Whose history is it anyway? The case of Exhibit B

In 2014, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B site-specific installation created a media storm and protests throughout Europe. One such protest was in London, leading to the cancellation of his show at the Barbican. Consternation caused by art work is not a new phenomenon, and indeed one of the enduring purposes of art is to push the boundaries of acceptability and to show sights that are normally kept hidden from the public gaze. From some of the Impressionists’ exhibits to twentieth century art works such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1987 and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary 1996, art has caused offence in a variety of ways. This article examines Exhibit B to identify the reasons for its reception. In broad outline, as a white artist his presentation of black oppression was regarded at best as naïve and at worse as culturally inappropriate.     

In Whose Service? Technology,Care and Disabled People: The case for a disability politics perspective

This paper discusses the introduction of telematics technologies, which are advancing rapidly in Britain and throughout the world, and which impact increasingly on the lives of disabled people. The authors argue that, to date, technology-based services have been largely, if not exclusively, determined by the interests of care service professionals, technologists and the commercial sector. Missing from the debate has been the perspective of the disability movement, which challenges professional hegemony, and introduces important issues such as choice, control and access to the wider environment. Such a perspective is needed if technological advances are to empower disabled people and not simply provide administrative solutions to the problems of increasingly hard-pressed service providers.     

Whose ‘wee country’?: identity politics and sport in Northern Ireland

This article responds to calls in this journal for increased attention to identity, culture, power and sport. It explores, for the first time, the lived realities of identity politics in a divided society, through interviews with 12 self-declared Irish nationalists and republicans that represented Northern Ireland. Important insights are revealed into national eligibility decisions for either Irish team, motivated mainly by ‘shop window’ visibility and being seen as the best of a peer group. Political and sporting nationalisms were not necessarily analogous. A significant original finding is that the lived experiences of being closer to ‘the other’ resulted in an overall reinforcement rather than dissolution of difference. Visual and oral ‘national’ symbols such as flag, and especially anthem, delineated such difference, being symbolic walls of the mind. ‘Our wee country’ was thus a polarised and polarising fantasy shield. The article concludes by reconsidering the role of sport as a lens through which to examine identity and its’ place as part of the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’.     

The politics of Agudas Yisroel in inter‐war Poland

Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames. The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust. New York: Holocaust Library, 1982. 500pp. Index. $8.95.

Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.). The Chronicle of the Lódz Ghetto, 1941–1944. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984. lxviii +551pp. Index. £25.

Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943. Ghetto, Underground, Revolt. Brighton (UK): Harvester Press, 1982. xviii + ‐487pp. Index. £28.

Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed. Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1984. xii +340pp. Index.     

The reconstruction of childhood–implications for theory and practice

First, the article deals with selected aspects of change that have framed the lives of contemporary families and children in Scandinavia: urbanization; secularization and norm-pluralism; changes in work-conditions; ideologies about the role of mothers; structural changes in family patterns; and the modern professionalization of care. Second, how change induces a crisis in the grand developmental approach within child psychology is investigated. It is argued that any a priori universal and non-contextual derived type of knowledge about development fails to grasp what is going on within families and in care and socialization in rapidly changing cultures such as Scandinavia and other Western European countries. An alternative paradigm is presented that should make us better able to understand development as embedded in culture and time. Third, some new challenges for educating the skilled practitioner are focused upon. Here reflective competence will be addressed: expertise as an ‘eternal process of inquiry; the ability to use multi-based and often conflicting knowledge about families and children in order to solve problems in everyday situations; the strengthened emphasis on the practitioner-as-person and the ability to use practical and reflected knowledge in different contexts. Finally, new bases of scientific knowledge are suggested for use in the future education of practitioners.     

‘Civilising’ the Roma? The depoliticisation of (anti-)racism within the politics of integration

This essay questions the enduring difficulties of addressing racism within the current politics of integration in Europe, with a specific focus on the Portuguese context. The analysis centres on integration initiatives to promote employability among the Portuguese Roma and the ways in which they are rationalised by employment gatekeepers and decision-makers. This rationalisation depoliticises racism by constantly shifting the focus to the presumed characteristics of the ‘other’, re-enacting white-privileged notions of nationhood, Portugueseness and Europeanness. Accordingly, projects based on ‘activation of social competences’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘interculturality’ are implemented as a civilising and disciplinary programme aimed at correcting the presumed deficiencies in ethnically marked populations. The analysis aims to contribute towards a much needed debate on the notion of integration and the re-articulation of the historical legacies of racism in contemporary European democracies.     

Whose Problem is This?

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how the needs of lesbian and gay youth are situated and defined in educational contexts and the intended and unintended consequences of framing their needs in particular ways. It is based on a case study of a senior college in New Zealand where a strategy for dealing with gay and lesbian youth was framed within a climate of market-driven educational reforms and where queer youth were viewed within the discourse of being “at risk.” This enabled the school to promote itself as providing a caring and nurturing environment without jeopardizing its position in the marketplace. However, this strategy had the unfortunate consequences of re-pathologizing lesbian and gay students and constructing their sexuality as a personal problem.     

The politics of death: on life after the “end of history”

In this paper, the most recent writings by Giorgio Agamben and Bruno Latour are brought into dialog by examining what light they shed on contemporary debates concerning “end of life” decisions. More specifically, the paper focuses on the debates sparked by Diane Pretty's request for a grant of immunity against legal prosecution if her husband were to assist her to commit suicide and so terminate her increasingly unbearable suffering from motor neurone disease. The aim of this exercise is to articulate the presuppositions informing two influential and radically opposed views on the contemporary reconfiguration of relationships between humans, animals and other non‐humans.     

The “hurried child”: The myth of lost childhood in contemporary American society

The hurried child writers argue that childhood has changed fundamentally for the worse in contemporary American society. The authors assert that today's youth are too adultlike: they behave like adults and are treated as adults by parents, schools, the workplace, the media, and society in general. While offering some perceptive insights, the thesis poses numerous methodological, substantive, and empirical problems. These include (1) a limited historical perspective on the changing nature of American childhood, (2) a failure to identify exactly who the hurried children are, and (3) the use of a deterministic model and negative bias in their work. Our analysis indicates no large-scale destruction of childhood and adolescence hypothesized by the hurried child writers. For the vast majority of contemporary American children, the hurried child is more myth than reality.     

Whose responsibility? Resilience in families of children with developmental disabilities

Families with children with disabilities are at higher risk of stress, financial disadvantage and breakdown. In recent decades, research and policy have shifted focus from these problems to a strengths-based approach, using concepts such as family resilience. By definition, resilience is the ability to cope in adverse circumstances, suggesting a reliance on the individual. If this is the case, then to what extent does ‘family resilience’ place another burden of responsibility onto families? Whose responsibility is family resilience? This paper begins to answer this question using interviews with parents of children with developmental disabilities based in New South Wales, Australia.     

The Who of Power?

How is the causative role of ideas appreciated in understanding the political economy of neoliberalism? What are the origin stories of neoliberalism and how are these related to the periodisation of capitalism? Is there a role for an explicit normative perspective in critiquing neoliberalism as a set of class relations? These broad questions are raised in this feature review, which looks at the latest work on the durability of embedded neoliberalism. It does so by highlighting the importance of revealing and critiquing ideas-centred assumptions within political economy in order to offer an alternative stance on the class relations, institutions, and ideology of present-day capitalism. As a consequence, reflecting further on the who of power remains an enduring challenge for political economy.     

Medical decision-making: Whose values?

Abstract

Bioethical debates contribute to discussions about the direction of healthcare funding as we enter the twenty - first century. The funding of healthcare is debated by economists, bioethicists and clinicians. Because of their practice experience and knowledge base social workers are also well-placed to contribute to such issues. The debate has taken place at the ‘macro’ rather than the ‘micro’ level. Yet many ethical decisions about healthcare are made at the patient's bedside. Are they procedural or clinical decisions? Are decisions made for a group or class of patient or on an individual basis? Answers for these questions are sought in a study of medical decision-making for head-injured patients admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of a major teaching hospital.

This paper attempts to draw out ethical principles which are part of medical decision-making. The notion of contextual ethics is likened to the ecological approach of Carel Germain which provides a useful framework for ethnomethodological research.     

The politics of portrait photographs in southern Nigerian newspapers, 1945–1954

This paper focuses on the increasingly important role played by pictorial journalism in the struggle for Nigerian self-rule. From the late 1920s onwards, daily newspapers printed portrait photographs with a pro-colonial slant: members of the colonial administration, international heads of state, foreign ministers and, occasionally, the highest-ranking Nigerian politicians. To challenge a dominance of pro-colonial depictions, the anti-colonial West African Pilot introduced a new style of printed portrait photographs in 1937 that became a role model for other newspapers in the 1940s and the 1950s. This article focuses on the use of these portrait photographs for the political propaganda of party-affiliated newspapers, such as the Daily Service, the West African Pilot and the Southern Nigeria Defender, which were published in the southwest of Nigeria. The technological difficulties of printing photographs in newspapers in the 1940s meant that editors had a limited choice of which portrait photographs to include (mainly photographs of politicians, businessmen and chiefs were available). The editors were further constrained by the scarcity of photographs of ordinary people. In addition, photographs depicting the colonial administration’s personnel or edifices were not in line with the editorial policy of the anti-colonial newspapers. In the 1950s, when Nigerian newspapers were able to afford the technological equipment to reproduce their own photographs, a representative cross-section of Nigerian society was still rarely included in the portrait photographs. The photographs that were printed showed the self-fashioning of Nigerian leaders of democratic parties, ahead of the emergence of a new style of democratic and charismatic leaders in Senegal. Although these anti-colonial images were more democratic than the old colonial images in pro-colonial newspapers, they replaced the imperial hierarchies which editors rejected, with the new social hierarchies of local Nigerian elites foreshadowing the politics of independent Nigeria.     

The restructuring of rural Spain?

This paper explores the utility of ideas derived from the rural restructuring literature for understanding contemporary trends in rural Spain. It concludes that the processes that analysts associate with rural restructuring are of little help in understanding the Spanish context. As regards capitalist markets, the Spanish countryside is not characterised by economic diversification, professionalism, environmentalism and consumerism on a scale that resembles anticipations derived from the restructuring literature. For state processes, lethargy is a more appropriate adjective than restructuring. Likewise, social and cultural change in civil society are subdued versions of trends that beset Spanish society.