MILK BARS,STARBUCKS AND THE USES OF LITERACY

The starting point for this article is the passage on ‘The Juke-Box Boys’ in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. This passage is often cited as evidence of Hoggart's residual, Leavisite suspicion of mass culture and his nostalgia for more ‘authentic’ working-class culture. This article moves beyond this critique by discussing Hoggart's account in relation to the broader historical shifts signalled by the development of milk and coffee bars in postwar Britain, and their more recent replacement by corporate fast-food and coffee chains. It argues that Hoggart's critique was not simply a knee-jerk fear of the new; it fed into more widespread anxieties which long predate the media invention of the ‘teenager’ or the emergence of organized youth subcultures. These anxieties were not simply about mass culture and Americanization, but also about cultural literacy, class, the relationship between the public and private sphere, and the losses and gains of rising affluence – concerns that have been increasingly submerged in post-Thatcherite political culture.     

JUMPING ON SHADOWS: CATCHING THE UNCONSCIOUS IN THE CLASSROOM

This article discusses case material from a psychoanalytically informed ethnographic research project where the author had a dual role as a teaching practitioner and researcher in an infant school. It suggests that practitioner researchers can deepen a concern with reflexivity in the research process by transferring elements of the practice of the psychoanalytic clinician — specifically, attention to ‘counter‐transference’ — to their research practice. The article reviews the concept of counter‐transference. It suggests that working out the difference between transference and counter‐transference may be connected unconsciously to working out the distinctions between ego and superego. The article then goes on to provide an illustration of the way in which the author attempted to use her own counter‐transference to inform her research into young children's learning, specifically in relation to her experience of being a teacher. The discussion connects this to the teacher's transferential place as a parental and ‘superego’ figure for pupils. Observational extracts are drawn from the case study of ‘Lutfa’, a Bengali girl placed at the lower end of the ability group range. The article concludes by suggesting that attention to counter‐transference dynamics as a form of reflexivity can provide the practitioner‐researcher with valuable information about the research subjects and about dynamics in the setting, particularly the participants' relationships to ‘superego’ figures.     

Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s Baba-Dziwo: Experimenting With the Popular

Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska is known today almost exclusively as a great Polish lyric poet. However, during the interwar period she was one of the most frequently staged playwrights, with access to a wide popular audience. She was also keenly aware of the various dramatic experiments occurring around her and actually collaborated on a play with Stanis?aw Ignacy Witkiewicz. This article contends that popular plays, such as those of Jasnorzewska, fulfilled an important role in educating Polish audiences, preparing them to deal with truly avant-garde works several decades later. The mixture of traditional and non-traditional elements, with special focus on the grotesque, in Jasnorzewska’s play Baba-Dziwo is analyzed to show how the playwright simultaneously forces her audience to face experimental devices but guarantees their continued interest by exploiting also familiar elements.     

‘It Does Not Mean Me,But a Supposed Person’: Browning,Dickinson, and the Dramatic Lyric

Although scholars have explored the importance of the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Emily Dickinson, very little research exists on the implications of her admiration for Robert Browning. Within the context of Browning’s nineteenth-century US reception, this essay considers the profound and seminal effect this writer had on Dickinson’s vocation as a poet and her understanding of poetry. Focusing in particular on Dickinson’s reading and response to Browning’s Men and Women (1855), it explores connections between Browning’s dramatic lyrics and Dickinson’s creation of dramatic speakers and situations. Developing earlier scholarship on Dickinson’s use of personae and the influence of drama and performance on her works, this essay argues that Dickinson found in Browning’s poetry distancing strategies that complicated the notion of the lyric as a form of personal address and/or biographical revelation. Rather than granting the reader access to the poet’s interiority or corporeal presence, Dickinson, like Browning, creates ‘supposed persons’ who speak in a confidential, intimate manner about particular events and incidents. Following Browning, Dickinson constructs speakers whose identities are divided, contradictory, and fragmented, and, in so doing, she further impersonalizes the personal lyric by creating the possibility of a difference between what her speakers say and what her poems mean.     

DIFFICULTIES IN HOLDING THE ROLE OF THE OBSERVER

This is the second of two linked papers on learning from infant and child observation in social work qualifying training (linked with Linnet McMahon & Steve Farnfield ‘Too Close In Or Too Far Out’). A former student reflects on her own observation experience. She considers the anxieties aroused and their containment, which became possible initially through reflection in the seminar group and ultimately through her internalisation of the reflective process. She discusses the value of her learning in subsequent practice in palliative care.     

Using intervention-oriented evaluation to diagnose and correct students’ persistent climate change misconceptions: A Singapore case study

The evaluation of classroom-based educational interventions is fraught with tensions, the most critical of which is choosing between focusing the inquiry on measuring the effects of treatment or in proximately utilizing the data to improve practice. This paper attempted to achieve both goals through the use of intervention-oriented evaluation of a professional development program intended to diagnose and correct students’ misconceptions of climate change. Data was gathered, monitored and analyzed in three stages of a time-series design: the baseline, treatment and follow-up stages. The evaluation itself was the ‘intervention’ such that the data was allowed to ‘contaminate’ the treatment. This was achieved through giving the teacher unimpeded access to the collected information and to introduce midcourse corrections as she saw fit to her instruction. Results showed a significant development in students’ conceptual understanding only after the teacher's decision to use direct and explicit refutation of misconceptions. Due to the accessibility of feedback, it was possible to locate specifically at which point in the process that the intervention was most effective. The efficacy of the intervention was then measured through comparing the scores across the three research stages. The inclusion of a comparison group to the design is recommended for future studies.     

The Uses of the Past and European Integration: Austria between Lisbon,Ireland, and EURO 08

This article examines Austrian national identity negotiations through a qualitative analysis of the country's ideologically heterogeneous media, with a focus on Austria's most widely read paper (and its popular readers’ letters pages) between April and August 2008. This turbulent period coincided with widening opposition to the EU's Lisbon reform treaty, Austria's co-hosting of the European football championship, and the collapse of the country's coalition government. This analysis of media coverage and readers’ letters focuses on the rhetorical strategies underpinning various discursive constructions of Austria's place within the EU. The following key findings are discussed: projections of perceived social ills and resulting anxieties onto the EU; the interpretative uses of the past—historical episodes selected from Austrian and other national contexts—to make sense of and politicize the present; constructions of ‘European ideals’ in juxtaposition to perceived ‘European realities’; and competing models of national identity in relation to the European ‘network state.’     

Cultural workers,pedagogy and the politics of difference: Beyond cultural conservatism

‘Odor di Femina: Though you may not see her, you can certainly smell her’, articulates the primacy of visualism in the history of psychoanalysis. In the first half of the study Mavor reveals how both the photographs of mentally ill women made under the direction of Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot and the use of the visualist rhetoric in the writings of Charcot and Freud were regarded as proof of an always already diagnosed and conceptualized vision of sexual difference. Charcot's and most emphatically Freud's conception of the senses conventionally marked vision as masculine and the others (touch, hearing and especially smell) as feminine. Mavor then turns to Lacan to undo this historically gendered, power-hungry split between sight and the othered senses through his theory of the gaze as objet petit a, which reticulates the gaze and its conventional singular authority. Taking a cue from Lacan's provocative claim that ‘a wild odour emanates’ from the‘function of seeingness’, Mavor pushes Lacan's theory of the gaze (which, she argues, has often been sorely misrepresented in feminist film theory and art history) towards an expanded constellation of the senses. Her excavation of Lacan loosens the gaze's hold on the site of seer/seen, subject/object and, especially, sight/smell. As a result, sight loses its historical pride of place among the senses.     

Unconscious Transmissions Between Patient and Pregnant Analyst

When two people in close proximity both experience processes of heightened perceptiveness, the likelihood of unconscious communication increases. In analysis, coconstructed emotional configurations of transference–countertransference further contribute to the interplay. The analyst's pregnancy offers a window on bilateral processes of unconscious communication, often obscured in psychoanalytic theorizing. The unconscious dialogue has three constituents: a) effects of the analyst's pregnancy on the patient (her liminality, disclosure of sexuality, two-in-one numinosity, and archaic, life-bearing, death-dealing powers); b) effects of pregnancy in the therapist herself (heightened intuition, slippage, and introspective preoccupation with “procreative mysteries,” anxieties of formation, containment-preservation, transformation and separation). c) the impact of patients on the pregnant analyst (her susceptibility to, and defensive def lection of, intrusive projections into her inner world). Focusing on generic anxieties broadens the discussion beyond synchronization of the intra/interpsychic dynamics of a particular two some.     

Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer,Bourdieu and reflexivity

Through a critique of Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, this paper explores the theoretical contribution of a Bourdieusian sociology of the subject for understanding social change. Archer's theory of reflexivity holds that conscious ‘internal conversations’ are the motor of society, central both to human subjectivity and to the ‘reflexive imperative’ of late modernity. This is established through critiques of Bourdieu, who is held to erase creativity and meaningful personal investments from subjectivity, and late modernity is depicted as a time when a ‘situational logic of opportunity’ renders embodied dispositions and the reproduction of symbolic advantages obsolete. Maintaining Archer's focus on ‘ultimate concerns’ in a context of social change, this paper argues that her theory of reflexivity is established through a narrow misreading and rejection of Bourdieu's work, which ultimately creates problems for her own approach. Archer's rejection of any pre‐reflexive dimensions to subjectivity and social action leaves her unable to sociologically explain the genesis of ‘ultimate concerns’, and creates an empirically dubious narrative of the consequences of social change. Through a focus on Archer's concept of ‘fractured reflexivity’, the paper explores the theoretical necessity of habitus and illusio for understanding the social changes that Archer is grappling with. In late modernity, reflexivity is valorized just as the conditions for its successful operation are increasingly foreclosed, creating ‘fractured reflexivity’ emblematic of the complex contemporary interaction between habitus, illusio, and accelerating social change.     

Fabrications of self: Identity formation in the Odyssey

Abstract

This interpretation of the Odyssey challenges conventional readings in a way that recaptures the strangeness in a text that has been colonized by interpretative strategies, interpretations that impose certain cultural and gendered stereotypes. My reading inverts and subverts some of these stereotypes, without claiming to reveal, or aiming to establish, true identities. Rather, my point is that identities are unstable and unpredictable; the main characters in the Odyssey can be understood best by analysing their characteristic style of dealing with these uncertainties. In this light, Odysseus appears as much less stable and much less ‘in control’ than in standard readings. His presumed, and famed, autonomy is shown to be largely a product of self‐deception, deriving from an inability to confront himself. The women in the Odyssey, on the other hand, are stronger characters, both less helpless, and more helpful, than standard readings allow for. Calypso and Circe play a positive role in liberating and educating Odysseus. Penelope, for her part, turns out to be involved in a much more subtle and elusive form of self‐fabrication than Odysseus. Rather than applying stereotypes of cunning' or ‘faithful’, we should understand both Odysseus' and Penelope's actions as the product of their own idiosyncratic way of dealing with contingency, within the bounds set by cultural and natural circumstance.     

The ‘First Three Years’ Movement and the Infant Brain: A Review of Critiques

This article reviews a particular aspect of the critique of the increasing focus on the brain and neuroscience; what has been termed by some, ‘neuromania’. It engages with the growing literature produced in response to the ‘first three years’ movement: an alliance of child welfare advocates and politicians that draws on the authority of neuroscience to argue that social problems such as inequality, poverty, educational underachievement, violence and mental illness are best addressed through ‘early intervention’ programmes to protect or enhance emotional and cognitive aspects of children's brain development. The movement began in the United States in the early 1990s and has become increasingly vocal and influential since then, achieving international legitimacy in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and elsewhere. The movement, and the brain‐based culture of expert‐led parent training that has grown with it, has been criticised for claiming scientific authority whilst taking a cavalier approach to scientific method and evidence; for being overly deterministic about the early years of life; for focusing attention on individual parental failings rather than societal or structural problems, for adding to the expanding anxieties of parents and strengthening the intensification of parenting and, ultimately, for redefining the parent–child relationship in biologised, instrumental and dehumanised terms.     

Performing “in the red”: transformations and tensions in repertoires of contention during the 2012 Quebec student strike

The longest and largest student strike in Canadian history began in Quebec in the spring of 2012 in resistance to proposed tuition hikes and the increasing privatization of education and public services that this signaled. The symbol of the student movement, the red square (denoting ‘squarely in the red’ or ‘squarely in debt’) quickly went ‘viral’. At its height, an estimated 300,000 students were striking – nearly 75% of Quebec’s post-secondary student population; on May 22nd some 500,000 people marched in support. The strike continued for six months, ending only after the government was overturned and a new government cancelled the tuition increase. The redeployment of local protest repertoires, including traditional tactics such as picket lines combined with inclusive and creative tactics popularized in alter-globalization movements. Formal student associations combined with various ad hoc coalitions and organizations, as well as communitarian groups, in an uneasy alliance to create a mass mobilization that some commentators dubbed Québec’s ‘Maple Spring’. This article documents the transformation of what Tilly has called ‘repertoires of contention’ within the context of the Quebec student movement. In so doing, it highlights some of the principle debates concerning social values and distributions of agency that resurfaced in connection with the diverse tactics that formed the ‘new’ combinational repertoire.     

Time,Space and Gender: Understanding ‘Problem’ Behaviour in Young Children

The following article reports on a small‐scale, exploratory study of aggressive and ‘problem’ behaviour in pre‐school children. This project was conceived in the wider context of anxieties about childhood and New Labour’s policy focus on ‘anti‐social’ behaviour in children. Based on interviews with nursery staff and parents in addition to participant observation undertaken in nursery playrooms, this article examines the relevance of time, space and gender for understanding problem behaviour in young children. Taking a social constructionist perspective and drawing on Foucault's ideas in particular, it examines the social processes which regulate and normalise behaviour in young children. © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.     

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.     

‘Race’-education policy as social control?

This paper focuses on the instrumentalist Marxist model which has been used to explain the policies of the British state in the field of ‘race’-education. After discussing the model's core assumptions and its application in this field the paper explores the model's explanatory adequacy through a case study of the role of the quasi-state agencies of the ‘race’-relations industry in developing ‘race’-education policy in initial teacher education. It ends by considering whether a new conceptual framework is needed to understand ‘race’-education policy.     

Gogol'’s “Portrait” Repainted: On Gary Shteyngart’s “Shylock on the Neva”

The Russian-American novelist Gary Shteyngart has frequently been called a “Gogolian” writer, usually in an attempt to explain the pedigree of his grotesque humour. This article focuses on Shteyngart’s story “Shylock on the Neva” (2002), which is a modern-day rewriting of Gogol'’s tale “Portret” [“The Portrait”]. A close analysis of Shteyngart’s text and comparison to its Gogolian model reveals a complex relation that is not necessarily centered on Gogol'’s humour. In his rewriting of “The Portrait,” Shteyngart emphasizes the inherent venality and vulgarity of Gogol'’s characters, who turn into grotesque caricatures of their prototypes. In doing so, he seems to “Gogolize” Gogol'’s tale by adding some of the absurd humour that critics have found to be lacking in “The Portrait.” By making a painting the focus of their stories, both Gogol' and Shteyngart engage in a self-reflective comment about art and the role of the creative artist. Similar to the clichéd hack-paintings of Gogol'’s painter Chartkov, artistic creation has been reduced in “Shylock on the Neva” to the production of postmodern simulacra based on stereotypes and cultural myths.     

With Strength and Struggle: A Teacher's Process of Transforming Science into Multicultural Science. Where is Multicultural Science in Science Education Reform?

This interpretive case study focuses on one middle school science teacher in the United States as she transforms her classroom based on her personal definition of science education that is multicultural. The teacher‐participated in a multicultural science institute over the course of four years which provided a framework for her change process. Critical to the change process was an acceptance of the responsibility to teach science to all students in her diverse classroom. Elements of her change process included incorporating a model of science known as the 3P's, as well as, a focus on multicultural perspectives and cooperative learning. Classroom practices were changed as a result of a complex interaction between her increasing conviction in the academic ability of her students and an evolving perception of science as a social construction.     

Demonizing the Sensible and the ‘Revolution of Our Generation’ in Rosia Montana

Abstract

‘Save Rosia Montana’ is an emblematic socio-ecological movement in post-communist Romania. It started in 2000 as a local reaction against what was projected to be the largest open-cast gold mine in Europe; it has gradually grown into a national movement with global networking. Activists have been consistently accused of acting under the impulse of an emotional luggage which could function as an impediment to understanding the ‘real’ issue, that of Romania's development. While the corporation claims to present the ‘real’ story articulated in the supposedly objective discourse of rational science, the choice to take a stance out of other beliefs has been demonized as emotional. This article will make a critical discourse analysis of corporate texts and Rosieni's testimonies to highlight what appears as ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’ discourse, how some phrases are presented as self-evident rationales while others are dismissed as inappropriate or ‘emotional’. Rosieni have created visibilities for new things, objects, languages, and projections that have been downplayed by the post-communist political context. The conflict is not just over cognitive aspects or valuation languages but also over how one is allowed to feel, what one is allowed to enjoy (doing), how is one supposed to live (spend time), what Ranciere calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’.