Absent Voices Research Articles

Reframing convict tattoo collections: the comic as critical methodology

ABSTRACT Taking the specific example of Paco: Les Mains Rouges (2014; 2017) – a two-volumed sepia graphic novel by Fabien Vehlmann and Éric Sagot – this article explores the potential of the comic format to destabilize carceral histories via the trope of the convict tattoo. The creation of convict records (including the surveillance of tattoos) leaves a rich textual and visual archive that is steeped in power inequalities and absent voices, but also creative potential. By articulating the comic as a critical methodology, this article aims to explore the potential for the format to develop narratives that counter authorized archives and challenge dominant representations of incarceration whilst drawing creative inspiration from historical iconographies of punishment. In its consideration of creative interpretation and potential for engaging with new modes of collecting, it has applications for historical research, media, visual criminology and museum and heritage studies.

Divided Communities and Absent Voices: The Search for Autistic BIPOC Parent Blogs

Both autistic adults and families of autistic children rely heavily on blogs and other digital platforms to create community and gain experiential knowledge about autism, but research on autism blogs has failed to distinguish between the perspectives of autistic adults and neurotypical parent bloggers. Furthermore, intersections in the experiences of BIPOC autistics are rarely examined. Using a content analysis with a feminist Critical Disability Studies lens, I explore six autism parent blogs from diverse demographics: a white neurotypical father, a white autistic mother in an interracial relationship, a white neurotypical mother, an Indigenous autistic trans father, a Black autistic nonbinary mother, and a Black neurotypical mother. I examine the attitudes of these bloggers to get a sampling of their opinions on autism, how they parent autistic children, and how their social location, specifically race, impacts their experiences. More intersectional research needs to be done to boost the perspectives of BIPOC autistics and the expertise of autistic parents.

Miseducation in South African Public Schooling: the case of To Kill a Mockingbird

A racial incident revolving around the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in a South African school has prompted this examination of how set works are implicated in the dissemination race-related beliefs. The way the book is taught, it is argued, cements the continuation of the alienation of blackness by affirming ubiquitous white normativity. It perpetuates the notion that the fault lies in an ‘existential deviation’ that inheres in black people. This examination highlights how, through the purposive propagation of white normality, the book exhibits anti-black sentiments. The sympathetic white psyche that subsists simultaneously with the continuing enjoyment of racial favouritism, is appraised. The stance of the book is confronted by noting the contrived largely absent voices of black people in the narrative. This book positions the black characters as props, for the absolution of the white protagonists (and by proxy sympathetic white people) during circumstances of the unremitting and deadly racial oppression.

Absent Voices: Women and Youth in Communal Land Governance. Reflections on Methods and Process from Exploratory Research in West and East Africa

An increasing number of African States are recognizing customary land tenure. Yet, there is a lack of research on how community rights are recognized in legal and policy frameworks, how they are implemented in practice, and how to include marginalized groups. In 2018–2019, we engaged in collaborative exploratory research on governing natural resources for food sovereignty with social movement networks, human rights lawyers and academics in West and East Africa. In this article, we reflect on the process and methods applied to identify research gaps and partners (i.e., two field visits and regional participatory workshops in Mali and Uganda), with a view to share lessons learned. In current debates on the recognition and protection of collective rights to land and resources, we found there is a need for more clarity and documentation, with customary land being privatized and norms rapidly changing. Further, the voices of women and youth are lacking in communal land governance. This process led to collaborative research with peasant and pastoralist organizations in Kenya, Tanzania, Mali and Guinea, with the aim to achieve greater self-determination and participation of women and youth in communal land governance, through capacity building, participatory research, horizontal dialogues and action for social change.

The Voices of Others: Intertextuality and Authorial Presences in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction

My project here is to discuss the extent of Rhys's permeability to the voices of ‘others’, especially when it comes to quoting, inserting, using, or elaborating her own writing with a recourse to the literary authority of other writers. The postcolonial concept of ‘writing back’ obliterates the process of actual writing to the profit of the Western-constructed idea of an accusatory pattern in the literary agendas of authors from former Empires. As critical as Rhys might have been of European colonialism, a limitation of her work to a gesture of ‘writing back’ amounts to denying the polyphony orchestrated by the writer, thereby blurring any form of aesthetic purpose per se. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid a strictly postcolonial discourse, my article studies the wide scope of examples of intertextuality in Jean Rhys's short fiction (mainly in the short stories ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, ‘Hunger’, ‘La Grosse Fifi’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’ and ‘Temps Perdi’), in relation to the very notions of authority—both the author's, and her peers’. What is more, ‘others’ are present in her writing under the form of absent voices piercing through the fabric of the text, which results in a failure to locate the main source of authority. I shall enquire into the notion of failure as writing and reading aesthetics, rather than a simple literary motif.

Absent Voices: Experiencing Prison Life from Both Sides of the Fence - A Turkish Female's Perspective

Absent Voices: Experiencing Prison Life from Both Sides of the Fence - A Turkish Female's Perspective

Thailand in a Larger Universe: The Lingering Consequences of Crypto-Colonialism

The present parochialism of Thai studies, although partial, suggests parallels with the situation of Modern Greek studies in the early 1970s. The cultural and political conditions attendant on both in the respective time periods—especially the prudery, emphasis on bourgeois notions of respectability, and restrictions on the scope and content of scholarship—suggest that a comparative framework, already emergent, would benefit both Thailand and Thai studies today. Thailand and Greece both represent conditions of “crypto-colonialism,” in which the combination of adulation and resentment of powerful Western nations produces a distinctive set of attitudes. Important cultural and political consequences flow from this shared condition, as is also contrastively demonstrated by the two countries’ very different recent histories. For example, censorship, once deeply intrusive but now virtually nonexistent in Greece, was instantiated by absent voices and official surveillance at the Thai studies conference at which this article was originally presented. A defensive posture, such censorship exposes an underlying sense of political weakness and cultural embarrassment.

“If You Want the History of a White Man, You Go to the Library” : Critiquing Our Legacy, Addressing Our Library Collections Gaps

ABSTRACTIn 1864, the same year the University of Denver was founded by John Evans, then the territorial governor of Colorado and the superintendent of Indian affairs, a group of U.S. militia attacked and killed vulnerable members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations at Sand Creek. Using critical race theory and the feminist “ethic of care,” we critique our collections in terms of the massacre and absent Native American voices in order to develop a collecting philosophy and direction to acknowledge and address the gaps and to formulate strategies for teaching students to interrogate a predominately white institutional archive to give voice to the absent or silenced.

Policy research and ‘damaged teachers’: Towards an epistemologically respectful paradigm

This paper canvasses one of the most debilitating issues currently disfiguring schools - the absent voices of teachers in the policy reform of schooling. This is a phenomenon that has afflicted schooling around the world for more than three decades, and it is not without effects. The escalating levels of student disaffection, alienation, violence, disengagement and `dropping out' are not unconnected to the marginalisation of teachers and the disrespectful and distrustful ways in which they have been treated by policy makers, politicians and a largely hostile media. What is advanced in its place in this paper is a way of conducting research that restores trust through acknowledging and celebrating the distinctive repertoires of knowledge teachers and students possess, and points to the way in which a more respectful policy paradigm might be re-invented.

Policy research and ‘damaged teachers’: Towards an epistemologically respectful paradigm

This paper canvasses one of the most debilitating issues currently disfiguring schools'”the absent voices of teachers in the policy reform of schooling. This is a phenomenon that has afflicted schooling around the world for more than three decades, and it is not without effects. The escalating levels of student disaffection, alienation, violence, disengagement and 'dropping out' are not unconnected to the marginalisation of teachers and the disrespectful and distrustful ways in which they have been treated by policy makers, politicians and a largely hostile media. What is advanced in its place in this paper is a way of conducting research that restores trust through acknowledging and celebrating the distinctive repertoires of knowledge teachers and students possess, and points to the way in which a more respectful policy paradigm might be re-invented.

Identidades suspendidas por el silencio, la opacidad, la vergüenza y los tabúes Narrativas sobre violencia sexual en la guerra irregular en el Caribe colombiano

In this paper, we present the product of the first part of this fieldwork developed in the framework of the research about Narratives of sexual violence in irregular warfare in Colombia's Caribbean: voices of gay, transgender, intersex, bisexual and lesbian, whose objective is to do a literary narrative of the sexual violence cases on the LGTBI population caused by paramilitary groups in this area. To develop our purpose in “introduction”, there is a brief review of the theoretical foundations of our investigation, previously published on Human Rights, a trans-disciplinary approach; then in “A needle in a haystack“, we talk about the difficult search for victims decided to testify; in “The territory, the trip, the music“, we can describe the context in which the interviews were made that led to literary narratives presented in “Living voices and absent voices”, to finally show some of the conclusions of this second part of our research.

A Queer Thing

The article focuses on the 2010 art exhibition Swallow My Pride (SMP), a visceral response to the commercialization of gay culture in Cape Town and a critique of notions of queerness and its visibility in the public sphere. SMP brought local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex artists together to reflect upon queerness through methodology and an appeal to the personal. In the exhibit, queerness functioned as a strategy to articulate difference, challenge heteronormativity, and problematize gender identifications. The artworks brought a fresh focus to the courage, suffering, humor, intelligence, and enormous variety of local queer culture. The article investigates how the exhibition, as a queer archive, embraced a critical history of sexuality and gender in the present moment, as well as acknowledging absent voices and narratives, which have been previously silenced and unnamed.

Understanding Hospital Admissions Close to the End of Life (ACE) Study

BackgroundPalliative care is a policy priority internationally. In England, policymakers are seeking to develop high quality care for all by focusing on reducing the number of patients who die in acute hospitals. It is argued that reducing ‘inappropriate’ hospital admissions will lead to an improvement in the quality of care and provide cost savings.Yet what is meant by an ‘inappropriate’ admission is unclear and is unlikely to be shared by all stakeholders. The decision process that leads to hospital admission is often challenging, particularly when patients are frail and elderly. The ACE study reopens the idea of ‘inappropriate’ hospital admissions close to the end of life. We will explore how decisions that result in inpatient admissions close to death are made and valued from the perspective of the decision-maker, and will consider the implications of these findings for current policy and practice.Design/MethodsThe study focuses on the admission of patients with advanced dementia, chest disease or cancer who die within 72 hours of admission to acute hospitals. The study uses mixed methods with three data collection phases. Phase one involves patient case studies of admissions with interviews with clinicians involved in the admission and next-of-kin. Phase two uses vignette-based focus groups with clinical professionals and patients living with the conditions of interest. Phase three uses questionnaires distributed to clinical stakeholders. Qualitative data will be explored using framework analysis whilst the questionnaire data will be examined using descriptive statistical analysis. Findings will be used to evaluate current policy and literature.DiscussionSignificant ethical and validity issues arise due to the retrospective nature of phase one of the study. We are not able to gain consent from patients who have died, and the views of the deceased patients cannot be included directly, which risks privileging professional views. This phase also relies on the memories of the participants which may be unreliable. Later phases of the study attempt to compensate for the “absent voices” of the deceased patients by including next-of-kin and patient focus groups.

Absent Voices: Modern Women Writers in Celtic Countries

AbstractAlthough Modern Studies has increasingly focused on international writers, little attention has been paid to the women writers of Celtic countries. This represents an absence of important and distinctive modern voices. More important, to study their work is to discover new, experimental, technically revolutionary, and culturally challenging responses to a changed world: in what has been called “the Celtic Fringe” of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, a treasure trove of new work by women is now appearing. Especially in Scotland, an “efflorescence of Scots as a poetic medium” is now taking place. Yet early frameworks for defining modernism, which have remained, do not account for modern work developed in different cultural traditions and in the different languages of the United Kingdom. Thus we need to re‐examine the difficult, problematic language issues that shaped work by modern women writers in three distinct cultures within the UK. To sustain traditional modernist notions of aesthetic value is to miss the alternative values, sources, and linguistic intensities of modern and contemporary women writers from Celtic countries.

<i>Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education: Connecting Parallel Universities</i> ed. by Michael D. Waggoner (review)

Reviewed by: Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education: Connecting Parallel Universities ed. by Michael D. Waggoner Elizabeth J. Tisdel Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education: Connecting Parallel Universities. Michael D. Waggoner (Ed.). 2011. New York: Routledge. 272 pp. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-88755-7 ($155.00). Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-88756-4 ($44.95). There has been a growing discussion of the role of spirituality in higher education since the dawn of the new millennium. These discussions examine numerous issues in regard to higher education, including the tensions, similarities, and differences between religion and spirituality; the relationship between the sacred and the secular; the place of direct and indirect discussions of religion and spirituality in the classroom; and the role of faculty, administration, student affairs professionals, and campus ministers in navigating some of these tensions. Indeed, different higher education institutions have navigated these tensions in different ways, depending on whether they are secular or religiously affiliated, private or public. In his new edited book, Sacred and Secular Tensions in Higher Education: Connecting Parallel Universities, editor Michael Waggoner gathers together several discussions of these issues and, in his opening chapter, suggests that there are ways of connecting some of these discussions taking place in “parallel universities.” He brings important context to the discussion and is well suited to do so, as he has been the editor of the journal Religion and Education since 2000 and has thus been steeped in the discourse about these issues. In fact, aside from his contextualizing remarks in the first chapter, the remaining eleven chapters are actually reprints of articles spanning 2003–2010 from Religion and Education by authors and researchers from different types of higher education institutions. This is a very good collection discussing some of the aforementioned issues with depth and insight. A strength of the volume is certainly Waggoner’s opening and closing remarks. In the opening chapter, he provides context for the discussions that follow. He gives a brief history of religion in American higher education and notes how both secular and religiously affiliated institutions have wrestled differently with their role in dealing with religious and spiritual questions. Indeed, they are not of one mind, but the result of this history, along with the (Euro-)American tendency toward individualism, has led to the “Balkanization” of religious groups on campus and its adjacent community and has resulted in blind spots about dealing with questions of religion and spirituality and the sacred-secular dialectic (my term, not his) in the curriculum, the co-curriculum, and in the minds of faculty, students, and student affairs professionals. Waggoner’s basic argument in the opening chapter is that the sacred and secular are not as dichotomous as they might seem in higher education, though admittedly [End Page 295] different types of institutions deal with the relationship between religious/spiritual issues and the secular world differently. Each of the authors’ contributions in the eleven chapters is unique and offers important insights to subjects as diverse as: the importance of including atheism in discussions of religion, dealing with evangelicals in the classroom in multiple kinds of higher education institutions, and attending to non-majority religions as well as religious pluralism. The book includes the perspectives of student affairs professionals, faculty, chaplains, and researchers and their discussion of data-based studies, including the well-known and landmark UCLA Higher Education Research Study on student and faculty spirituality. In the Afterword, Waggoner offers some concluding remarks and some recommendations. From the standpoint of what it does provide, the book is excellent. No one book can provide everything, however, and there are a few absent voices in this volume that were a bit surprising. There is no chapter that deals with how the sacred-secular dialectic plays out in the many Catholic higher education institutions in the United States. Given the contribution of Catholic higher education to the U.S. university landscape, the lack of attention here is striking, as is the missing voices of those from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), a group that has also tended to have less emphasis on individualism. Both groups here have navigated the tensions of the sacred-secular dialectic in...

Third parties' voices in a therapeutic interview

Drawing on a dialogical approach inspired by Bakhtin, we start from the assumption that a concrete discussion is an intermingling between dialogue in praesentia and dialogue in absentia, and we refer to the notion of “enunciative positioning” to account for the various relations that a speaker may express toward the voices that he or she invokes. Our data are based on a first therapeutic interview between a therapist, a mother, and a child in a counseling center for children and adolescents. We identify the various voices invoked in this interview and show that three levels of discursive process were involved: (a) the speakers invoked absent speakers; (b) at the same time they developed their own discourse on the basis of their interlocutors' discourse which (c) itself drew on absent speakers or voices. We highlight the various discursive processes through which the speakers integrate their own voice into absent voices, or integrate a distant voice so that it loses its property of being a distant (and borrowed) voice. As a theoretical and methodological contribution to dialogism, our results show that absent voices and their specific intermingling with hic et nunc exchanges were a major resource for therapeutic processes.

Anatomy of a Mean City: Including People Experiencing Homelessness in the Discussion

In January 2006, a survey released by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty named Lawrence, Kansas the second “meanest city” to people who experience homelessness in the United States. The survey focuses on the increase in ordinances that make behaviors such as panhandling and sleeping on sidewalks illegal. A critical perspective missing from the 2006 study were the views of those experiencing homelessness. Therefore, this study was developed with the intention of providing a voice to individuals in the homeless community and to encourage other advocacy efforts to include those absent voices. Findings indicate that Lawrence may not be “mean” in terms of ordinance enforcement but suggest that homeless individuals encounter negative attitudes from the community at large and face barriers to employment and participation in community life. Implications for social welfare practice, policy and research are discussed.

Family Hair Looms

heirloom-2. something having special monetary or sentimental value or significance that is handed on either by or apart from formal inheritance from one generation to another.-Webster's Third International Dictionary In the last years of his life, my father's rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side became the repository of what had been his lawyer's office in the glamorous Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan. The office itself was small and chaotic, though my father claimed that he knew where everything was. My father's attachment to his office and the papers that filled it was intense, but at some point in the 1980s, the combination of his worsening Parkinson's disease and the economic demands of the law firm from whom he rented his space forced him to give up his name on the door. The Redwelds, the distinctive rust-colored containers of legal files, moved uptown. When I inherited my father's possessions after his death, I found, tucked away in his dresser drawers and in the Redwelds that I thought contained the history of his legal career, the unsorted memorabilia of our family: random items from past and forgotten lives-cemetery receipts for the upkeep of graves, report cards, loose photographs of unidentified subjects, magazines, newspaper articles, telegrams, letters in Yiddish, and the mysterious locks of hair that I allude to in my title. What was the point of my keeping what, on the face of it, was precious neither to me nor to anyone else-unless, through another kind of editorial decision, I could figure out whether there was something I could learn from what, as an academic, I called my archive, my material. Material for what? For a narrative I would some day construct about a family that had vanished without a trace. Or maybe just the opposite. This family, over generations, had left traces-in objects, in documents, and finally in me. What was missing was a story that would make sense of the silence that surrounded the scraps of information I had gathered, a story that would bear witness in the place of the absent voices. If I haven't already done so in a gesture of efficiency, at my death someone will toss this entire legacy into a black trash bag and it will all vanish down the garbage chute of history, completing the disappearance already in progress. But perhaps if I convert these objects into words, I can counter the vanishing act. I can share my objects and reinsert them into the wider history to which they belong. This is because my story branches into a network of narratives both characterized by their incompleteness and their interrelatedness. The story I'm trying to tell is both individual and collective. For example, if you click onto the web site jewishgen.org you can see, through criss-crossing tracks of virtual connection, the attempts of many other third-generation descendants of an Eastern European world, shattered at the end of the nineteenth century into the shards and scraps of diaspora, to make sense of a fractured past. The objects-in particular, the locks of hair-photographs, and documents in my personal safekeeping for which I am seeking an interpretive framework take on meaning in relation to a world to which I have no direct access beyond their limited material dimensions. My objects bear witness, as it were, to the existence of a community to which I belong only remotely, but that I can invoke when I insert them into this historical context. The hair was stored in a once-elegant cardboard box. I believe that after my grandmother's death in 1954, my father kept the locks previously saved by my grandmother, without necessarily knowing their origin. While I can safely guess that this hair belongs to my father's side of the family (on my mother's side everyone had bonestraight black hair), what does it mean to inherit something when you don't know for sure to whom it belonged? In this case, since the hair is unassigned-and, we might say, unlike a letter, unsigned-what is the status of possession of hair? …

Coalition of the Uncertain: Classroom Responses to Debates about History Teaching

Concern over the state of Australian history education has generated heated debate for over a year. Yet there have been glaringly absent voices in this very public argument: namely, the students and teachers who engage with this subject every day. Despite mounting anxiety about the state of Australian history teaching, there has been little discussion of how history teachers and students do history. This paper asks how students, teachers and curriculum officials make sense of a subject that constantly arouses so much public anxiety and unease. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Absent Voices: The Story of Writing Systems in the West. Rochelle Altman

Previous articleNext article No AccessBOOK REVIEWSAbsent Voices: The Story of Writing Systems in the West. Rochelle Altman Scott GwaraScott Gwara Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 100, Number 1MARCH 2006 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.100.1.24293834 Views: 2Total views on this site COPYRIGHT © 2006 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.