Absent Presence Research Articles

An absent presence: separated child migrants’ caring practices and the fortified neoliberal state

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambivalent positioning of separated child migrants in the UK with a focus on the care that they provide for each other. Drawing on interview data with state and non-state adult stakeholders involved in the immigration-welfare nexus, we consider how children’s care practices are viewed and represented. We argue that separated children’s caring practices assume an absent presence in the discourses mobilised by these actors: either difficult to articulate or represented in negative and morally-laden terms, reflective of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ towards migrants and advanced capitalist constructions of childhood. Such an examination sheds light on the complex state attempts to manage the care and migration regimes, and the way that care can serve as a way of making and marking inclusions and exclusions. Here we emphasise the political consequences for separated child migrants in an age of neoliberal state retrenchment from public provision of care and rising xenophobic nationalism.

The Last September: Irish modernism, narrative deferral, historicist determinism

ABSTRACTThis article questions the idea that Irish literary modernism is defined by Irish postcoloniality. The continued influence of historicist approaches in literary studies have inspired an understanding of Irish modernism as determined by material base. An oversight of such approaches, however, is that much of the respective fiction which constitutes Irish modernism resists representing the cultural circumstances from which it emerges. Particular to this predicament is Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September given that it is the novel which is often read as representing Ireland’s transition from colonial to postcolonial status. Through an analysis of its fractured, and thus typically modernist, narrative strategy, this article argues that colonial history is an absent presence which lacks constitutive meaning in this fiction, and thus suggests that Irish literary modernism does not neatly correspond to or reflect the story of Irish monumental history.

The Absent Presence of the Middle Class in Ali Smith's There But For The

Ali Smith There But For The adli romaninda okuru tuketici orta sinifin olmayan bir varlik haline gelerek sistemin surdurulmesine katkida bulundugu gozetlemeci kapitalist toplumda varolussal bir yolculuga cikarmaktadir. Bu toplumun uyelerinden biri bir aksam yemegi toplantisi esnasinda kendisini tanimadigi bir cift insanin misafir odasina kilitlemek suretiyle kendini medeniyetten soyutlarken aslinda kendisi de olmayan bir varliga donusmektedir. Yok olusuyla yarattigi kargasa onu ulus capinda daha da buyuk bir var olusa donusturur. Bu esnada, aksam yemeginde ve adamin eyleminin altinda yatan isyanin fark edilisinden sonra suregelen tartismalar cevresindeki insanlarin yargilayici varliklarinin onlari yalnizca adamin hayatinda degil, ayni zamanda toplumun genelinde aslinda bir var olmayisa donusturdugunu ortaya koymaktadir. Romanin basliginda kullanilan atasozunun eksik birakilmis olan kismi (grace of God, go I) daha en bastan var olan her kim olursa olsun bu kisinin varliginin baskalarinin acisindan zevk almak uzerine temellendirilecegini ima etmektedir. Gozetlemenin toplumun orta sinif uyeleri tarafindan icsellestirilmis olmasi gercegi ironik bir bicimde bu uyeleri sistemin vucut bulmus bir haline cevirmektedir. Bu uyeler yalnizca gozetlemeciler ve yargiclar olarak var olmakta, ancak is sorunlarin cozumune geldiginde ayni uyeler ortadan kaybolmaktadirlar. Bu makalenin amaci orta sinifin bu var olmayan varligini medeniyet ve medeniyetin hosnutsuzluklari baglaminda varolussal bir tartisma olarak incelemektir.

Listening as critique: Towards a methodology of absent presences in research on coloniality

Only recently I started a PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Theatre and Performance Studies. In this PhD I am investigating the history of the magic lantern, one of the first devices to project images for a broad audience. The magic lantern was frequently used for colonial propaganda by missionaries and social reformers, constituting an image of the Other that still lives on today. This article will not be an introduction into the subject of the magic lantern propaganda. Instead, it is attended to be a first methodological reflection of this research. It serves as an attempt to consider how to engage with the archival material I encounter without reproducing the colonial gaze living on in these photographs. Central to this article will therefore be the question on how to relate to the Other in the image from within a privileged (academic) position. As Theatre and Performance Studies cannot rescind from the discussions on decolonization coming from the African Diaspora in Belgium, I think about a methodology to cope with the recurring gaps in our research field as a precondition to do research on images of the other. I do not seek to map out a fixed methodological plan. I rather try to take some first steps to listen as critique to an alternative history that is always already, absent in its presence. 

УКРАЇНСЬКА ЛІТЕРАТУРНА ЕМІГРАЦІЯ: МОДЕЛІ «ВІДСУТНЬОЇ ПРИСУТНОСТІ» В МАТЕРИКОВОМУ ПИСЬМЕНСТВІ

The article focuses on various aspects and peculiarities of Ukrainian literary emigration – from the need to surround other people’s space with the whole complex of psychological, socio-cultural, creative problems – to the re-accentu- ation of the notions of motherland / stranger, center / periphery, etc. In this context, various individual views on the notion of a homeland as a territory and a homeland as a spiritual, metaphysical substance are considered. It is noted that under the conditions of a closed system of totalitarianism, this was perhaps the only opportunity to perceive the intellectual, philosophical, artistic-style impulses of the world not only through the mediation of Russian and Polish translation, but also directly within other cultures. Writers outside Ukraine produced other models of world perception – hence the explanation of a broad map of scattering of Ukrainian emigrants. The emigre writers integrated into a strange world, the world of the Other is not as Alien, where, accordingly, there is a dominant, “central” or dominant culture and culture marginal, peripheral, brought from other ethnic territories and communities. On the one hand, they got the freedom of creativity, and on the other hand, they were limited by harsh conditions of survival (most of them had to work for a long time on different jobs). Open to change, they were guided by the guideline to maintain a certain balance between their / stranger to balance the images of their homeland / stranger. The received “gift of freedom” tried to convey creativity, “liberating” itself from traditional aesthetics, instead seeking the new, “unburied aesthetics”. Different models of “absent presence” of diasporic writers in mainland Ukrainian literature (B. Boychuk, B. Rubchak, I. Koshelevets, Emma Andievskaya, Vera Vovk, Anna-Galya Gorbach, Martha and Ostap Tarnavsky, etc.) are analyzed in the article. Some of them tried to legalize their presence in the Ukrainian socio-cultural space still far from gaining independence from Ukraine; others have proven active in the Ukrainian cultural environment since the 1990’s. The author stresses the need to study the holistic image of Ukrainian literature, including the study of mentality, psychological peculiarities of emigration writers.

The Distance from Home by Daniel Jacobs

Reviewed by: The Distance from Home by Daniel Jacobs Dr. Jeffrey Berman The Distance from Home by Daniel Jacobs. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books. 220 pages. “You must change your life.” Daniel Jacobs, the author of the 2019 novel The Distance from Home, does not quote Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous injunction, which appears at the end of his 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” but it describes precisely the predicament of his protagonist, Hannah Avery. Not that her life was entirely bad when she decided, twenty-two years earlier, in 1972, to accept George Albright’s invitation to join him, his wife Pru, and friends on a trip to Nepal. Hannah was thirty-seven at the time, single, still mourning the death of her mother when she was nine. An art curator at the Musϧe Baudry, Hannah enjoys her work, but it doesn’t prevent her from feeling lonely, restless, and unfulfilled. Past relationships with men have not worked out; her boss has recently disparaged her work, and she feels the biological clock ticking. She is looking for someone or something that will help her change her life. Will trekking through the unforgiving Himalayan mountains provide Hannah with that opportunity? This is the question that drives the novel. Daniel Jacobs is well known in the psychoanalytic community. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Director of the Hanns Sachs Library. He is also Director of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies at Princeton and Aspen. A coauthor of the 1995 book The Supervisory Encounter: A Guide for Teachers of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Jacobs has published many articles on psychoanalysis, but The Distance from Home is his first novel—a daunting challenge for an octogenarian. The Distance from Home contains a wide cast of compelling characters, beginning with Hannah, who is complex, sympathetic, and believable. Jacobs narrates the story through Hannah’s point of view, and we trust her perceptions and value judgments. She realizes, from the moment she agrees to travel to Nepal, that the experience may be life-transforming. An authority on seventeenth-century Dutch garden design, she loves paintings because they never change—unlike people, who do. [End Page 446] Jacobs knows the art world well, and Hannah’s judgments about painting are authoritative without being opinionated. Unlike other curators, she never believes that she knows more about a painting than the artist who painted it. (Just as a literary critic doesn’t know more about a story than the writer who created it.) She understands that you must look at a painting for hours before it reveals itself. The same is true for a novel: you need to reflect on it and read it more than once before it reveals itself. Indeed, nearly everything Hannah says about painting is true of literature. She is involved in the restoration of art—and as we ponder the novel, we see that she is involved in nothing less than the restoration of her own life, trying to repair the damaged parts of her existence caused by her mother’s early death, her father’s self-absorption and alcoholism, and her boyfriends’ lack of understanding. “Only art clarifies things—for a moment anyway” (p. 30), she tells her former lover, the painter Leon Kaminsky, who is anxious to resume their relationship in Nepal. The two characters could not be more different. “Loving is so messy,” he declares; she points out that the opposite is true for her: “Love order things” (p. 62). Part of Hannah’s attraction to art is that it gives her the order and control she needs. Similarly, part of the pleasure of reading The Distance from Home is that we see how Jacobs portrays Hannah’s pursuit of love and order while trekking through Nepal. She knows that love is not always enough, but without love and self-esteem, she cannot imagine the possibility of happiness. Hannah’s mother remains an absent presence throughout the novel. There are more than a dozen references to the woman who wasted away from metastatic cancer while her daughter looked on helplessly. Hannah cannot exorcise the image of her mother...

‘I've got lots of gaps, but I want to hang on to the ones that I have’: the ageing body, oral health and stories of the mouth

AbstractThe mouth may be presented and understood in different ways, be subject to judgement by others and, as we age, may intrude on everyday life due to problems that affect oral health. However, research that considers older people's experiences concerning their mouths and teeth is limited. This paper reports on qualitative research with 43 people in England and Scotland, aged 65–91, exploring the significance of the mouth over the lifecourse. It uses the concept of ‘mouth talk’ to explore narratives of maintaining, losing and replacing teeth. Participants engaged in ‘mouth talk’ to downplay the impact of the mouth, demonstrate socially appropriate ageing, and distance themselves from ‘real’ old age by retaining a moral identity and sense of self. They also found means to challenge dominant discourses of ageing in how they spoke about missing teeth. Referring to Leder's notion of ‘dys-appearance’ and Gilleard and Higgs’ work on the social imaginary of the fourth age, the study illustrates the ways in which ‘mouth talk’ can contribute to sustaining a sense of self in later life, presenting the ageing mouth, with and without teeth, as an absent presence. It also argues for the importance of listening to stories of the mouth in order to expand understanding of people's approaches to oral health in older age.

More present than absent: Men who use domestic violence and their fathering

AbstractAn earlier article referred to the “absent presence” of the perpetrator in the lives of children and their mothers who have lived with domestic violence. It identified the ways in which the shadow of the perpetrator continued and was evidenced in the “symptoms of abuse” that both women and children experienced in spite of his absence. The current article argues that fathers who use violence are actually more present than absent in the lives of children (and women), even following separation. A mixed method approach surveyed men in Men's Behaviour Change Programs (N = 101), and interviewed women who had experienced violence (N = 50). The studies reported that the majority of men in both the quantitative men's study (80%) and the qualitative women's study (77%) had substantial contact with children. The women's interviews highlight the problematic fathering that many of their children experienced, both before and after separation. They reported very high levels of child abuse and poor attitudes to both women and children.The article concludes that the family violence and child welfare systems are poorly configured to address fathers who use violence and continue to hold substantial parenting roles, including following separation.

Mediated absent presence in forced displacement

ABSTRACT For many forcefully displaced people worldwide, notions around one’s sense of “home” and “place” in the world are perpetually unsettled. This article explores how digital technologies interact with embodied, material experiences within the geographical location refugees are residing in. Empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted among Iraqi urban refugees, living in prolonged uncertainty in Jordan, shows how situated experiences of legal, material, and social uncertainty reinforce particular mediated socialities. Pivotal studies have shown how digital connections engender virtual home-making practices and a wide variety of connected presences. This study points to the other side of the same coin: the cultivation of “absent presence.” “Absent presence” refers to feelings—the ambivalence that experiences of prolonged displacement bring about—but also to active disengagement and affective tactics in response. These engender a further separation from the physical world where forced migrants are not deemed welcome.

Smartphones reduce smiles between strangers

New developments in technology—from the printing press to television—have long facilitated our capacity for “absent presence,” enabling us to escape the limits of our immediate environment. Does being constantly connected to other people and activities through our smartphones diminish the need to engage with others in the immediate social world, reducing the likelihood of approach behavior such as smiling? In a preregistered experiment, strangers waited together with or without their smartphones; their smiling was later coded by trained assistants. Compared to participants without smartphones, participants with smartphones exhibited significantly fewer smiles of any kind and fewer genuine (Duchenne) smiles. These findings are based on objective behavioral coding rather than self-report and provide clear evidence that being constantly connected to the digital world may undermine important approach behavior.

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

Resisting representation: Flann O’Brien and Ireland

ABSTRACTThis article explores the extent to which Flann O’Brien’s early fiction can be read as ‘representing’ the cultural realities of post-independence Ireland. The rise of the new modernist studies has inspired a host of criticism to explain the Flann O’Brien oeuvre in terms of the cultural dynamics from which it ‘emerges’. The early novels, however, given their radically symbolic character – and the particular manner in which they efface memory – are obtuse in relation to (the representation of) Ireland. Through a close reading of their respective narrative modes, it is argued that Ireland is an absent presence which lacks constitutive meaning in At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman and is thus supplemented by their fictional realities. As such, this article (re)considers the critical criteria for thinking about Irish modernist literature in relation to the history of the nation state.

The absent presence: Children's place in narratives of human trafficking

This paper uses in‐depth qualitative data, obtained as part of research examining human trafficking from Slovakia to the United Kingdom, to explore the place of children in human trafficking processes. Rather than foregrounding cases of children as direct subjects of abuse, the paper focuses on instances where children are used to control, manipulate and exploit relatives embroiled in human trafficking. We study examples when children are moved across national borders and those when they remain in the home country, and show how in both accounts their (absent) presence constitutes a significant means for facilitating, maintaining and intensifying the exploitation of their adult relatives. Through doing so, the paper demonstrates how identifying the distinct spaces and moments within which children appear in narratives of exploitation has the potential to uncover nefarious practices occurring within the human trafficking process, as well as the indirect effects of human trafficking on family dynamics. The paper extends conceptual understandings of agency in human trafficking by illustrating how children are simultaneously subjects of exploitation and emplaced through complex channels within the exploitation of others.

Le spectre du cancer : géographicités de l’expérience de la maladie

Le cancer peut être considéré comme une maladie chronique dans la mesure où sa rémission n’exclut pas la possibilité de son retour. La sortie progres­sive de la maladie impliquerait des reconfigurations qui prennent du temps. Le problème central semble alors être celui des temporalités. Pourtant, ces reconfigu­rations liées aux expériences passées de la maladie et aux effets toujours présents ne sont-elles pas également spatiales ? Un travail de recherche a été réalisé auprès du service de l’Activité physique adaptée (APA) d’un centre de lutte contre le cancer. En plus des observations participantes réalisées durant les séances de sport, les matériaux de cette étude reposent sur neuf entretiens semi-directifs auprès de dix participantes au programme APA, ayant ou ayant eu le cancer, principalement du sein. Depuis le point de vue singulier des participantes, les lieux se chargent de sémantiques diverses via le vécu du cancer. En actes, les spatialités révèlent la présence du cancer dans les actions et les espaces du quotidien. L’APA, comme d’autres activités, s’apparente à une reconquête d’espaces d’actions, permettant de passer de la position attentiste de patient qui doit supporter passivement les traitements à des activités non-subies qui constituent des prises sur une trajectoire de vie. Le géographique est finalement à considérer à la façon d’un maillage de co-spatialités humaines et non-humaines, qui renseigne le caractère dynamique et proactif des environnements. Cet ensemble d’analyses permet de questionner l’expérience de la maladie et de ses temporalités, incarnées dans un vécu corporel et spatial.

The Expression of Time (Spinoza, Deleuze, Cinema)

Abstract This essay investigates the absent presence of Baruch Spinoza’s thought in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image and argues that the concept of expression—as articulated by Deleuze in his study on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy, as well as in his Logic of Sense—constitutes the crucial condition of possibility of Deleuze’s philosophical theory of the cinema and, in particular, of his twofold understanding of cinema as medium of expression and of cinema as expression of time.

One family, two children, and six parents: understanding the absent presence of birth families through a five-year investigation of an adoptive mother’s narratives

ABSTRACTThis five-year single case study was aimed to understand the role of birth families in the family dynamics of one American family with two daughters adopted from China over the course of their transition into adolescence. Six open-ended interviews with the adoptive mother, triangulated with two unstructured observations, revealed that despite their physical absence, the adoptees’ birth families occupied an important space in the family dynamics of this adoptive family. Interviews with the adoptive mother revealed that for the two adopted children, the absent presence of their respective birth families had different cognitive, affective, and behavioral manifestations. Over the course of transitioning from childhood to adolescence, there was a gradual and noticeable increase of autonomy in both adoptees in initiating adoption conversations. There was also a power shift from the adoptive mother to the two daughters in family discussions on birth families, although differences between the two adoptees in handling birth family-related issues were also apparent. Findings highlighted the palpable presence of birth families in the lives of adopted children and meaningful differences between the two adoptees raised in one adoptive family. Implications for family clinicians working with adoptive families were discussed.

Translating ritual into film – Notes on Paul Henley’s ‘spirit, possession, power, and the absent presence of Islam: re-viewing Les Maîtres Fous’

In his 2006 article for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, ‘Spirit Possession, power, and the absent presence of Islam: re-viewing Les Maîtres Fous’ (Henley, 2006, pp 731-62), Paul Henley gives an in-depth analysis and re-examination of the seminal classic “Les Maîtres Fous” by the late French film director Jean Rouch. One of the most striking elements in the text is the rift Henley detects between what he calls ‘Rouch The Author’ and ‘Rouch The Film-Maker’. The article goes to great lengths in its analysis of possible new viewing angles for the anthropological material at hand, being the hauka – cult in Accra, West-Africa – as observed in the film. Henley has a clear view on all possible alternative interpretations and re-viewings of the film from an anthropological point of view, but seems to struggle when it comes to juxtaposing these with the reality of the film. He chooses to make a sharp division between the two sides of Jean Rouch (‘Author/Anthropologist’ and ‘Film-Maker’) without ever delving into the historiography of anthropological films at the time, nor the influence Rouch was under from directors such as Luc De Heusch and Alain Resnais. He also neglects to place Rouch’s work within the broader context of filmhistoric developments of the 1950’s. Henley’s paper does not attempt to address these questions and there is the clear choice of interpreting the work only from an anthropological point of view. This paper will address these gaps, offering a few possible explanations which address Rouch’s work as a director, a side that should complete the anthropological data in Henley’s paper. This text will provide a basic layout for understanding the cinematographic choices Rouch made, placing them in a larger framework and making a case for the interpretation of the film on its own terms and not only as an (seemingly) objective account of an anthropological study. Key words: Jean Rouch, Paul Henley, Luc de Heusch, anthropological film, self-reflexivity

Absent Presence: Reading Other Artists in Baudelaire's Critical Essays

Absent Presence: Reading Other Artists in Baudelaire's Critical Essays

Anti-Bullying Policies in Canadian Sport: An Absent Presence

In Canada, it is estimated that one-third of bullying occurs outside of educational settings, including sport and recreation spaces (Shannon, 2013). Beyond important academic literature on abuse in athlete-coach relationships, however, there is little research on peer-to-peer bullying in sport. This is a noticeable absence considering assertions that there is a high potential for bullying to occur (Kerr, Jewett, MacPherson, & Stirling, 2016; Shannon, 2013). Moreover, bullying has been connected to children and youth drop-out rates (Fraser, 2015).Our interest in this project was to determine how Canadian national sport organizations (NSOs) address peer-to-peer bullying through policy. Although antibullying strategies that rely solely on policy are ineffective (Short, 2013), clearly communicated and implemented policies remain important (Mountjoy et al., 2016; Olweus & Limber, 2010; Walton, 2004). Thus, we focused our analysis on policy documents available to the public on NSO websites.A total of 118 documents were retrieved, consisting of various codes of conduct and harassment policies. Of these 118 policy documents, only three had been produced that addressed peer-to-peer bullying specifically. In the remaining 115 documents, bullying was mentioned just 19 times and only defined in five documents. The absence of specific policy and policy statement addressing peer-to-peer bullying is important to highlight. Well-written and implemented policies are needed in order to help create safer spaces in sport for children and youth. More specifically, it is imperative for sport and recreation organizations to have clearly defined policies on peer-to-peer bullying, which are openly communicated to members of the organization. It is also important for organizations to make it clear how members should report incidents of bullying.Finally, policies that adequately define bullying and that address its root causes such as sexism, racism, ableism, and LGBTQphobia are considered best practice as they are determined to be more complete. Policies that highlight the root or ideological causes of bullying may have more long-term impact on reducing bullying behaviours and incidents, as children and youth are encouraged to embrace difference and demonstrate empathy, respect, and compassion (Short, 2013). These policies should co-exist with educational programs on bullying, such as those offered by Respect in Sport and the Canadian Red Cross.Subscribe to JPRA

Making medicine; producing pleasure: A critical examination of medicinal cannabis policy and law in Victoria, Australia

Several jurisdictions around the world have introduced policies and laws allowing for the legal use of cannabis for therapeutic purposes. However, there has been little critical discussion of how the object of ‘medicinal cannabis’ is enacted in policy and practice. Informed by Carol Bacchi’s poststructuralist approach to policy analysis and the work of science and technology studies scholars, this paper seeks to problematise the object of ‘medicinal cannabis’ and examine how it is constituted through governing practices. In particular, we consider how the making of the object of ‘medicinal cannabis’ might constrain or enact discourses of pleasure. As a case example, we take the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s review of law reform options to allow people in the Australian state of Victoria to be treated with medicinal cannabis. Through analysis of this case example, we find that although ‘medicinal cannabis’ is constituted as a thoroughly medical object, it is also constituted as unique. We argue that medicinal cannabis is enacted in part through the production of another object (so-called ‘recreational cannabis’) and the social and political meanings attached to both. Although both ‘substances’ are constituted as distinct, ‘medicinal cannabis’ relies on the ‘absent presence’ of ‘recreational cannabis’ to define and shape what it is. However, we find that contained within this rendering of ‘medicinal cannabis’ are complex enactments of health and wellbeing, which open up discourses of pleasure. ‘Medicinal cannabis’ appears to challenge the idea that the effects of ‘medicine’ cannot be understood in terms of pleasure. As such, the making of ‘medicinal cannabis’ as a medical object, and its invocation of broad notions of health and wellbeing, expand the ways in which drug effects can be acknowledged, including pleasurable and desirable effects, helping us to think differently about both medicine and other forms of drug use.