Active Social Agents Research Articles

Sharing the world: the researcher and the researched

This article explores the methodological opportunities and challenges I encountered, as a disabled researcher, while doing research on the educational experiences and career aspirations of a group of young disabled people, still in full-time mainstream or special education. While the key barriers facing disabled researchers are recognized, they are challenged in this article and rather seen as opportunities. Further, they are diluted by the ontological privileges that are at the disposal of the disabled researcher, including the use of empathy, which provides a way of understanding other people's experiences in the context of both similarities and differences between the researcher and the researched. This article focuses on three methods of qualitative enquiry – namely, classroom observation, forum theatre workshops and individual interviews. It explores how they were employed to ensure the voices of young disabled people were captured by the research process in ways that reflect their views and recognize them as active social agents who are able to make decisions about their own futures.

Reflections of a Researcher on the use of a Child-Centred Approach

Abstract The ‘new’ sociology of childhood has drawn academic attention to the relationship between the social construction of childhood and the place of children in research. Recent shifts in thinking have allowed for children to be regarded as active social agents who make choices and negotiate their social and intellectual pathways around existing adult controls. Thus, academics have had to begin to consider how research can be conducted with children rather than on them. This paper reflects on the experience of undertaking child-centred research and debates the extent to which children can, in reality, be central to all elements of the research process. It refers to the author’s own research experiences in order to highlight the factors which serve to facilitate and inhibit research with children. Crucially, the author engages with the notion that child-centred or child-focused research requires that children are active rather than passive partners to the researcher.

Death, exchange and reproduction in the British Bronze Age

This article examines the character and role of exchange in Bronze Age Britain. It critiques anachronistic models of competitive individualism, arguing instead that the circulation of both artefacts and the remains of the dead constructed the self in terms of enduring interpersonal ties. It is suggested that the conceptual divide between people and things that typifies post-Enlightenment rationalism has resulted in an understanding of Bronze Age exchange that implicitly characterizes objects as commodities. This article re-evaluates the relationship between people and things in Bronze Age Britain. It explores the role of objects as active social agents; the exchange of artefacts and of human remains facilitated the production of the self and the reproduction of society through cyclical processes of fragmentation, dispersal and reincorporation. As such, Bronze Age concepts of personhood were relational, not individual.

Resistance, essentialism, and empowerment in black nationalist discourse in the African Diaspora: A comparison of the back to Africa, black power, and rastafari movements

The mobilization of ethnicity entails the production of culture—a process involving the interweaving of culture, history and identity, and the manipulation of cultural symbols to reconstruct and reshape conceptions of self and community. The shifting character and salience of ethnicity as demonstrated in the Back to Africa, Black Power, and Rastafari movements point to the flexibility of culture and identity. In demonstrating the interrelationships among activism, identity and culture and their impact on the creation of new and revitalized ethno-racial identities in the African-Caribbean Diaspora, all three movements allowed their socially dispossessed and culturally displaced adherents to be active social actors and knowledgeable agents capable of making their own history. This paper takes issue with the black cultural nationalists’ deployment of a “race-culture” essentialist discourse to: (i) frame notions of difference vis-a-vis the Other; and (ii) “imagine” and homogenize blackness so as to produce ethno-racial solidarity in the minds of the disenfranchised.

The Invisible Citizens Roaming the City Streets

Children living in the streets and supporting themselves through various kinds of street-based jobs have become a visible social phenomenon in urban Sudan. This article analyses the making of street children's subcultures by discussing their everyday street lives within the cultural, social, political and educational settings. In order to understand street children, not only as an urban social phenomenon, but also as active social agents who are categorised by the State and the urban privileged classes in very specific terms, I have employed a multi-pronged approach to interview them to contextualise their everyday lives and discourses to reveal their abilities as agents for the nation's future, and to push the society's efforts to make them into capable but loyal citizens.

Adolescent girls, illegal abortions and “sugar-daddies” in Dar es Salaam: vulnerable victims and active social agents

Adolescent girls’ early sexual activity, early pregnancy, induced abortions and the increase in HIV infections have become major concerns in Sub-Saharan Africa. Efforts, though, to understand their sexual behaviour and to prevent reproductive health problems are almost non-existent. Adolescent girls are normally seen as victims and easy preys of (often older and married) men's sexual exploitation. This article, which is based on a qualitative study of 51 adolescent girls who had just had an illegal abortion in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, reveals that these girls are not only victims but also willing preys and active social agents engaging in high-risk sexual behaviour. In order to get material benefits they expose themselves to serious health risks, including induced abortion — without realising their own vulnerability. In our study, one out of four girls had more than one partner at the time they became pregnant, and many counted on an illegally induced abortion if they got pregnant. Even if adolescents are now allowed free access to family planning information, education and services, our study shows that this remains in the realm of theory rather than practice. Moreover, most adolescent girls are not aware about their right to such services. The paper concludes that the vulnerability of adolescent girls increases without the recognition that sexuality education and contraceptive services do not constitute a licence to practice illicit sex — but rather a means to create more mature and responsible attitudes and to increase sexual and reproductive health.

Revisiting Images of the Child in Early Childhood Education: Reflections and Considerations

There have been a number of recent developments impacting on the field of early childhood education that suggest it might be timely to re-examine our understandings of children and childhood. Events such as the development of mandated curriculum for the non-compulsory years, the implementation of diagnostic tools and assessment regimes in the first years of school, and moral panic over paedophilia are all underpinned by certain views of the child and ideals of childhood. This article explores how three dominant constructions of the child embedded in early childhood policy and practice are problematic, particularly in terms of power relationships and agency for the child and how they may constrain the possibilities in early childhood curriculum. The analysis concludes that taking a critical perspective on these childhood images helps reveal hidden assumptions and creates an opportunity for new kinds of images that offer alternative positions to the child as an active social agent and re-orient early childhood curriculum towards its transformational possibilities.

My Animals and Other Family: Children's Perspectives on their Relationships with Companion Animals

ABSTRACTThe relationship between children and companion animals in contemporary British society has not been explored in any depth from a sociological perspective. The new paradigm of the ‘sociology of childhood’ constructs children as active social agents whose social relationships are worthy of study in their own right. This raises questions about the nature of children's social relationships, which often include close attachment to companion animals. This exploratory paper draws on data from two different qualitative research projects, a study of children's activities outside school (191 children aged between 12 and 15 years), and a study of children's conceptualizations of family (183 children aged between 8 and 14 years). The paper is based upon children's descriptions of their pets, in their own words, and indicates that children's relationships to their pets changes with age. It concludes that to see pet care as merely a form of role rehearsal for future adult activities is too limited and that we need to take account of the importance of animals in children's lives in the here and now.

WHY HORROR? THE PECULIAR PLEASURES OF A POPULAR GENRE

What is the appeal of horror? Various attempts have been made to answer this question, generally combining arguments about the nature of horror texts with arguments about the distinctive character of horror consumers. The most common attempts at general explanation are grounded in concepts drawn from psychoanalytic theory, some depending quite directly on Freud's ‘return of the repressed’ argument in his discussion of ‘the uncanny’, others utilizing the framework of ‘structural psychoanalysis’ to explore the ways in which the unconscious structures forms of representation. Examples of both forms of analysis are discussed – largely in relation to horror movies – exemplified in the recent work of Wood, Twitchell, Creed and Clover. General explanations which do not use psychoanalytic arguments are less common, though Carroll has recently offered one such approach which is given consideration here. It is argued that these attempts at posing general explanations of the appeal of horror are, at worst, inappropriately reductive and, at best, insufficiently specific, failing to distinguish the diverse pleasures that heterogeneous horror audiences take from their active involvement in the genre. Alternative, more particularistic approaches are considered (exemplified in aspects of work by Biskind, Carroll, Dika, Jancovich and Tudor) which seek to relate textual features to specific social circumstances. It is argued that such approaches pre-suppose a social ontology centred upon active social agents who use cultural artefacts as resources in rendering coherent their everyday lives. This is in some contrast to attempts to provide general explanations of horror's appeal where the tacit model is one in which human agents are pre-constituted in key respects, horror appealing, therefore, because it gratifies pre-established desires. It is suggested that the former, active and particularistic conception is to be preferred and that this necessitates a renewed attempt to grasp the diversity of what is, after all, a heterogenous audience capable of taking diverse pleasures from their favoured genre.

Group Socialization: Theory and Research

Moreland and Levine (1982) proposed a model of group socialization that describes and explains the passage of individuals through groups. In that model, the relationship between the group and the individual is assumed to change in systematic ways over time and both parties are viewed as active social influence agents. This chapter summarizes the group socialization model, discusses theoretical elaborations and extensions of the model, and reviews some empirical studies stimulated by the model.

Women and charitable organisations in nineteenth century Ireland

Irish women played an important role in voluntary charity work in 19th-century Ireland. Initially these women were involved in fundraising for male run charities. Individual women soon recognised the need for specialised charities and began to organise other women in societies which catered for the most vulnerable members of society, poor women, prostitutes and destitute children. They later broadened the scope of their work to provide vocational training for women in the teaching and nursing professions. These philanthropic women also formed groups involved in the anti-slavery and temperance movements. Lay voluntary societies were most often formed by women of the protestant or Quaker faiths. The role of lay Catholic women in charitable societies was gradually taken over by female religious orders which developed rapidly in Ireland after mid-century. Most of the women involved in lay voluntary work did not seek publicly to alter the social conditions which led to poverty and destitution. A number of women did, however, individually campaign to change those laws which affected women and children. Through charity work women in 19th-century Ireland broadened the working horizons for all women and promoted their right to be active social agents in Irish society.