Subject Positions (subject + position)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The Concept of Subject Position in Empirical Social Research

JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 3 2001
Jukka Törrönen
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Producing Contradictory Masculine Subject Positions: Narratives of Threat, Homophobia and Bullying in 11,14 Year Old Boys

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 1 2003
Ann Phoenix
This paper reports a qualitative analysis of data from a study of masculinity in 11,14 year old boys attending twelve London schools. Forty-five group discussions (N= 245) and two individual interviews (N= 78) were conducted. The findings indicate that boys' experiences of school led them to assume that interviews would expose them to ridicule and so threaten their masculinity. Boys were generally more serious and willing to reveal emotions in individual than in group interviews. A key theme in boys' accounts was the importance of being able to present themselves as properly masculine in order to avoid being bullied by other boys by being labeled "gay." The ways in which boys were racialized affected their experiences of school. [source]


Feminist Research Management in Higher Education in Britain: Possibilities and Practices

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2010
Natasha S. Mauthner
This article aims to explore the possibilities and ambivalent practices of feminist management in the context of research management in higher education in Britain. Drawing on a reflexive and critical analysis of our experiences of contract research and research management over the past 15 years, we discuss the challenges of putting feminist management principles into practice in team-based and collaborative research projects. By rendering academic cultures increasingly competitive, individualist and managerial, we argue, new managerialist reforms in higher education over the past two decades have intensified those very aspects of academic life that feminists have long struggled with. In particular, in creating the new subject position of research manager, with concomitant institutional expectations and obligations, new managerialism has exacerbated tensions between our identities as feminists, scholars and managers and between collective, individual and institutional needs and aspirations. We illustrate these tensions through a discussion of four related aspects of team research which, we suggest, undermine attempts at implementing the feminist ideals of intellectual equity and political equality: divisions of labour in research teams; divisions of intellectual status and the differential valuation of researchers and research labour; divisions of formal power and the management structure of research teams; and exertions of informal power and the micropolitics of research teams. We suggest that feminist research management and feminist management, more generally, need to recognize and accept differences and inequalities among feminists and work with these issues in reflexive, ethical and caring ways. [source]


Get Back into that Kitchen, Woman: Management Conferences and the Making of the Female Professional Worker

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2010
Jackie Ford
Conferences are a little studied aspect of working lives. In this article we explore how management conferences contribute to the continuing imbalance of power between men and women in management. We analyse data gathered from a reflexive ethnographic study of a management conference. We show that women arrive at conferences as knowing subjects, able easily to occupy the subject position of conference participant, but they are then subjected to processes of infantilization and seduction. They are made to feel scared and are given the order, as were their mothers and grandmothers: get back to the kitchen. We avoid using a theoretical explanation for these findings, preferring to offer them without much explanation, for we favour instead a political approach, and we use the findings as a way of making a call to arms to change the ways in which conferences are hostile to women. [source]


Mobilizing Foucault: history, subjectivity and autonomous learners in nurse education

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 4 2008
Chris Darbyshire
In the past 20, years the impact of progressive educational theories have become influential in nurse education particularly in relation to partnership and empowerment between lecturers and students and the development of student autonomy. The introduction of these progressive theories was in response to the criticisms that nurse education was characterized by hierarchical and asymmetrical power relationships between lecturers and students that encouraged rote learning and stifled student autonomy. This article explores how the work of Michel Foucault can be mobilized to think about autonomy in three different yet overlapping ways: as a historical event; as a discursive practice; and as part of an overall strategy to produce a specific student subject position. The implications for educational practice are that, rather than a site where students are empowered, nurse education is both a factory and a laboratory where new subjectivities are continually being constructed. This suggests that empowering practices and disciplinary practices uneasily co-exist. Critical reflection needs to be directed not only at structural dimensions of power but also on ourselves as students and lecturers by asking a Foucauldian question: How are you interested in autonomy? [source]


Shape-shifting discourses of anorexia nervosa: reconstituting psychopathology

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 4 2003
Pamela K. Hardin
HARDIN PK. Nursing Inquiry 2003; 10: 209,217 Shape-shifting discourses of anorexia nervosa: reconstituting psychopathology This article explores how the circuitous relationship between individuals, the media, and discursive systems replicate and reinforce the act of self-starvation in young women. Using a feminist poststructuralist methodology, the focus of this article is on how discourses and institutional practices operate to position young women who take up the subject position of wanting to be diagnosed as anorexic. Utilizing data from online accounts and individual interviews, I attend to the ways in which young women are institutionally positioned as ,anorexics' and the effects that those positions have on their behaviors, in addition to reinforcing institutional practices that construct anorexia nervosa. Questions addressed through this inquiry are: How do institutional practices create and continue to constitute ,anorexia nervosa'? How do discourses operate to position young women such that they are either included and/or excluded into the category of ,anorexia nervosa'? What are the effects and consequences that emanate from these positionings? [source]


Charisma, creativity, and cosmopolitanism: a perspective on the power of the new radio broadcasting in Uganda and Rwanda,

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 4 2007
Richard Vokes
From the mid-1980s onwards, the number of charismatic leaders operating in the Great Lakes region of Eastern-Central Africa has risen dramatically. This article draws a connection between this rapid expansion of charismatic authority and the concurrent proliferation of new radio broadcasting cultures across the zone. It notes that practically every new leader who has emerged over the last two decades has engaged in some form of radio broadcasting, and that in a number of instances, such broadcasts have been central to a particular leader's very claim to power. It then examines the reasons why radio broadcasting has emerged as so important here. Through a detailed study of one charismatic leader, Kihura Nkuba , who rose to prominence in Southwestern Uganda in 1999 , the article argues that the power of the new radio broadcasting stems from the ,cosmopolitan' subject position it engenders amongst listeners. However, this is a quite different form of cosmopolitanism which is at least partly unintended, or involuntary (and stems from the insertion of a ,global' technology , i.e. the physical radio set , into the listening context). Yet it is still compelling, a fact which helps us to understand why some listeners of these broadcasts have been motivated , after listening to charismatic leaders' broadcasts , to engage in extreme, socially abnormal, acts. The article goes on to argue that this provides a perspective from which to understand events in Rwanda in 1994, when radio listeners were induced, by a group of charismatic radio presenters (on the station Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, RTLM) to participate in genocidal killings. Résumé Depuis le milieu des années 1980, le nombre de chefs charismatiques a considérablement augmenté dans la région des Grands Lacs d'Afrique centrale et orientale. L'auteur établit ici un lien entre l'expansion rapide de l'autorité charismatique et la prolifération en parallèle de nouvelles cultures de la radiodiffusion dans cette zone. Il note que tous les nouveaux chefs, ou presque, qui sont apparus au cours des deux dernières décennies sont présents sur les ondes de multiples manières. Cette présence radiophonique est souvent un élément essentiel de leurs revendications de pouvoir. Il examine ensuite les raisons de l'importance des émissions de radio dans cette région. Par le biais d'une étude détaillée de l'un de ces chefs charismatiques, Kihura Nkuba, qui s'est fait connaître en 1999 dans le Sud-ouest de l'Ouganda, l'article montre que le pouvoir des nouvelles émissions de radio tient au positionnement en tant que sujet « cosmopolite » qu'elles suscitent parmi leurs auditeurs. Il s'agit toutefois d'une forme de cosmopolitisme très différente, au moins partiellement fortuite ou involontaire (et née de l'insertion d'une technologie « globale », le récepteur de radio lui-même, dans le contexte d'audition). Cette captivation peut nous aider à comprendre comment les auditeurs de ces émissions ont pu être incités, après avoir écouté les émissions de leurs chefs charismatiques, à s'engager dans des actes extrêmes et anomiques. L'auteur affirme que cette approche peut éclairer les événements de 1994 au Rwanda, qui ont vu les auditeurs des radios incités par un groupe de présentateurs charismatiques (ceux de la Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, RTLM), à participer à des massacres génocidaires. [source]


FROM WOMEN'S WORK TO THE UMBILICAL LENS: MARY KELLY'S EARLY FILMS

ART HISTORY, Issue 1 2008
SIONA WILSON
This essay presents a historical and theoretical account of Mary Kelly's formative involvement in experimental filmmaking in Britain during the early- to mid-1970s. The argument develops by tracing the complex interconnections between Kelly's political engagement with Marxist-feminism and her theoretical involvement with psychoanalysis and film theory. After discussing Kelly's participation in the Berwick Street Film Collective's Night Cleaners (1975) and the London Women's Film Group's Women of the Rhondda (1973), I present a sustained close reading of the artist's first solo work, the film loop installation Antepartum (1974). I argue that Antepartum interpellates the spectator into a feminine subject position. This reading of the film draws upon recent post-Lacanian feminist scholarship in philosophical ethics that focuses on the intrauterine relation. Antepartum offers a politically informed aesthetic experiment that prefigures some of these insights. [source]


"We Don't Want No Haole Buttholes in Our Stories": Local Girls Reading the Baby-Sitters Club Books in Hawai,i

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 4 2001
Donna J. Grace
This study investigates the place of popular cultural texts in the construction of the gendered and cultural subjectivities of seven eight-year-old girls growing up in Hawai,i. Within the context of weekly literature circles held over a period of four months, Grace and Lum sought to understand how these young "local" girls engaged with a book series privileging white, middle-class, mainland values, and how they located themselves within dominant ideologies related to race, culture, and gender. Using qualitative methods, the following questions were addressed: (1) In what ways did the girls identify with particular storylines, subject positions, and views of the world? (2) Were dominant messages accommodated, negotiated, or resisted? (3) What pleasures were produced and experienced in the reading? (4) How were meanings shaped and mediated by "local" culture and the reader's personal histories? The findings suggest that rather than being manipulated by the textual images of femininity, suburban living, and western notions of beauty, the girls had alternative social and cultural discourses with which to negotiate and resist them. These discourses related to notions of the family; gender relations; peer friendships and rivalry; perceptions of beauty; and cultural identity. The findings suggest the importance of local context in understanding textual readings and interpretations. [source]


,Who is the Developed Woman?': Women as a Category of Development Discourse, Kumaon, India

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2004
Rebecca M. Klenk
This article analyses gendered discourses of development in rural North India, and addresses the usefulness of recent scholarship on development as ,discourse' for understanding connections between development and subjectivity. This scholarship is an excellent point of departure for exploring the contradictions inherent in the institutionalization of economic development and the global reach of its discourses, but it has focused primarily upon development as discourse at official sites of deployment, while paying less attention to how specific discourses and processes of development are appropriated by those constituted as beneficiaries of development. The under-theorization of this aspect has meant that the range of processes through which development projects may encourage new subject positions are poorly understood. By investigating what some women in rural Kumaon have made of their own development, this article contributes to emerging scholarship on development and subjectivity with an ethnographic analysis of the polysemic enthusiasm for development expressed by some of its ,beneficiaries'. [source]


Regional development policies and the constructions of gender equality: The Swedish case

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2007
CHRISTINE HUDSON
Drawing on Carole Bacchi's ,What's the Problem? Approach', we explore how arguments concerning the new forms of regional policy are assigning different categories of people different subject positions and, in particular, we focus on the kind of subject positions that are being given to women as a group in this context. The discourse being shaped in national policy is, however, interpreted in specific contexts. Accordingly, we compare the way this new discourse is being (re)interpreted and (re)constructed and the subject positions being ascribed to women in the regional development partnerships and growth strategies in two Swedish regions: Västerbotten and Jönköping. Finally, we draw attention to how both the form and the content of Swedish regional development policies create great difficulties for politicizing gender as a power dimension in society. We suggest that regional politics has become de-politicized and argue for the need for it to be re-politicized with gender included as a conflict dimension. [source]


SARS in Canada and China: Two Approaches to Emergency Health Policy

GOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2007
JAMES LAWSON
China and Canada addressed the transnational 2003 SARS outbreak within a common, multilevel network of public-health expertise. The two countries deployed distinct public-health strategies, and faced distinct levels of resistance. This article addresses this comparison. During this epidemic "state of exception," both countries adopted emergency policy instruments and overall policy styles. However, Chinese emergency boundary policing corresponded better to everyday experience than did hospital-based screening in Canada, and China's policing targeted collectivities where Canada emphasized individual case tracking. While Canadian efforts were smaller in scale and faced infrastructural deficiencies, prior campaigns to address endemic health problems formed a basis for compliant popular subject positions. Power/resistance relations and their cultivation during endemic conditions must become the center of analyzing effective approaches to emergency planning. [source]


Narratives of ,green' consumers , the antihero, the environmental hero and the anarchist

JOURNAL OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR, Issue 1 2009
Minna Autio
Environmental policy makers and marketers are attracted by the notion of green consumerism. Yet, green consumerism is a contested concept, allowing for a wide range of translations in everyday discursive practices. This paper examines how young consumers construct their images of green consumerism. It makes a close reading of three narratives reflecting available subject positions for young green consumers: the Antihero, the Environmental Hero and the Anarchist. It reveals problems in the prevailing fragmented, gendered and individualistic notions of green consumerism, and discusses implications for policy and marketing practitioners. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Re-founding Representation: Wider, Broader, Closer, Deeper

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2010
Lucy Taylor
This article challenges conventional understandings and methodologies associated with the study of political representation. It imagines representation as a power relationship and shifts attention from elections to a closer examination of the interface between representatives and those they claim to represent. It argues for the need to make representation studies wider, moving our focus to study polities beyond the confines of prosperous, established democracies. Secondly, we should broaden our understanding of representation agents in two ways. We should consider how non-voters are represented and we should include diverse forms of social organisations, problematising relationships of representation within these groups and taking their political-representational role seriously. Thirdly, we should move closer, conducting not only macro-level analyses but also micro-level studies, exploring representation among and between individuals and groups in order to understand the complex relationships, motives and dynamics of power at work. Finally we need to go deeper, looking at our own subject positions as scholars critically and challenging the neutrality of the ideas and assumptions that we use as intellectual tools. Moreover, we should promote deeper relationships of representation, reconnecting it to ideas and practices of participation, and promoting the role of accountability in ,closing the loop' and enhancing democracy. [source]


Talking Cop: Discourses of Change and Policing Identities

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 4 2003
Annette Davies
This paper presents empirical and theoretical analysis of the enactment of New Public Management (NPM) within the UK police service. It draws on empirical material gathered in a two-year study that explores the ways in which individual policing professionals have responded to, and received, the NPM discourse. Theoretically informed by a discursive approach to organizational analysis, the paper focuses on the new subject positions promoted within NPM that serve to challenge traditional understandings of policing organization and identities. The paper examines the implications of this for policies that promote community orientated policing (COP) and increased inter-agency partnership. The paper argues that the promotion of a more progressive form of policing, based on community orientation and equality principles, may struggle to gain legitimacy within the current performance regime that legitimizes a competitive masculine subjectivity, with its emphasis on crime fighting. [source]


Fracturing the Real-Self,Fake-Self Dichotomy: Moving Toward "Crystallized" Organizational Discourses and Identities

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 2 2005
Sarah J. Tracy
This article begins with the following question: Why, even with the proliferation of poststructuralist theoretical understandings of identity, do people routinely talk in terms of "real" and "fake" selves? Through an analysis of critical empirical studies of identity-construction processes at work, this article makes the case that the real-self,fake-self dichotomy is created and maintained through organizational talk and practices and, in turn, serves as a constitutive discourse that produces four subject positions with both symbolic and material consequences: strategized self-subordination, perpetually deferred identities, "auto-dressage," and the production of "good little copers." The article challenges scholars to reflexively consider the ways they may perpetuate the dichotomy in their own academic practices. Furthermore, the authors present the metaphor of the "crystallized self" as an alternative to the real-self,fake-self dichotomy and suggest that communication scholars are well-poised to develop alternative vocabularies, theories, and understandings of identity within the popular imagination. [source]


From distance and uncertainty to research and pedagogy in the Borderlands: implications for the future of intercultural communication

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 3 2001
Leda Cooks
Thus, their new subjectivity emerges in the process of drawing borders around their old subject positions, a process that constitutes them as nascent specular border intellectuals. Their contemplation of the condition of their lives represents a freedom, or at least an attempt to have freedom, from the politics of imaginary identification and opposition, from conflation of identity and location, and so on - in short, from the varied and powerful forms of suturing that are represented by and instrumental in the construction of their sedimented culture. The process of decoding as well as the emerging command of literacy permits them a gradual shift from the confines of the imaginary to the outer edges of the symbolic realm. [source]