own fieldwork with the Tariana, an Arawak-speaking group in the multilingual area of the Vaupés River Basin in north-west Amazonia (Brazil). The focus of the paper is a pedagogical workshop jointly run by myself with my Tariana-speaking adopted family.     

Child advocacy: a dialogue of inclusion

This paper is a case study that illustrates how privilegingchildren's voices in conversations has assisted our work withchildren who have witnessed domestic violence. Using the ChildCrisis Team in Auckland, New Zealand as case study, we arguethat as an inclusive practice child advocacy seeks to positionchildren as active participants in the community developmentprocess rather than the passive recipients of adult hopes anddreams. To break the cycle of violence in the home, children'sexperiences and knowledge should be enabled to enter the spacefor the production of strategies and actions that enhance thecreation of safe home environments, by incorporating their voicesthrough respectful practice by professionals working in theareas of domestic violence and child protection.     

Mother-Writing and the Narrative of Maternal Subjectivity

This essay discusses how writing from a maternal perspective can construct maternal subjectivity in a linguistic form. Maternal subjectivity is understood as the aggregate of subject positions, or “representations,” experienced by a woman who is a mother. Writing can form connections between subject positions, including those which have been split off or denied because of culturally induced ambivalence, to establish a subjectivity that is multiple rather than split. Through a reading of Mary Gordon's novel, Men and Angels, I show how the text's narrative structure, as it represents a mother's discourse with her own mother, her discourse with herself, and her discourse with her child, incarnates the plurality of self positions that mothers possess and constructs a relationship or “grammar” between them. By evoking this complex maternal subjectivity, mother-writing can be understood as a gesture toward recognition–both within the text, for its characters, and outside the text, for the mother/writer.     

Fieldwork in forbidden terrain: the state,privatization and human subjects regulations

In this paper we explore the intersection of the modern-state and fieldwork practices within the social sciences. Our contention is that during the past decade or so there has been an expansion in forbidden or restricted research terrain that threatens the present and future conduct of social research. We argue that this restriction has been engendered by two related developments: privatization and human subjects regulations. The social and political implications of these trends are considered. Her most recent books areMadwives: Schizophrenic Women in the 1950s (Rutgers University Press, 1987) andGender Issues in Field Research (Sage, 1988). He is the author ofCastles of Our Conscience: Social Control and the American State, 1800–1985 (Forthcoming, Polity Press, Cambridge, U.K.)     

Child maltreatment in the family: a European perspective

Child maltreatment is generally referred to under the global categories of physical, sexual, emotional/psychological abuse and neglect. The Concerted Action on the Prevention of Child Abuse in Europe (CAPCAE) reports on the specific forms of harm and injury, actions and persons believed responsible in eight European countries. The most common actions across all participating countries responsible for harm were those of violent parenting or absent parenting. A review of prevention strategies found that few programmes focused on specific behaviours or included measures to indicate whether their actions were successful in preventing further harm to children. It is recommended that fathers need to be targeted in prevention as well as mothers and that specific data collection of actual harms, actions, persons responsible and outcomes needs to be implemented as a priority in all European countries. Such specificity avoids a focus on risk which is unacceptable in some countries, over inclusive of parents and resource intensive.     

Child Care and Child Births: The Role of Grandparents in the Netherlands

This study explored the involvement of grandparents in the care for young children and its effect on subsequent child births in dual‐earner families, using data on 898 Dutch men and women aged 18–49 from the Netherlands' Kinship Panel Study. Three theoretical perspectives were used to develop hypotheses: (a) needs and opportunities, (b) normative preferences, and (c) gendered involvement of grandparents. The findings showed that needs and opportunities informed involvement of grandparents but that the availability of formal child care did not predict grandparents' involvement. Maternal grandparents were more likely to provide child care than paternal grandparents, and grandmothers were more likely to do so than grandfathers. Involvement of both maternal and paternal grandparents in turn increased the likelihood of additional child births. The authors conclude that grandparental child care may be part of an emerging reproductive strategy. Implications of these findings for the theoretical approaches used are discussed.     

Existentialism and Constructivism: A Bi-Polar Model of Subjectivity

The philosophical systems of existentialism and constructivism have generated distinct clinical approaches based on seemingly incompatible conceptions of subjectivity and its role in clinical work. The premise of this paper is that, taken together, existential and constructivist perspectives provide an essentially dialectical view of personal identity, suggesting that a bi-polar model of subjectivity may yield a broader therapeutic gain than either/or positions. I demonstrate this premise by illustrating the central tenets of each approach using clinical vignettes, then further elucidate each position by drawing upon its philosophical underpinnings. Finally, I present a longer clinical illustration that contains both an existential and a constructivist phase.