Negotiating and Practicing Performance: An Ethnographic Study of a Musical Open Mic in Brooklyn,New York

This qualitative study explores amateur musicians and their performance negotiations at a weekly “open mic” in Brooklyn, New York. These musicians and their performance negotiations are juxtaposed against the larger cultural structures of musical scenes and musical art worlds. Opportunities and pathways are few for amateur musicians to practice and negotiate the craft of performance. This study examines the negotiation of the presumed boundaries between musical practice and performance within an open mic scene constructed by and for amateur musicians who are marginal to the larger musical art world.     

Creativity and Learning Jazz: The Practice of “Listening”

This article is about interaction, culture, and creativity. The ethnographic setting is a set of jazz performance classes at a California university. Although I write about jazz music, the reader need not have a background in studying or performing jazz (or music in general) to understand this article. In the title of the article, the term “practice” refers to (1) “listening” as a culturally specific communicative practice, and (2) the practice (a.k.a. rehearsal) of that culturally specific version of “listening”. I document and analyze how jazz instructors communicate with students about group interplay during musical performance. Extrapolating from this focus, I suggest some ways that contemporary linguistic anthropology can contribute to theories of creativity, focusing on the role that cultural norms of interaction defined by a particular activity play in constraining or shaping creative processes.     

The sampling continuum: musical aesthetics and ethics in the age of digital production

This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist within and across musical methods wherein sampling is part of the spectrum of activities. Thirdly, we discuss the ubiquity of digital technology within popular music production and the resultant closer relationship between sampling and other musical techniques moving onto, fourthly, how the sampling aesthetic has become integrated into musical practice in a manner insufficiently accounted for by its legal and industrial contexts. This ‘post-sampling’ reality places sampling and other musical techniques along a spectrum, in practical and ethical terms, and musicians would be better served by sampling being treated as part of the overall musical palette, allowing both scholars and the law to concentrate on ideologies of practice across the tools that musicians use rather than between different specific techniques.     

TEACHING NOTES: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES AND SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION

This study surveyed social work educators about the importance of multiple intelligences for social work practice and social work education. The sample consisted of 91 faculty members who responded to an online survey that asked them to rate the importance of 7 intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal) for overall social work practice, culturally competent practice, and social work education content areas. Interpersonal, intrapersonal, and linguistic intelligences were endorsed as the most important intelligences for social work practice and education; bodily-kinesthetic, musical and spatial intelligences for culturally competent social work practice. Implications for social work education and future work in this new area are recommended.     

Performance measurement: Some conceptual issues

Measures of how well a system is operating are clearly of interest to a wide range of users, from organizational researchers to system managers. The current literatures in such areas as “performance measurement, ” “organizational effectiveness, ” and the like show little consistency in their definitions of terms or in their methods for generating measures. The present paper attempts a clarification of these issues in the form of a conceptual minimalist position which requires only three basic definitions, and leaves, as far as possible, all remaining issues open to empirical investigation.We first review the literature on “organizational effectiveness” contrasting the organizational goals and systems paradigms, and note the lack of either theoretical or empirical convergence between the two. An examination of the nature of effectiveness statements suggests that this failure of convergence flows mainly from the different criterion sets generated by the two paradigms — and, importantly, that one should not expect convergence on a single measure or set of measures which uniquely define how well a system is performing. One's view of how well a given system is performing is a function of where one stands (either theoretically or in relationship to the system), and pursuit of the one true set of performance measures is a futile exercise. Instead, we propose to redirect attention to the identification of the various individuals and groups (“constituencies”) with an interest in system performance, and to the investigation of those items of system relevant information (their “performance measure sets”) which do, in fact, change their evaluations of how well the system is performing. This perspective will, we hope, redirect effort from futile theoretical debate to empirical investigations of what measures are used, by whom, and to what effect, in specific settings.     

What Are the Correlates of Infertility-Related Clinical Anxiety? A Literature Review and the Presentation of a Conceptual Model

Infertility is a major stressor for many couples. Although several reviews addressing psychological distress and depression within infertile couples exist, less emphasis has been placed on infertility-related anxiety. Yet it is important to know whether clinical anxiety is a prevalent problem among infertile couples and what are the characteristics of those suffering from clinical anxiety. The present article summarizes the literature on infertility-related anxiety published between 1997 and 2008 and presents a model of infertility-related clinical anxiety that identifies variables that may distinguish individuals who present with clinical anxiety from those who successfully cope with infertility. This model is intended to inform both research and clinical practice with partners of infertile couples. Methodological shortcomings of infertility research and recommendations for future studies are also discussed.     

Omniscience at the Edge of Chaos: complexity,defences and change in a Children and Families Social Work department

ABSTRACT

This paper will explore a period of organisational change in a Children and Families Social Work team, applying ideas from complexity theory and psychoanalysis to explore the changes that occurred. In doing so it will critique the Newtonian concept of cause-and-effect linear causality, instead positing a nonlinear model of an organisation as a complex adaptive system in flux as it interacts with its environment. The paper will go on to posit that Bion’s psychoanalytic concepts of Omniscience and K Activity are self-organising forces in social care organisations, and when anxiety is not managed effectively, reductionist technical-rationale approaches to Children and Families Social Work dominate practice. It will conclude by outlining how the organisation’s effective management of anxiety through the creation of containment, created a series of organisational changes. These changes better supported the management of the complexity and uncertainty inherent in the social work task, raising possibilities of improvements in social work practice beyond the organisation.     

The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices in a Rural Albertan Community

Amid growing concerns over nutrition, food safety, and the relationship between health and environment, anxiety about the general deskilling around food‐related activities has garnered significant public interest and academic inquiry. Mainstream agriculture commodity and retail food chains are failing to meet the concerns citizens are expressing about their food. This has contributed to a relearning of skills of procuring, preparing, and preserving food. This qualitative study looks at the practice of home preserving in a rural Albertan community through a social practice theory framework. I test two premises set out by Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012): First, social practices consist of three elements (materials, competencies, and meanings) that are integrated when practices are enacted; second, that practices emerge, persist, and disappear as links among these defining elements are made and broken. I demonstrate how the integration of the elements enabled canning as a practice to flourish during a certain period. I then explore how the disintegration of the elements contributed to the decline of the same practice in later years. By examining the connections and breakages in the links between materials, meanings, and competencies, I illustrate the essentiality of integration of elements in order for practices to exist.     

Work,Performance, and the Social Ethic of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice in Contemporary India

This ethnographic essay focuses on the relationship between religious performances and the “strong discourse” of contemporary global capitalism. It explores the subjective meaning and social significance of religious practice in the context of a rapidly expanding mass religious phenomenon in India. The narrative draws on Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian philosophy and popular culture. It shows that religion here is primarily a means of performing to and preparing for an informal economy. It gives the chance to live meaningful social lives while challenging the inequities and symbolic violence of an imposing global capitalist social ethic. Unlike exclusive formal institutions that are increasingly governed by neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open and freely accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove their resolve, gifts, and sincerity. In contrast to the focus on social anomie and the reactionary characterization of contemporary religion in identity‐based arguments, this essay demonstrates that religious practice here is simultaneously a way of performing to and performing against a totalizing capitalist social order.     

Tapping your way to success: using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to reduce anxiety and improve communication skills in social work students

By the nature of their professional training and practice placements, social work students are prone to situations provoking the onset of anxiety. A programme of academic and placement support, termed the ‘Skills Lab’, provides help and support for students to develop their communication skills and prepare for their practice placements and transition into professional social work practice. Skills Lab evaluations indicated a high level of appreciation, linked with a strong sense of apprehension and anxiety, which some students report has negatively affected their performance. To address student anxiety, a pilot study using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) was developed. EFT is an intervention, which may potentially be effective in reducing academic anxiety and enhancing public speaking. This mixed-methods pilot study measured participants’ (n = 45) subjective distress and anxiety before and after using EFT. Subjective distress/anxiety was invoked through a 15-min assignment lecture. Twelve of the 45 students also participated in one-one interviews to elaborate on their experiences of EFT. Quantitative findings indicated participants reported significantly less subjective distress and anxiety after using EFT. Qualitative findings indicated three themes whereby participants found EFT calming, relaxing and helpful; considered the transferability of EFT in other settings; and proposed some of the mechanisms of EFT’s action.     

Creativity as mediated action: A comparison of improvisational performance and product creativity

This paper elaborates the notion of mediated action through a comparison of group improvisational performance and the product‐oriented creative domains studied by psychology. Semiotically mediated interaction is central to both forms of creativity: in group improvisation, the interaction is parallel and simultaneous, communication between performers is mediated by musical or verbal symbolic structures, and is thus synchronies in product‐oriented creative domains, interaction between creating individuals is mediated by ostensible products in the domain, the interaction is over long time spans, and thus is historical or diachronic. After presenting a model of mediated action, six interactional dimensions of contrast are described which are characteristic of both synchronic and diachronic creative interaction. By demonstrating these processual parallels between synchronic and diachronic creativity, the model suggests that the study of performance has several implications for the broader study of creativity. The focus on processes of symbolic interaction represents an application of the mediated action concept to both product creativity and improvisational performance.     

Facilitating Transition Among Transgender Clients: Components of Effective Clinical Practice

Although transgender clients seek services in a number of settings in which social workers practice, there is a dearth of scholarly literature available to guide effective clinical practice with this population. When transgender issues are included in the practice literature, the trend has been to consolidate the needs of transgender clients with those of the larger lesbian, gay, and bisexual community or to simply focus on increasing the comfort level of clinicians working with this population. This is concerning because transgender individuals represent a vulnerable subgroup of clients with unique and specific treatment needs related to the transition experience. Social workers play a critical role; they may serve transgender clients and their families in many ways: as advocate, educator, diagnostician, and individual, couples or family therapist. The purpose of this article is to identify several key components of trans-specific clinical practice and the role of social workers in supporting and facilitating client transition. Specifically, the authors will discuss: (a) relevant definitions and terminology, (b) emerging issues related to depathologizing the needs and experiences of transgender individuals, (c) the critical elements of trans-specific clinical assessment, and (d) clinical advocacy associated with the medical legal and social aspects of the transition process. Specific recommendations for trans-affirmative social work practice will be offered.     

Working with Narratives

ABSTRACT

This article will discuss healing across cultures and describe narrative practice as a means of access to coping strategies in African American folk beliefs and traditional healing practices. Four elements were found in empirical research on folk healing among African Americans: spirituality, ritual, the power of words, and dreams. These culture-specific healing elements often emerge as themes in personal narratives about coping in response to stress, crisis, and trauma. Viewing healing elements as themes is a useful framework for construing meanings from clients' experiences of stress, trauma, and crisis and coping strategies embedded in folk beliefs and traditional healing practices.

Additionally, the author presents a structured interview questionnaire for identifying folk healing themes, illustrates narrative practice as an approach for integrating folk beliefs and healing practices, and discusses implications for clinical training.     

Organizing creation: The role of musical text

This study considers how the work of an amateur orchestra creating a concert performance of a Haydn's concerto is organized by the musical score. The method of inquiry which places the text in the centre of the analysis explores how the surrounding social relations and discourses are carried into an actual work-in-progress; in this process, the score is a link between the macro level of musical discourse embodied in other texts, the related macro level of performance history, and the micro level of individual performance, finally connecting the individual work of actual composers to the exposition of that work. The study furthers existing ethnomethodological and phenomenological examinations of orchestral performance by exposing some of the relations underlying the taken-for-granted ‘common ground’ of the score.     

Of pain,passing and longing for music

Despite musicology’s historic veneration of ‘tragic’ (mostly physically or mentally impaired) artists, disability studies is still a new and controversial field in music scholarship. This essay addresses the recent emergence of disability studies in music scholarship from the perspective of a non‐visibly disabled musician and researcher. It examines the internal dissonance of passing as pain‐free and non‐disabled, the limitations of focusing on visible difference in musical performance and the complexities of performance where impairment, damage or pain is aurally evident, connecting the listener to the performer’s body. It calls for the study of musical bodies in all their manifestations, using pain and disability as analytic constructs.     

‘Stumbling through’? Relationship-based social work practice in austere times

In recent times relationship-based practice has become a familiar term in social work practice and education. Despite its widespread adoption, how relationship-based practice is understood varies widely. Drawing on contemporary conceptualisations of the child and family and individuals as psychosocial subjects experiencing social suffering, this paper explores how current social work practice can be understood in the context of neoliberalism and austerity. Setting these ideas in an historical context helps to inform our understanding as to why social work seems to be the focus of sustained political discontent and scrutiny, making it difficult to retain a balanced relationship-based professional stance. Contemporary responses to the current challenges of everyday practice are outlined and the contribution of psychodynamic and systemic ideas to promoting relationship-based practice is explored. The paper concludes by considering how the concept of social systems as defences against anxiety can inform our understanding of the resistance amongst practitioners to relationship-based practice and emphasises the importance of reflective spaces and places for developing and maintaining integrated, mature relational approaches to practice which impact on practice at both the individual casework and social structural level.     

Mindfulness: an intervention for anxiety in schizophrenia

Despite evidence that individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders experience significant and persistent symptoms of anxiety, there are few reports of the use of empirically supported treatments for anxiety in this population. This article describes how we have tried to adapt mindfulness interventions to help individuals with schizophrenia who experience significant anxiety symptoms. Although mindfulness has been widely used to help individuals without psychosis, to our knowledge, this is the first study adapting it to help those with schizophrenia manage worry and stress. We provide an overview of the intervention and use an individual example to describe how our treatment development group responded. We also explore directions for future research of mindfulness interventions for schizophrenia.     

Investigating consumption anxiety thesis: aesthetic choice, narrativisation and social performance

Warde's (1994 ) theoretical analysis of possible anxieties provoked in the act of consumption synthesises a large body of contemporary literature on uncertainty, social change and consumption. In doing so, it offers a predominantly structural model of the anxiety provoking tensions and forces individual consumers may be exposed to. Drawing on the work of contemporary figurehead theorists of social change, and proposing his own application of Durkheim's model of suicide to the problem of consumption anxiety, Warde presents a model of how anxieties and their mitigation are embedded within configurations of contemporary consumer culture. Though Warde's analysis illustrates the structural, theoretical context of potential consumption anxieties for particular social groups, it is unable to specify how such anxieties are manifested and managed – or performed – by individuals within specific social and consumption settings. This paper takes an interpretive approach, conceptualising consumption anxiety as a discursive, narrative phenomenon likely to surface within particular social settings that are conducive to generating expressions of anxiety. The paper also considers the relation between narrativisation and objects, arguing that the cultural capacity of objects must be understood within local settings where objects are afforded a capacity to act through various discourses. The argument is drawn using selections of face-to-face interview data collected from a sample of middle-class householders on the practice of home decoration.     

Integrative Family Therapy With Childhood Chronic Illness: An Ethics of Practice

A challenge for contemporary family therapists is negotiating differences between modern and postmodern frameworks in the practice context. Modernists espouse a systemic metaphor; use evidence‐based and interventive approaches, including strategic, structural‐ or solution‐focused techniques, and believe in the therapist's knowledge, expertise and power to influence individuals or families to change. On the other hand, postmodernists follow a social constructionist, dialogical or narrative paradigm, which identifies the main ingredient of therapy as language, conversation, understanding and the therapist's ‘not knowing’ stance in eliciting a person's expertise and story Yet many practitioners adopt a middle way between these paradigm polarities, one that is less theory‐driven and more pragmatic, flexible, integrative and practice‐based. This is consistent with evidence‐based practice and research demonstrating common factors across all therapies. The value of preserving systemic thinking in family therapy is recognised while reaching forward to a postmodern social constructionist and dialogical approach. The article describes this integrative stance in family therapy as paramodern based on an ethics of practice. This is illustrated by a detailed case study of integrative family therapy, which addresses anxiety, anger and sleeping issues associated with a chronic childhood illness called Perthe's disease.     

A balancing act: a grounded theory study of the professional judgement of child protection social workers

ABSTRACT

This paper explores professional judgement of social workers working to protect children. Based on 22 in-depth interviews with social workers, a grounded theory methodology is adopted. The policy context for child protection practice is outlined and analysed. This study then explores how information, responsibility and in particular anxiety, are transacted between social workers and other professionals. Additionally, this study explores the delicate balances social workers are required to negotiate, focussing on two elements of the findings, ‘closeness- distance’ and ‘power over- power together’. The delicacy of the balances negotiated by social workers leads to a powerful analogy of social workers as tightrope walkers, and strategies to seek balance are identified. The implications for practice are explored. The internal mental processes of social workers require closer attention, a cautious approach should be taken to rational-technical solutions and social workers should be better prepared to respectfully challenge other professionals.