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Historical Construction (historical + construction)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences60%

Selected Abstracts

Drifters and the Dancing Mad: The Public School Music Curriculum and the Fabrication of Boundaries for Participation

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2008
RUTH GUSTAFSON
ABSTRACT Recent reforms in the general music curriculum have, for the most part, failed to lessen the attrition rates of African Americans from public school music programs. In this article I assert that an embodied ideal of cultural nobility, exemplified by Auguste Rodin's famous statue, The Thinker, has unconsciously operated as a template for participation. As a model comportment in the Western musical tradition, The Thinker has a broader relevance insofar as other school subjects emerged from similar cultural ideals. Beginning with the early period of public music instruction up to the present, I examine the construction of racial boundaries by linking a specific body comportment hailed as worthy by the music curriculum to historically constructed notions of Whiteness. This issue has been underexplored in research in both music and general education. For that reason, this article examines overlapping systems of reasoning about music, comportment, class, religion, language, nationality, and race in professional and popular texts from the early 1800s to the present. This positions public music instruction as authored, not by pedagogical insight alone, but through changes in musical taste, social practices, strategies of governing populations, and definitions of worthy citizenship. There are three levels of analysis. The first is a personal account of the early manifestations of attrition of African Americans from school music programs. The second level of analysis brings the problem of equity into proximity with the tradition of genteel comportment that permeated the training of the good ear or listener and the fabrication of the bona fide citizen. These, I argue are congruent with the historical construction of Whiteness as a standard mark of worthiness. At the third level of analysis, I take up present-day curriculum designs. This section discusses how the language of the music curriculum continues to draw boundaries for participation through protocols that regulate musical response. Here, I argue that the exclusion of popular genres such as hip-hop should be rethought in light of the evidence that shifting historical definitions for music fabricated an overly restrictive template for comportment, recognizing the prototype of Whiteness as the sole embodiment of merit. [source]

Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the civil wars and Interregnum

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 197 2004
Lloyd Bowen
This article examines how Wales and the Welsh were represented in the pamphlet literature of the civil war and early Interregnum. It considers the historical construction of the Welsh image in English minds, and traces how this image came to be politicized by Welsh support for Charles I during the sixteen-forties. An examination of the public controversies surrounding the state-sponsored evangelization programme in Wales during the early sixteen-fifties shows how the contested image of Wales in the public sphere interacted with high politics at the centre. This study contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity, identity and politics during the sixteen-forties and fifties, and demonstrates how imagery and representation informed political discourse in the mid seventeenth century. [source]

DISCIPLINING THE PROFESSIONAL: THE CASE OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT*

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 6 2002
DAMIAN HODGSON
Despite its rapid growth in recent years, Project Management has received very little critical attention, particularly when compared to the more ,hyped' managerial fashions such as TQM (cf. Wilkinson and Willmott, 1995) and BPR (cf. Grey and Mitev, 1995; Grint, 1994). My intention in this paper is to critically examine the ongoing construction of Project Management as a professional discipline in modern organizations. Drawing on an understanding of ,discipline' based in Foucauldian work, I will briefly trace the historical construction of Project Management as a form of managerial knowledge, outlining the key models and techniques which make up contemporary Project Management. Through an empirical study of the articulation and reproduction of Project Management within two Financial Services institutions, the everyday construction of Project Management as an ,objective' and ,abstract' body of knowledge will be described. I then contrast this with the embodied and power-laden operation of Project Management, with disciplinary effects not only on those employees whose work is restructured in line with Project Management principles but equally upon self-professed Project Management professionals themselves. [source]

Invisible colour: Landscapes of whiteness and racial identity in international development

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 5 2009
Kristín Loftsdóttir
Racialized identity in relation to international development is a surprisingly unanalyzed theme within anthropology, even though extensively explored in connection with contemporary western multi-cultural societies and historical relations between different parts of the world. In the paper I explore race and whiteness in relation to international development, emphasizing the importance of analyzing how the historical construction of racial identity continues to inform actual lived relationships of people belonging to different geographical spaces. In order to capture the importance of development in visual and everyday lives of people in different parts of the world, I use the term "developscape", adapting Arjun Appadurai's (1996) idea of globalization consisting of different "scapes", furhtermore, as asking how this "developscape" is racialized. [source]

Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá-Atlantic Religion

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2003
J. Lorand Matory
Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of selectively narrating Yorùbá-Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re-casting of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists abroad but also led Brazilian nationalist power-brokers to marginalise the male, and often reputedly homosexual, priests who give the lie to Landes's interpretation. In the service of a longdistance Yorùbá nationalist agenda, sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has declared traditional Yorùbá society ,genderless', and found, among both North American feminist scholars and Yorùbá male scholars, allies in concealing the copious evidence of gender and gender inequality in Yorùbá cultural history. What these historical constructions lack in truth value they make up for in their power to mobilise new communities and alliances around the defence of a shared secret. The article addresses how politically tendentious scholarship on gender has inspired new social hierarchies and boundaries through the truths that some high-profile scholars have chosen to silence. [source]