Recycling the orphan photograph: the new life of Jewish objects

The aim of this article is to explore the new lives of prewar photographs of European Jewry. In particular, I employ the concept of ‘orphan photograph’ which describes any work whose owners, producers, and the subjects featured in them are no longer available. Working from the premise that a photograph is not only a two-dimensional representation but also a three-dimensional object, I show how family images are consumed, distributed, discarded, salvaged and brought back to life. As I argue in this article, with the annihilation of their owners the once-important personal meanings of the pictures become obscured and obliterated. Subsequently, in post-Holocaust culture orphan photographs become invested with collective values. In the process of being recycled, these private family photographs are transformed into public spaces through which new visions of the past are projected and group interests promoted. Drawing on two case studies from Poland, I look at the ways in which these orphaned images are used by writers and NGOs, and examine how the various agents affect the subsequent readings of these artefacts. The article shows that once allowed to ‘speak for themselves’ these images reveal an immense capacity to challenge our pre-set notions of the past and escape the ‘backshadowing’ narrative of the Shoah.     

Beyond the body in a box: Visualizing contexts of children's action

Social scientists refer routinely to a range of social and cultural contexts in trying to understand children's lives, but this range may not include what children think or say about what they do. In this article, I examine how two girls thought about their efforts to mummify a Barbie Doll as part of a school project. Attending to what the girls said about their project led me to regard strings of related activities—as defined by kids—as an important but neglected context of children's action. After reviewing how the girls’ work cut across the contexts familiar to social scientists, I examine the implications of “activity series” for visualizing kids and their contexts, in theory and in photographs.     

Territories of images,technologies of memory

In this article I examine the classification and preservation systems applied to the Farm Security Administration‐Office of War Information Photograph Collection over the last sixty years, and how these different, and to some extent competing, systems have impacted on access to the photographs and the attribution of meaning to them. I discuss the way in which these systems are part of the struggle over the construction of a visual memory of the years 1935–1943.     

One hundred years of suffering? “Humanitarian crisis photography” and self-representation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Humanitarian images streaming from the ongoing conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are not “new”. In fact, contemporary aid and journalistic images strikingly mimic photographs created a century earlier during the Congo Reform Association’s humanitarian attack on Leopold II’s actions in the Congo Free State. This article explores the consistency of these photographic forms and their surrounding text, showing how the images of suffering are not simple reproductions of observed reality but carry personal, local and political meaning. By analysing image content as well as the subject and photographer’s experiences of image creation, this article expands beyond realist objectivity to encompass the subjects’ visual embodiment of subjective desires and expectations. Specifically, I examine how the photographic space composed of the photographer, camera and subject, becomes an intersection replete with competing expectations, hopes and tensions. To situate these images and their subjective, political and humanitarian weight within the DRC itself, I conclude with analysis of how the Congolese choose to present themselves to a different audience: themselves.     

Being Tough and Belonging: Technologies of Masculinity among Martial Arts Students in China

Literary masculinity has dominated Chinese society for thousands of years. Even in today's academic schools, boys with good academic performance have a higher status than those who are seen as ‘aggressive’ or ‘tough’. In this article I examine how students reconstruct the hierarchy of literary/martial masculinity in Shaolin martial arts schools, an alternative form of education in China. Rather than being disciplined into socially useful subjects, as expected by parents and school authorities, I show how martial arts students have reconstructed the symbolic meanings of masculinity and shaped a new space of belonging. Through displays of violence and cultivating toughness, students deploy technologies of martial masculinity to fit in with their peers and reproduce the masculine ethos of martial arts schools.     

Meaning and Identity in “Cyberspace”: The Performance of Gender,Class, and Race Online

This article explores issues of gendered, classed and raced identities using examples drawn from my research on a type of online forum known as a mud. I critique previous accounts of research regarding identity online which have suggested that online interactions encourage greater identity fluidity and multiplicity. Drawing on examples from face-to-face interviews and online interaction, I discuss several aspects of identity. I first examine participants' efforts to meet face-to-face and discuss their privileging of offline information regarding identity. Using two examples of “gender-switchers,” I then show how some participants distance themselves from experiences of gendered identities which might otherwise disrupt previously held beliefs about gender. Next I discuss classed and raced identities, which participants express in conversations about income and ethnicity. These discussions point to the interconnections between online and offline interpretations of class and race. Thus, in discussing these examples, I emphasize the need to examine not just online performances, but also the participants' interpretations of such performances. Despite the potentially disruptive effects of online ambiguity, many participants continue to believe in essence and continuity of identity.     

Of Mice,Rats, and Men: Exploring the Role of Rodents in Constructing Masculinity Within a Group of Young African American Males

In this article I demonstrate the process through which mice—generally characterized as meek and frightened creatures—are used symbolically by the participants in a study I conducted among boys on a high school basketball team to define masculinities that are consistent with what Connell (1995) calls hegemonic masculinity. I use ethnographic data, gathered as an assistant coach of the team, to argue that in managing their interaction with rodents, the young men and coaches, through their talk, transform their orientation to these creatures by constructing the rodents in a manner that encourages aggressive responses. Although the participants' use of mice is part of an idioculture (Fine 1987) that may be distinctive to the team, the meanings they create are consistent with a broader set of meanings and evaluations of men and masculinity.     

Overcoming the latecomer dilemma: the unintended effect of successful strategies in the community university movement in Taiwan

The existing research highlights how effective strategies facilitate social movements in recruiting participants and attracting resources. Less effort has been done to investigate the relationship between strategies and their long-term impact on the movement. In this article, I examine a grassroots education reform movement – the Community University Movement in Taiwan since 1998 to shed light on the dynamic relationship between initial strategies and the movement development. Specifically, I examine the latecomer phenomenon – one of the crucial consequences brought by initial strategies. Movement leaders often face a dilemma that encouraging broader participation runs the risk of attracting latecomers with diverse backgrounds to the movement. Based on my ethnographic work, I find that the latecomers bring four types of impacts to the community university movement – fragmentation, competition, goal replacement, and political-patronage. I further investigate how movement leaders coped with this situation. The findings show that without sufficient organizational capacity, movement leaders were in a weak position to harness the influence of the latecomers. I also find that those community universities founded by activists, in order to compete, had become more like their competitors to emphasize performance and efficiency. These findings thus highlight the importance of choosing the initial strategies that would minimize the potential negative effects brought by the latecomers.     

A symbolic representation of Wellington: how participatory painting processes enabled a more inclusive urban narrative

In this article I examine how a participatory painting project in Wellington enhanced cross-cultural understanding between former refugee and host-society participants and enabled a more inclusive urban narrative. In light of the current global humanitarian crisis, a climate of fear has arisen around refugees, which is often exacerbated by the media perpetuating misinformation and negative stereotypes. To counteract misrepresentation, the painting project provided a space for participants to share their lived experiences of home, belonging, and public visibility. A scholar activist orientation was employed, informed by a participatory action research epistemology. These philosophical foundations influenced a qualitative multi-method methodology consisting of painting workshops, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and public feedback. Through the process of painting a collaborative mural, participants used symbolism to deconstruct language barriers, elicit new ideas, and co-construct a more inclusive narrative whereby differences were negotiated rather than excluded, oppressed, or assimilated. In this manner, social unity was achieved in such a way that it that did not over-ride diversity.     

Visualizing Structure: Reading Surfaces of Social Life

This paper reports on the use of aerial photographs to study the social structure of a dairy farm neighborhood in St. Lawrence County, New York. The paper compares information from aerial photographs of farmsteads and farm work to data gathered in a sociological survey. I examine how the visual data compares to other sociological information; how photographs, in this research, amplify, supplement, or contextualize nonvisual data.     

Practicing gender in youth sports

To learn more about gender identity and sports participation, I observed and photographed two mixed‐gender teams of six and seven year‐old soccer players in a youth sports program. My observations of these twenty‐six children (twelve boys and fourteen girls) were made at practices and games during the Fall soccer season of 1997. I also conducted photo‐elicitation interviews with five girls and five boys on the two teams. Field notes, photographs and interviews documented some of the gendered and non‐gendered behavior engaged in by the children and interviews revealed how the children thought about this. One intriguing pattern was that the young soccer players interacted freely with teammates of the other gender during adult‐structured exercises, yet self‐separated by gender when allowed to structure their own activities. This finding has important implications for understanding the social construction of gender and for strengthening gender equity provisions in youth sports programs.     

Interprofessional Learning: Reasons,Judgement, and Action

This article uses the theoretical and methodological tools of cultural historical activity theory and critical realism to examine three case studies of the introduction and expansion of sustainable agricultural practices in southern Africa. The article addresses relevant issues in the field of agricultural extension, which lacks a theoretical “bridge” between top-down knowledge transfer and bottom-up participatory approaches to learning. Further, the article considers the learning environments necessary for sustainable agriculture. Such environments provided research participants with encounters with “postnormal” scientific practices that recognise and engage plural ways of knowing. Our research explored why farmers learn and practise sustainable agriculture, how they learn and practise it, the contradictions they are facing, and how these contradictions can be overcome in a context of change-oriented learning.     

Living with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy: Relational Autonomy and Decision‐Making

Interviews were conducted with boys and young men who have Duchenne muscular dystrophy, exploring their thoughts on making a decision to participate in medical research. This article focuses on one of the key findings, discussing how the participants identified their parents as carers, spokespersons and advisors. The term ‘relational autonomy’ encapsulates these co‐operative relationships, illustrating how they can help young people living with a degenerative disability to exercise some agency and autonomy. The boys and their families have demonstrated how disabled children who are physically dependent can be supported by their parents, without compromising independence.     

The power to fix the gaze: Gender and class in Victorian photographs of pit‐brow women

This article considers how Victorian discourses on gender and class operate both within and upon Victorian photographs of women miners (pit‐brow women) in their working clothes. The photographs come from the personal collection of Arthur J. Munby, a bourgeois man of the period. In contrast to other studies undertaken on his collection, this article considers these photographs in the context of their commercial sale. Thus this article aims to investigate why Victorian men, such as Munby, purchased such photographs. The article does this by rebuilding the discursive field that gave these photographs meaning. This reveals that the way in which these photographs were actively constructing categories of difference (class and gender) allowed them to signify in a number or erotic and sexualized ways. Furthermore, the article exposes how these particular photographs carried specific meanings of the erotic because these women, unlike other working‐class women, wore trousers. Finally it reveals the power such discourses held in structuring the experience of being a woman miner in the 1860's.     

Visualising the invisible: a guided walk around the Pendleton Housing Estate,Salford, UK

A visual essay and short reflective text that works in response to the images within, and the experiences felt, as I was taken on a gentrification walk of a deprived council estate on the edge of Salford, in the North West of England. Split into two sections, the writing is a response to four photographs taken while guides, John van Aitken and Jane Brake of the Institute of Urban Dreaming, highlighted the manufacturing of precarity and engineered deprecation in the area. Originally written as one of a collection of responses by a number of participants to their politically orientated walks, the short visual essay outlines how visual practices and photo-walking as a methodology enable us to see otherwise invisible aspects of slow, political and administrative violence.     

Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.     

Place,space, networks,and the sustainability of collective action: the Madres de Plaza de Mayo

This article provides a framework for analysing social movements and explaining how collective action can be sustained through networks. Drawing on current relational views of place and space, I offer a spatialized conception of social networks that critically synthesizes network theory, research on social movements, and the literature on the spatial dimensions of collective action. I examine the historic and contemporary network geographies of a group of human rights activists in Argentina (the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) and explain the duration of their activism over a period of more than two decades with regard to the concept of geographic flexibility. To be specific, first I show how, through the practice of place‐based collective rituals, activists have maintained network cohesion and social proximity despite physical distance. Second, I examine how the construction of strategic networks that have operated at a variety of spatial scales has allowed the Madres to access resources that are important for sustaining mobilization strategies. Finally, I discuss how the symbolic depiction of places has been used as a tool to build and sustain network connections among different groups. I conclude by arguing that these three dimensions of the Madres’ activism account for their successful development of geographically flexible networks, and that the concept of geographic flexibility provides a useful template for studies of the duration and continuity of collective action.     

Breasted experiences in pregnancy: an examination through photographs

Drawing on qualitative data from a sample of pregnant women in Hobart, Australia this article uses ‘feminist’ ‘memory work’ and the ‘photovoice’ method as frames for discussing the ways in which interviews and participant-produced photographs may be used to trace and understand pregnant embodiment. I argue that digital photographs taken by women during pregnancy can reveal important information about how they negotiate their own experiences of breastedness and wearing maternity underwear over time. Here, the concept of ‘breastedness’ itself is expanded as women’s individual embodied experiences of pregnancy are reflected in the production and viewing of their own photographic images.