The relations of ruling: a feminist inquiry ∗

This paper explores the complex of objectified social relations that organize and regulate our lives in contemporary society. Its inquiry is driven by experiences in the women's movement of a dual consciousness, with the particularities of being mother and housewife on the one hand, and, on the other, the abstracted discourses and forms of organization creating the matrix of a consciousness outside the local and particular. A strategy for sociological inquiry is formulated which does not begin from a discursively structured position within the objectified relations, but from a standpoint traditionally women's, located in the actualities of the everyday of people's embodied living. The historical trajectory of these relations emerges as increasingly independent and increasingly pervasive organizers of people's everyday/everynight activities. The materiality of printed and electronic texts mediates the intersections of the relations of ruling and the everyday world. Texts are complemented by technologies or disciplined practices that standardize local states of affairs or events, bringing them into correspondance with standardized texts. Baudrillard's conception of ‘hyperreality’ is used to explicate characteristic forms of the text-mediated systems of corporate management. Finally the topic returns to the issue of gender, showing how the dual consciousness which brings the objectified extra-local character of these relations into view has itself been defined in the historical trajectory of their emergence. It is in this context, that a sociology from the standpoint of women can be seen as proposing an alternative organization of knowledge which does not reproduce the relations of ruling, but an explication of just those relations in which our lives are embedded.     

A Glimpse of the Truth: Evaluating ‘Debate’ and ‘Role Play’ as Pedagogical Tools for Learning about Sexuality Issues on a Law and Ethics Module

Social work education is familiar with concepts such as social exclusion, marginalisation, anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice. This familiarisation implies that students are adequately prepared to embrace equality and diversity, become ‘culturally competent’ and subscribe to moral and ethical standards including the rights of service users to respect and support regardless of sexual orientation. The ability of social work students to articulate and develop their own theories for practice and to handle personal issues when these conflict with ‘theories’ on equality and diversity are important aspects of learning. Educators teaching about sexual orientation issues however currently have fewer texts or support networks to draw on when addressing these. This paper looks at the effectiveness of ‘debate’ and ‘role play’ as pedagogical strategies and tools when teaching complex ethical issues on a law and ethics module. Dramatic and creative participative methods were used through the tools of debate and role play. These were used with students to explore a specific topic around gay adoption in the context of learning about anti-discriminatory law. The paper seeks to evaluate the outcomes of this approach by drawing on the students' post learning reflection.     

Strategies for model‐revision in a high school genetics classroom

Recent proposals to improve science education (e.g., AAAS, 1989; Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1990) have stressed the importance of providing high school students with a broad knowledge base consisting of a body of core concepts and theories. Science educators (Duschl, 1990; AAAS, 1989; Peterson & Jungck, 1988) have also argued that while concepts are an important part of any education, no student's scientific education can be considered complete without a complementary knowledge of the nature of science, including an understanding of the tentative nature of scientific knowledge and how it is constructed. In this paper we describe a science classroom in which students are given opportunities to construct and use scientific knowledge to solve realistic genetics problems, and suggest that allowing students to engage in the production of scientific knowledge can support science learning.     

Spatial Governance and Working Class Public Spheres: The Case of a Chartist Demonstration at Hyde Park

The concepts of the public sphere and public space have gained increasing purchase within social history. This paper contributes to this literature by theoretically developing a critical approach to both concepts. By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin circle, as well as Marxism and Poststructuralism, the paper suggests that public spheres under capitalism are structured through the basic contradiction between capital and labour. Each public sphere may then be seen as a refracted dialogic and spatial form of this basic contradiction, and is then best viewed as a contradictory spatial entity that obtains its unique identity through different "accents" and "word signs". The capitalist state must aim to regulate, through governance and law, dialogue within a public sphere. By focusing on the Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park, London in 1855, I show how these theories can be employed to explore how a radical social movement appropriated space by developing a working class public sphere.     

Social Welfare Policy as a Specialization in the Graduate Social Work Curriculum

This paper describes a new student/teacher evaluation system that helps students monitor and evaluate their progress in each course or unit of instruction. Because it produces a learning curve for each student and for the class as a whole, it is useful to both students and teachers in the assessment and evaluation of joint learning-teaching activities and achievements. Its major purpose is to help maximize learning gains.     

Social Support and Academic Engagement Among Reconnected Youth: Adverse Life Experiences as a Moderator

Using motivational theories of engagement and adopting a multidimensional perspective of academic engagement, the authors investigate the associations among teacher and parent support, students’ academic self‐efficacy, and academic engagement among a sample of reconnected youth who have returned to academic pursuit after dropping out (N = 938, mean age = 16.50, SD = 1.78). In addition, they examine how youth's adverse life experiences moderate the pathways in this model, an analysis notably missing from much of the academic engagement literature. They find that students’ academic self‐efficacy mediates parent and teacher support and youth academic engagement. Moreover, participants’ adverse life experiences moderate the connections among perceived support from parents, academic self‐efficacy, and academic engagement. Implications for practice and future directions are discussed.     

The Interactional Construction of Social Authenticity: “Real” Identities and Intergroup Relations in a Transylvania Internet Forum

Authenticity has become an increasingly salient topic within various interactional traditions, including conversational and discourse analysis, discursive psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and symbolic interactionism. However, there has been remarkably little cross‐fertilization of ideas and concepts. In this study, we consider the relevance of the interactional sociolinguistic concept of relationality for symbolic interactionist theories of authenticity. We first disambiguate two forms of authenticity that are commonly studied but not clearly differentiated in symbolic interactionist research—self‐authenticity, which emphasizes selves, and social authenticity, which emphasizes social identities. We then argue that relationality and its three pairs of interactional tactics—verification and denaturalization, adequation and distinction, and authorization and illegitimation—are particularly useful in conceptualizing social authenticity. We draw on data from an interethnic internet forum to show how members of two ethnic groups, Hungarian and Romanian, employ these relational tactics to authenticate their own ethnicity as the rightful inheritors of a place‐based Transylvanian identity, and to limit the other ethnicity's similar identity work. We then clarify the significance of social authenticity for the interactional study of category‐based identities by widening our discussion to other contestations over social identities in everyday life.     

“Beating the Bad Rap:” A Qualitative Study of Social Studies Educators Using Film

Abstract

The film-based practices of four social studies teachers were examined using a qualitative methodology. The research interviewed teachers twice over a 2-month period, collected handouts, and collected audio-recorded teacher logs. Three of the teachers taught social studies primarily, while a fourth teacher was responsible for both English and social studies content. The findings indicate that teachers used film in addition to a wide range of other visual practices. Teachers used film actively rather than passively to facilitate dialogic connections, as well as elicit thinking about their content areas.     

TEACHING EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE AT THE BSW LEVEL: AN EFFECTIVE CAPSTONE PROJECT

Developing student competencies related to evidence-based practice (EBP) isbecoming increasingly important as an evidence-based approach to practicebecomes more salient in the field. Although there has been significant discussionin the literature about how to teach EBP at the master's level, there is farless discussion about such instruction in baccalaureate programs. This articledescribes an undergraduate senior capstone project, which, in partnership withinternship activities, developed students' familiarity with EBP concepts andimproved their abilities to search for and use interventions from the professionalliterature. Findings from a survey study of the project indicated that studentsfelt better prepared to use best practices and that the project enhanced theiroverall sense of competence as practitioners.     

Textual accounts,ruling action: the intersection of knowledge and power in the routine conduct of community nursing work

This paper reflects critically on nursing knowledge-based action, its increasingly scientific and text-based manifestations, and the relevance of these practices for power and powerlessness in nursing. Smith's concept of text-mediated relations of ruling (1990. 1999) provides the analytic frame to investigate how nursing case managers articulate public health services and home support for people with disabilities to specific policies, including fiscal policy. An institutional ethnography shows how a nurse's routine text-mediated assessment and exercise of professional judgement establishes a ruling relation with a client (against her intention), as he is “written up” in organizational texts. The analysis of assessment texts spells out how a local perspective is subdued to the ruling discourse. A general argument is made on the basis of this analysis: nurses participate in ruling through the textualization of their knowledge and in the process it dominates their knowing and acting. An ideological construction of nursing knowledge results. The paper suggests what this means for the profession, nurses themselves, and their clients.     

The knowledge construction network of engagement research: Examining scholars’ star collaborators,embeddedness, and influence

Engagement is not new to the public relations lexicon. Yet, despite its significance in practice and the increasing scholarly attention, engagement has become a convoluted ideograph. Engagement has been critiqued as unorganized, lacking in a unified definition, and absent of a unified method of measurement. Still, it is a fundamental concept to the field. We take a network perspective to examine the construction of knowledge of engagement in the public relations literature. Broadly, we ask how scholars' direct and indirect connections influence our understanding of engagement? Using two bibliometric analysis techniques, we reveal and assess the connections among scholars, theories, concepts, and engagement types to inform future researchers’ scholarly endeavors into engagement.     

Historical and cultural perspectives on socialization

The article examines how infants are first permeated by culture. Building on Thibault (2000), semiogenesis is traced to the joint activity of primary intersubjectivity. Using an African example, analysis shows how--at 14 weeks--an infant already uses culturally specific indicators of "what a caregiver wants." Human predispositions and the mother's enactment of cultural processes enable the child to give joint activity a specific "sense." Developmentally, the child prods the caregiver to shaping his or her actions around social norms that transform the infant's world. This nascent lopsided relation is probably necessary for learning to talk. Acting with its mother, the baby's full-bodied activity uses adult "understanding" in ways that are cultural, contingent, and indexical. Infant activity is already semiotic.     

Topic models meet discourse analysis: a quantitative tool for a qualitative approach

Quantitative text analysis tools have become increasingly popular methods for the operationalization of various types of discourse analysis. However, their application usually remains fairly simple and superficial, and fails to exploit the resources which the digital era holds for discourse analysis to their full extent. This paper discusses the discourse-analytic potential of a more complex and advanced text analysis tool, which is already frequently employed in other approaches to textual analysis, notably topic modelling. We argue that topic modelling promises advances in areas where discourse analysis has traditionally struggled, such as scaling, repetition, and systematization, which go beyond the contributions of simpler frequency and collocation counts. At the same time, it does not violate the epistemological premises and methodological ethos of even the more radical theories of discourse, we will demonstrate. Finally, we present two small case studies to show how topic modelling – when used with appropriate parameters – can straightforwardly enhance our ability to systematically investigate and interpret discourses in large collections of text. Abbreviations: CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis; LDA: Latent Dirichlet Allocation     

Feminist Epistemology:

Challenges to men's claims to "know" the nature of women and the nature of the world have contributed to the development of the field of feminist epistemology. So also have critiques of the substantive claims of "authoritative" texts on such questions, consideration of the adequacy of traditional conceptions of knowledge, reason, rationality and the knowing subject, explorations of the causes and the persistence of defective epistemological theories, investigations of the influence of gender upon modes of cognition and analyses of the implications of particular theories of knowledge for feminist research in various academic disciplines. This essay provides a survey of these topics and the range of positions advanced by feminist scholars on these issues.     

The Teaching of Listening as an Integral Part of an Oral Activity: An Examination of Public-Speaking Texts

This article presents the results of a content analysis of 10 current public-speaking textbooks to determine the nature and extent to which they teach listening in an integrated approach with public speaking as an oral activity. Lewis and Nichols (1965 Lewis, T. R. and Nichols, R. G. 1965. Speaking and listening: A guide to effective oral-aural communication, Dubuque, IA: W.C. Brown.  [Google Scholar]) predicted that listening would increasingly be taught especially in an integrated approach with speaking. Beyond the prediction, they established a template for the pedagogy that emphasized the oral modality. Their prediction has not proved accurate. Ample research illustrates the lack of listening instruction. The current study sought both to replicate these findings and to examine the emphasis on the oral modality as reflected in public-speaking texts. Six research questions asked about listening inclusion and concentration, differences in written and oral modalities, delivery, development via writing, discussion of the oral modality, and pedagogy. The results of this analysis confirmed that these texts do contain treatments of listening but with one exception, only to a slight degree. Listening was seldom integrated with the teaching of speech within these texts. Second, with two exceptions, the texts seldom developed instruction with an emphasis on speech as an oral activity. Overall, the texts failed to reflect the pedagogy for teaching the oral modality essential to listening instruction. The results are discussed in terms of the extent to which the texts advance the teaching of listening and speaking as an interdependent oral activity. The conclusions indicate that the pedagogy advanced through these texts focus too greatly on writing to appropriately advance an understanding of the oral aspects essential to listening education.     

Using large classes to positive advantage: Involving students as research subjects and active learners

The large lecture format, with all its disadvantages, is becoming increasingly prevalent in undergraduate social work education in many countries. In some cases it can present opportunities other teaching formats cannot. One such opportunity is the implementation of surveys exploring students' own experiences and background with regard to key course content. This can help students 'connect' more easily with the concepts and theories presented in the lecture. An example of this method, including context and selected findings, is presented here with regard to a course on the Psychosocial Aspects of Disability and Illness.     

A packaged learning process: The consolidated approach

Social work educators do not have the luxury of teaching one concept at a time. With this in mind, the authors present a method of combining different content areas within one teaching exercise. Practice faculty can combine several concepts by using case studies to teach assessment skills and treatment issues of populations-at-risk. By assigning students an assessment of a case study character who is a member of a population at risk, the lecturer teaches a new skill and in the process students acquire additional knowledge about that population. The techniques use: (1) a genogram and an ecomap assessment of a woman in a short story; and (2) a problem-solving schematic assessment of a woman in a case study. The teaching techniques involve four steps: individual assignments, small group analysis, class assignments, and full class discussion. Class discussions revealed that students did gain knowledge of women's issues while acquiring practice skills. These strategies are appropriate for use in foundation or advanced social work curricula.