Young people in a city of culture: ‘Ultimate beneficiaries’ or ‘Economic migrants’?

There is burgeoning literature on cities that host major cultural events. However, there is surprisingly very little empirical research focusing specifically on young people and cities of culture, so we have limited knowledge in terms of how young people actually experience and interpret cultural events. Given this, we offer an important and timely contribution to such debates. Our spatial focus is Derry/Londonderry (D/L) in Northern Ireland. During 2013 D/L was the UK’s inaugural City of Culture (CoC). The bid document and legacy plans for CoC stated that young people would be ‘cultural assets’ during 2013 and the ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of the CoC legacy [Derry City Council 2010. Cracking the Code. City of Culture 2013. Derry: Derry City Council, 2013a. Our Legacy Promise. Building on the Success of 2013. Derry: Derry City Council, 2013b. Legacy Plan 2013–2023. Derry: Derry City Council]. This paper unpacks and analyses the extent to which young people in D/L related to and engaged with CoC and, arguably more importantly, how CoC affected their plans and aspirations for the future. Our research problematises the claim that young people were the ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of CoC; most strikingly, it shows that young people, despite offering very positive views, both expect and desire to live in cities other than D/L. As such, the debilitating long-standing trend of economic migration of young people will continue raising important issues for local stakeholders.     

Why Postmodern Theory may be a Problematic Basis for Therapeutic Practice: A Feminist Perspective

Both poststructural and social constructionist thinking are imbued with a masculine bias. First, I demonstrate that Foucault's theory of power and knowledge fails to take into account the female experience of power and the gendered nature of knowledge production. With the support of psychoanalytic theory I also claim that Foucault's theory of the ‘social’, ‘discursive’ production of ‘selves’ omits the contribution of the prelinguistic but no less ‘social’ mother–infant relationship, and in so doing obscures the prelinguistic foundations of emotionality. This poststructural reduction of ‘selves’ to, and subsequent subsuming of emotionality within, the instance of ‘language’, ‘discourse’ or ‘narrative’, is, I claim, replicated in the social constructionist thinking of Gergen and Bruner. Finally, I consider some of the consequences of a therapeutic practice which has its foundations in these two interrelated bodies of thought, suggesting, from a feminist perspective, that a major shortcoming of this narrative practice is its failure to attend to emotionality.     

Mediating affect in John Pilger’s Utopia: ‘the good life’ as a structure of whiteness

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought of as an affective structure, theorizing whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. In this context, Utopia [2013. Film. Directed by John Pilger. Australia: Antidote Films] specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The article develops by unpacking this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film's journey to Rottnest Island – formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers – to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective surfaces of whiteness by analyzing the film's encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ [Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and Indigenous ‘slow death’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press]. Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia [Nicolacopoulos, T. and Vassilacopoulos, G., 2014. Indigenous sovereignty and the being of the occupier: manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins. Melbourne: Re.press]. Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession – including, in the form of life – disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding and state-induced impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of the affective relations that mediate whiteness.     

Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism

Abstract

“Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism” asks why Atwood crosses the Canada-US border in her dystopian fiction. It takes Atwood’s 2004 comments that The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) partly grew out of her ‘irritation when people say “it can’t happen here”’ and her claim that she decided to set the novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts as being related to that irritation—’”It can’t happen here,” she explained, “should be placed in the most extreme ‘here”’—as a prompt. Focusing on Oryx and Crake (2003), this article argues that one of Atwood’s motivations for crossing the Canada-US border in this novel is to provoke us to develop what Giovanna Di Chiro has termed ‘a scale-crossing environmental consciousness.’ Oryx and Crake challenges us to think about environmentalism in relation to local, embodied experiences as well as on a global, transnational scale.     

Building good knowledge or blaming bad parents? Examining the construction of parents and parenting in a corpus of parent focussed cochlear implant research articles

Parents of deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) report feeling pressure to adhere to a very prescribed conceptualisation of ‘good parenting’, and in some cases report feeling judged or blamed, for example, if the child's progress post-CI is slower than expected. Previous investigations of the discourses of parenting science suggest that, while parent blame is rarely expressed explicitly, that normative, moral assumptions about how ‘good parents of a disabled child’ should feel, think and act are embedded within prevalent concepts and terminology. A disproportionate focus on evaluating individual parents' personal characteristics at the expense of more external, socially located issues has also been noted. Existing critiques, together with the author's lived experience provide the impetus for this study; in which corpus linguistics methods have been used to document the types of parents and parenting attributes constructed in a 420,982 corpus of research articles. The results indicate the prevalence of many highly evaluative parenting noun-collocates within the field; successful adaptation, a positive appraisal of the situation, realistic expectations, rational decisions, high involvement and full-time use of the CI are conflated with good parenting, whilst parents who present in alternate ways are construed as problematic. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Not without my sister(s)

Less than two months after 11 September 2001, and a few weeks after the beginning of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush made an urgent plea to see Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar. Not only did the President want to see Kandahar; he encouraged US citizens to view it as well. This article offers two readings of Kandahar – the first suggestive of what its filmmaker Makhmalbaf saw in Afghanistan and the second suggestive of what Bush saw (or hoped to see) in Makhmalbaf's Afghanistan. In particular, this article focuses on how the Bush administration – against the intentions of Kandahar's director and star – propelled occidental subjects to ‘lift the veil’ on Afghanistan and on Afghan women by viewing Kandahar as if it positioned the feminine as a needy and willing object of US rescue. It was in part by laying this particular claim to the separated sisters of Kandahar that the Bush administration constructed a humanitarian US ‘we’ as among the foundations of its ‘moral grammar of war’ in the war on terror.     

Portraits of work: mapping emerging coworking dynamics

ABSTRACT

Today’s patterns of work are very much defined by the ‘lean enterprise’ practice, taking form in organizations that are more competitive, customer-driven and agile on the one hand (Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (2007). Lean Solutions. New York: Simon & Schuster), and the separation of work from time and space on the other (Hochschild, A. (1997). The time bind. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books). Concepts like work and workspace are subject to an evolving nature and get a new meaning (Kirsh, D. (2000). A few thoughts on cognitive overload. Intellectia, 1(30), 19–51). This triggered the rise of new working spaces, fuelled by the aftermath of the global economic crisis that transformed the practices and meanings of work. Nevertheless, this applies only to particular sectors. This paper builds on the case of Genk, an important economic pole in the Limburg Region of Belgium. The development in the region has always been related to labour-intensive industrial activities. In light of these working shifts targeting mainly big companies/employers, Genk has turned a blind eye on the local proprietors. What about the small entrepreneurs/community economies addressing mainly the local clientele? What evolution do we see in their working pattern? By using a specific visualization tool, a series of interviews were conducted in order to explore in a playful way, existing social and economic networks. The interviews reveal networks that shape a coworking model. The paper will further present the scale of this ‘coworking’ phenomenon experienced in Genk, perceived to be the ‘new model of coworking’ in the context of the collaborative and sharing economy.     

‘Let your indulgence set me free’: reflections on an ‘Africanised’ Tempest and its implications for critical practice

A joint production of The Tempest by Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Company and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre raises questions about the possibilities, and difficulties, of the deliberate ‘Africanisation’ of Shakespeare. I argue that the discursive fields within which ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ are read carry significations that preclude easy acknowledgement. I consider the interpretative function an unapologetic, celebratory ‘Africa’ performs when it is put in conversation with canonical Shakespeare. Drawing on Terence Hawkes’s notion of ‘presentism’, I argue that in its effects this particular staging gives life both to the partisan discourse of public forgiveness in South Africa and to the powerful figure of ‘Shakespeare’. An African Tempest that engages the discourse of forgiveness allows ‘Shakespeare’ to share in the sociality invoked by ubuntu. Post‐apartheid theatre would do better to resist a post‐Truth and Reconciliation Commission hope of transcendence and an iconic ‘Shakespeare’. However, it may take great boldness to claim the latitude with which to trespass beyond an apparently familiar ‘Africa’ and an uninterrogated ‘Shakespeare’. The cultural legacies of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ need to be treated with the kind of unflinching critique of self and society that Edward Said deems central to the work of the humanities.     

One-dimensional times: a dialectical response to the Irish Times’ coverage of the global financial crisis

A growing literature claims that critique of neoliberal capitalism after the global financial crisis (GFC) has been ‘captured’ within the logic of capital. Such research argues that ‘capture’ is achieved through a process whereby critique of neoliberalism is transformed into arguments for more neoliberalism. This creates a one-dimensional ‘recovery’ discourse. Drawing on Marcuse’s theory outlining ‘one-dimensional society’ and critical discourse analysis, this study assesses the relevancy of such claims for an Irish medium, the Irish Times, through an examination of GFC-related discourse during 2009–2010. This study finds that economic discourse in the Irish Times is captured when organisational bias allows pro-neoliberal actors from business and government privileged access to discourse production. We engage a call from organisation studies for a dialectical reading of captured discourse. We end with a discussion of the limits of this reflexive approach to capitalism’s contradictions for disrupting its ongoing hegemony.     

The Defeat of the Guitar Army: Don DeLillo,John Sinclair,and the Rock Revolution

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street is seldom analysed as a serious engagement with the rock music and countercultural politics of the 1960s, yet these constitute its historical context, its subject matter, and its central concerns. An historicized reading positions the novel as an intervention into contemporary debates about the causes and consequences of the defeat of the 1960s ‘rock revolution’. These debates were most thoroughly synthesized by the rock culture’s chief agitator and organic intellectual John Sinclair in his 1972 book Guitar Army. Like Guitar Army, Great Jones Street dwells on the connections between the political failure of the rock revolution and the provenance and validity of rock’s anti-rational aesthetic. Sinclair finds political hope in re-emphasizing rock’s anti-rationalism, rooted equally in black music and the psychedelic experience. More sceptical, DeLillo offers a very different reading of the rock culture’s view of African American aesthetics and its use of psychedelics.     

Change Management Study of Horticulture 2015 — Conditions and Success Factors

The increasing organizational size, as a result of the industry's structural change, is leading to crises in German horticultural companies. Therefore, the present study examines the causes of fundamental change processes in horticultural companies, indicates the overriding trends and identifies the success factors of change initiatives. For this purpose, over 150 decision-makers with over 10 years’ experience in their respective organization were surveyed from May to December 2014. The megatrends are environmental issues, changed consumer behavior, resource shortages and the labor market. Currently, the reasons for change lie in a changing market strategy/sales approach, business succession and submission and external changes in the legal conditions. Among the most difficult problems occurring in the implementation of change processes are low willingness to take responsibility, interest and goal conflicts of the involved organization's members and a sacrifice of long-term actions for short-term profit improvements. The most important success factors of change processes include realistic, clear visions/goals and their communication, team spirit and motivation and a coordinated chronological procedure. Six factors of the psychological level of the change success are presented. The results of the study can help to recommend a design for change processes in companies within horticultural manufacturing.     

PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

This essay traces a body of work, as it emerges in the space between visual art and an engagement in the public sphere. A range of projects and exhibitions, using photography as medium, is described in the context of a discussion about the complexity of the photographic transaction. All of these projects explore notions of intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in the South African public cultural domain. The essay focuses particularly on Hotel Yeoville (2010), a participatory public art project-based online and in the library of the old Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. Yeoville's estimated 40,000 inhabitants are largely disenfranchised migrants and refugees from every part of the African continent. The project comprised a website and an exhibition space with a series of digital, interactive booths in which members of the public were invited to document themselves through mapping, video, photography, text and social media applications. The essay reflects upon the performative, evocative and expressive potentials of the media platforms that could be accessed through the Hotel Yeoville installation and in this particular social and political context asks questions about the photographic encounter and its relationship to self-representation, truth, knowledge and power.     

Infectious Innovations? The Diffusion of Tactical Innovation in Social Movement Networks,the Case of Suffragette Militancy

This paper explores the diffusion of a tactical innovation – militancy – within the British Suffrage Movement, 1905–1914. It concentrates upon the influences that arise from personal social networks and which affect ego's decision about whether to adopt the new tactic. UCINET is used to map and visualise the activist networks of two suffragettes who made different adoption decisions. This reveals that ‘weak ties’ to ‘innovation champions’ (i.e. suffragette ‘travelling organisers’) connected both women to opportunities to learn about, observe and adopt militancy. In order to explain why one suffragette adopted the tactic and the other did not, however, there is a need to link structural and cultural analyses of social networks together. Here, I do this by following up empirically what Fuhse [Fuhse, J. (2009). The meaning structure of social networks. Sociological Theory, 27, 51–73] has called the ‘meaning structure of the network’ consisting of interpersonal expectations and network culture. I propose that the ‘meaning structure’ of the network is linked to the structural patterning of social ties – and the subjective meanings of ego – through the communicative interaction in which they both are rooted [Mische, A. (2003). Cross-talk in movements: Rethinking the culture-network link. In M. Diani & D. McAdam (Eds.), Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to collective action (pp. 258–280). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press]. Focusing on communicative interaction and intersubjective meanings indicates that there is value in approaching personal networks as socio-cultural ‘lifeworlds’ [Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, volume 2: System and lifeworld. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Passy, F., & Giugni, M. (2000). Life-spheres, networks, and sustained participation in social movements: A phenomenological approach to political commitment. Sociological Forum, 15, 117–144.). This approach is particularly valuable in highlighting the construction of a ‘moral point of view’ within networks, which fundamentally shapes the symbolic legitimacy of culturally controversial tactics.     

Do today’s sociologists really appreciate Weber’s essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?

It is noted that Max Weber is held in very high regard by the majority of contemporary sociologists, while his essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is generally considered his most important as well as his most famous work. However attention is drawn to the marked contradiction between the practice of today’s sociologists in routinely heaping praise on this essay and the fact that their own self‐confessed theoretical statements constitute a direct rejection of Weber’s approach. This contradiction is illustrated by demonstrating that although The Protestant Ethic is essentially an examination of the role of motives in human action the concept of motive is effectively missing from contemporary sociology. A possible explanation for this apparent contradiction is then considered in the form of the claim that those theoretical positions favoured by contemporary sociologists could be considered as ‘developed out of’ or ‘descended from’ Weber’s theory of ‘motivational understanding’. This however is shown to be an untenable claim, given that the vocabulary of motives perspective, the treatment of motives as reasons, and rational choice theory all represent straightforward rejections of Weber’s position. Consequently it is concluded that there remains an unresolved and largely unrecognised contradiction between the iconic status accorded to Weber’s essay by contemporary sociologists and their own very obvious rejection of his theoretical approach.     

I am not that Caitlin: a critique of both the transphobic media reaction to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover shoot and of passing

In this article I discuss and critique transphobic media reactions to the celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s 2015 Vanity Fair cover shoot. I then consider these in the light of Garfinkel, H. [1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall] concept of ‘passing’ in his celebrated case story of Agnes and argue that ‘passing’ is often conflated with ‘being out’. I argue that the two are significantly different and claim that the former is implicitly based on a public lie. I use several auto-ethnographic narratives to illustrate the argument.     

The Professional's Influence within the Client System: Exploring Counter-Transference and Adult Attachment within the Therapeutic Relationships with Children Experiencing Abuse and Their Caregivers

A large amount of research has been completed on the impact of abuse and neglect on children's brain development, attachment and behaviour (Malinosky-Rummell &; Hansen, 1993, ‘Long-term consequences of childhood physical abuse’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 114, pp. 68–79; Margolin &; Gordis, 2000, ‘The effect of family and community violence on children’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 51, pp. 445–479; Perry, 2002, ‘Childhood experiences and the expression of genetic potential: what childhood neglect tells us about nature and nurture’, Brain and Mind, vol. 3, pp. 79–100; van der Kolk, 2005, ‘Developmental trauma disorder’, Psychiatric Annuals, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 401–408). Research has also begun to address the impact on the professional's and carer's psychological well-being, as a result of working with children who have experienced abuse and neglect (Cunningham, 1999 Cunningham, M. (1999) ‘The impact of sexual abuse treatment on the social work clinician’, Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 277–290. doi: 10.1023/A:1022334911833.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ‘The impact of sexual abuse treatment on the social work clinician’, Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, vol. 16, pp. 277–290; Trippany, Kress and Wilcoxon, 2004, ‘Preventing vicarious trauma: what counsellors should know when working with trauma survivors’, Journal of Counselling and Development, vol. 82, pp. 31–37; Conrad &; Kellar-Guenther, 2006, ‘Compassion fatigue, burnout and compassion satisfaction among Colorado child protection workers’, Child Abuse and Neglect, vol. 30, pp. 1071–1080). Psycho-dynamic concepts such as projection and splitting have begun to be explored in how children who have experienced abuse communicate their experience to their carers and the professionals involved with them. Some authors (Dale et al., 1986, Dangerous Families: Assessment and Treatment of Child Abuse, Tavistock Publications, London) have also explored the impact of the psycho-dynamics on the treatment team and the ‘splitting’ that can occur among professionals involved with the child. This paper aims to extend this reflection to also consider the impact of the professional's attachment history, early childhood experiences and current personal relationships on the child and caregiver's systems. Therefore, concepts such as counter-transference and adult attachment styles within the therapeutic relationship are explored and examples provided from my own practice.     

On the relation between ‘visual research methods’ and contemporary visual culture

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.     

Enhancing the entertainment experience of blind and low‐vision theatregoers through touch tours

In this paper we demonstrate how universal design theory and the research available on museum‐based touch tours can be used to develop a touch tour for blind and low‐vision theatregoers. We discuss these theoretical and practical approaches with reference to data collected and experience gained from the creation and execution of a touch tour for Hart House Theatre’s production of Hamlet at the University of Toronto. Finally, we offer up the possibility of using universal design theory to create a touch tour that would be attractive to all theatregoers.