One narrative or several? Politics,cultural elites,and citizens in constructing a ‘New Narrative for Europe’

ABSTRACT

European Union (EU) institutions have cultivated narratives of European integration for a long time. For its 2013–2014 ‘A New Narrative for Europe’ project, however, the European Commission for the first time explicitly used the ‘narrative’ label. Drawing on non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and qualitative discourse analysis, this article contrasts the drafting process and the resulting declaration’s narrative structure and content with its discussion by citizens in a web-based consultation. The analysis shows that participating citizens forcefully demanded a bottom-up debate and advocated pluralistic perspectives. In these circumstances, elite-driven attempts at strengthening European identity and EU legitimacy are likely to be ineffective.     

浅析农村空巢老人的养老机制：社会工作的视角

随着社会变迁,人口老龄化的进程加快,大力发展社会养老保障已为一成种必然选择。农村养老问题日渐凸显,但目前的农村空巢老人的养老机制还存在一些问题,可以尝试从社会工作的宏观、微观的两个层面采取一些对策和建议。     

浅议农村留守老人养老问题

农村留守老人养老问题已成为学术界的一个研究热点。本文从研究农村留守老人养老的意义出发,着重分析了造成农村留守老人养老困难的原因,以及提出解决农村留守老人养老问题的建议。本文认为传统家庭养老功能的衰弱、农村社会保障机制不健全、老人负担增加、老人孤独感增强和他们自身一些问题等五个方面是农村留守老人养老的主要困难。     

Telling a modest story: accounts of men's upward mobility from the National Child Development Study

While the pattern of social mobility in postwar Britain has been extensively studied, revealing considerable upward mobility, much less is known about the subjective dimension to mobility. In this article, we employ a new sample of in-depth interviews with 50-year old men from the National Child Development Study to examine in detail the link between objective mobility patterns and the way the upwardly mobile narrate their life trajectories. In contrast to the mobility ideology suggested by the Oxford mobility survey of the early 1970s, in which the upwardly mobile recognized and internalized their success as a project of the self, we report how members of this later generation of men with highly successful careers prefer instead to articulate 'modest' life stories. By treating the career as a narrative device, we are able to show how the disavowal of the dominant, linear hierarchical career model by these men allows them to tell particular and distinctive stories which establish their individuality and personhood, while, paradoxically, recognizing the cultural power of the dominant model. In particular, we highlight the use of 'linear contingent' narratives by these men, in which specific events, especially those connected with occupational and geographical transitions, are deployed as contingent thresholds to mark out key shifts and passages in their lives. We then compare their accounts with those of immobile and downwardly men, who instead deploy 'ghostly' stories, preoccupied by the past, or defensive accounts, displaying unease with their failure to live up to the expectations of the linear career model. Having shown that men's accounts of mobility are suffused with an awareness of their need to establish their own individuality through repudiating the social trope of the instrumental careerist, we conclude that the links between career identities and objective mobility patterns are not straightforward and need careful unravelling.     

农村人口文化建设应注意的几个问题

本文对农村人口文化建设问题作了深入探讨。认为农村人口文化应突出群众性特点,重视利用乡土文化资源,善于从传统文化中吸取力量,重视发挥文化人的引领作用,还应虚功实做,并注重加强阵地建设。     

浙江农村乡风文明建设的战略意义与现实基础

经济社会发展已走在全国前列的浙江农村,要继续保持在全国的领先地位,必须加强作为新农村建设精神支撑和动力源泉的“乡风文明”建设。为此,文章在分析“乡风文明”的基本内涵、文化功能及其在社会主义新农村建设总目标中所处地位的基础上,立足浙江经济社会协调发展的宏观背景,从理论与实践的结合上,探讨了浙江新农村乡风文明建设的战略意义与现实基础问题。     

Narrative stability in interview accounts

We identify and discuss the phenomenon of narrative stability, in the context of current methodological literature on interviewing. It derives from two independent studies, undertaken fifteen years apart, of members of the same genetics research group who were interviewed by different researchers. The first (‘Discovery’) interviews were collected very soon after the breakthrough was first published. The second (‘Legacy’) interviews were based on informants looking back at those events. Some strikingly similar narrative episodes across those accounts suggest strong narrative stability. In the course of interviews, informants reproduce biographical stories that are well sedimented. Not all interview materials, therefore, should be thought of exclusively in terms of co-production between interviewer and informant.     

Postmodern synergistic knowledge creation: extending the boundaries of disability studies

The tensions between the competing discourses of the medical and the social models of disability have traditionally provided a platform for discussion and research in the fields of disability studies and special needs education. Over the last 30 years a wealth of literature has consolidated the debate and produced particular knowledge of impairment and disability. In this paper we argue that by privileging notions of ‘deficit’ within these medical or social model perspectives the richness of the lived experience of people with impairments is denied. The individual becomes lost within a framework of medical symptoms or social inequalities. This paper considers alternative approaches which reveal a fuller picture of the lives of people with impairments. The authors conducted two separate empirical studies, one employing a Deleuzo‐Guattarian perspective, the other a Bourdieusian perspective. In this paper we illustrate how these theories of practice can reveal situated understandings of the individual with impairments and his/her daily life. By embracing new understandings and different theoretical perspectives we show how new knowledge can emerge to illuminate the fluid and ever‐changing notions of ‘disability’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’, which form elements of the individual lived experience of the research participants.     

Traveling from Feminism to Mainstream Sociology and Back: One Woman's Tale of Tenure and the Politics of Backlash

Within disciplines, the 1980s were an especially heady intellectual time for feminist graduate students. Not only did second wave scholarship prove to be inspirational for dissertation projects, but new books and articles published by women of color, lesbian feminists, postcolonial theorists and poststructuralists posed serious challenges to the ethnocentric assumptions of white, middle-class and Western feminism. Yet, despite over a decade of social movement activism and the creation of feminist institutions and organizations, this generation of feminist scholars worked against a cultural backdrop marked by a dramatic move to the political right. My personal narrative begins in this historical moment charting my political and intellectual trajectory from graduate school to the present. My positioning as a queer feminist between the second and third waves of feminist scholarship carried with it a rewarding intellectual legacy as well as a number of painful contradictions.¹ Further, I argue that these contradictions arose as a consequence of the uneven diffusion and reception of feminist scholarship, particularly the politics of backlash, within institutions and academic departments across the country from the 1980s to the present.     

Accounting for Divorce: Gender and Uncoupling Narratives

Past research about uncoupling processes has focused on the differing narratives people offer to explain the end of their marriages, depending on whether or not they perceive themselves to have initiated the ending. This article extends previous work by adding gender to the analysis, exploring intersections between accounts of divorce and accountability to cultural assumptions related to gender. In this inductive study, we examine qualitative interview data—particularly discrepancies in the narratives of some men and women—and suggest that gender mediates how people talk about the process of uncoupling as well as their motives for divorce.