Concept Of Ambivalence Research Articles

Moving Away From Partisanship: Diversifying the Motives Behind Political Polarization

Most current academic work on political polarization treats partisanship as the dominant motivational driver behind social cleavage and mass polarization. This essay engages in the debate by moving beyond the conceptual straitjacket of partisanship-driven polarization, recasting the primary motives behind political polarization into the three situated and interrelated ideologies that drive the phenomenon of polarization at a mass level, namely, populism, system-justifying attitudes, and state-sponsored ideologies (including religiosity and other cultural identities). By signposting more open-ended, processual, and ambivalent conceptions behind polarization, this article attempts to systematically map the alternative motives of polarization, and in doing so supplement our understanding of the deep ideological divides present not only in Western democracies, but also in many (semi-)authoritarian contexts. The article offers a point of departure for appreciating the coexistence, coevolution, and mutual constitution of the different ideological motives behind polarization, and suggests ways to develop paths to depolarization through a grounded, processual–relational analysis of the world.

Who Counts as Family Later in Life? Following Theoretical Leads

A critical, multilevel conceptual framework provides alternative ways of addressing the question, Who counts as family later in life? The conceptual approach incorporates core ideas from life course, critical, and feminist perspectives, as well as the concept of ambivalence. Three meanings of the word count are used to address who should be included as family, which family ties are personally meaningful in the second half of life, and which family ties are significant sources of support. The article closes by exploring how to make research count: What are the policy and research implications of variations in who should be counted as family, who counts subjectively, and who can be counted on in mid‐ and later life? The macro–meso–micro framework connects societal and institutional arrangements to individuals and their family ties, emphasizing the need to balance individual and collective responsibility in order to support family relations across the life course.

Inscrutable patchwork: exploring inconsistencies in the history of twentieth-century residential childcare

ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, historical child abuse and violence in institutional care have been widely researched across western countries. This article contributes to this research by exploring the conception of residential childcare in Switzerland. Based on the results of a major national study (an interdisciplinary research network funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation 2014–2018), the author examines the inconsistency between the educational ideals circulating in academic and professional milieus and the long prevailing and often violent pedagogy of obedience in Swiss welfare administration and childcare institutions. How far can this practice be explained by the ambivalent conceptions of a ‘right’, ‘just’ or ‘ideal’ education, which were presented simultaneously and often inconsistently in different places? What role did the heterogeneity of the welfare system play? This article thus contributes to helping social work understand its past. It illuminates the success stories of a still young profession as well as the fateful interventions, omissions, professional closures and conflicts shaping the history of the profession. It argues that the current professional discussion on the basic values that were violated in the past not only urgent but also needs to gain historical depth and critical reflexivity.

Reconciliation pedagogies and critical ambivalence in teacher professional development: insights from a case study in Cyprus

ABSTRACT This paper draws on ethnographic data from a project on peace education and reconciliation pedagogies in the conflict-affected context of Cyprus. Following a primary school teacher over the period of eight months in peace education workshops and in her classroom before and after the workshops, we trace critical moments that seem to have an impact on teacher’s thoughts and emotions in relation to conflict and reconciliation. Analysing extracts of interaction both from the workshops as well as from her classroom, we show her struggle to cope with reconciliatory ideas and the dominant conflict ethos, pointing to possibilities for change but also resistances and limitations. Despite the detailed focus on one individual, we use data from the whole project to contextualize her practices and we use her case to highlight important elements to consider when designing reconciliation activities. Using the concept of critical ambivalence, we highlight teachers’ ambivalent emotions during the process (namely, both positive and negative ones) as a first step in deconstructing hegemonic nationalist discourses, and we argue for the value of creating spaces for these ambivalent emotions to be acknowledged and discussed through a critical lens.

Debates about the generic ontology of film noir

This viewpoint discusses the various definitions given to classic film noir in order to show how the concept of film noir is difficult to demarcate as a genre, remaining a debatable subject among theoreticians. On a broader level, it might be argued that these discussions are linked with the intertextuality, the dynamism and the hybridity of film genres. One can also argue that film noir stands as one of the preliminary examples of such hybridity in the history of Western narrative cinema. Such a debate is also connected to film noir’s deviance from Hollywood conventions. While inhabiting elements from these conventions, classic noir has been affected by European film movements whilst influencing them. Noir holds a critical position to the social conditions of its era, defined usually from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. It also produces generic stereotypical characters such as the ‘hardboiled’ detective and the femme fatale that are both embraced and highly criticized by film theoreticians. However, film noir is an ambivalent concept, a category of films that can be sensed, yet resists delimitation within strict boundaries.

Laughter, resistance and ambivalence in Trevor Noah’s stand-up comedy: returning mimicry as mockery

This article explores how to understand stand-up comedy as a form of resistance in global politics, combining discussion of Homi Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry with an examination of Trevor Noah’s stand-up performances, in particular his material on race, disease and poverty. The article builds upon approaches which have interpreted comedy in terms of hidden transcripts, counter-discourses, and counter-conducts to argue that stand-up is serious politics. Notwithstanding his prominence and success, Noah’s performances are an alternative to dominant, white, western and Eurocentric discourses of global politics, and can be understood as a form of ‘ambivalent mockery’ which both inhabit and subvert dominant power relations and discourses from within. In his routines race is reified and deconstructed; disease is tragic and laughable; poverty is lamentable, valorized, and misunderstood. Noah invokes, inhabits and challenges racist and racialized assumptions, performing a racial ‘in-between-ness’ ranging across black, mixed, coloured and white identities which subverts assumptions about stable categories of race and identity. Taking this comedy seriously enables important contradictions in assumptions about race, disease and poverty to be seen more vividly, and demonstrates how global politics is performed and resisted in diverse ways.

The Concept of Ambivalence in the Study of Family Relations

Цель статьи – привлечение внимания к понятию амбивалентности, его использованию и измерению в российских социологических исследованиях, в том числе семейных. Представлены определения понятий амбивалентности и теоретические подходы, с помощью которых, по мнению автора, можно анализировать причины семейной амбивалентности: символический интеракционизм, подход семейного жизненного пути, системная теория, феминистский подход, феноменология. Акцент сделан на понятии «структурная амбивалентность», источником которой (в отличие от определения Р. Мертона) является различное распределение в обществе привилегий и ресурсов среди социальных групп по признаку класса, возраста, пола, этничности/расы, дееспособности, сексуальной ориентации, места рождения и др. Это понятие подчеркивает социальную активность граждан как социальных акторов, не только их психологические состояния и чувства. Структурная амбивалентность влияет на микроуровень семейного взаимодействия. Проблематизируется измерение амбивалентности в социологических исследованиях в связи с ситуационностью и диалектической природой понятия. Представлены основные предметные области применения понятия в зарубежных исследованиях: отношения взрослых детей и родителей, в сводных семьях, в семьях мигрантов, при выполнении отцовской роли молодыми отцами и современных ролей бабушек/дедушек, в процессе «создания семей» незамужними матерями. Приводятся типологии источников межпоколенческой амбивалентности. Обосновывается актуальность исследований в России отношений между взрослыми детьми и родителями, прародителями и внуками, в том числе с применением понятия амбивалентности.

Analysis of Social, Environmental and Economic Sustainability Core: A Bibliometric Overview

Sustainability has become a global concern in the 21st century. However, sustainability is an ambivalent concept that can be interpreted in many ways. In the beginning, it was environmentally-relat...

Кумуляция и амбивалентность в семантике мифологем (на примере репрезентанта horseshoe концепта SUPERSTITION в англосаксонской культуре)

The paper is devoted to the study of the internal, “invisible” structure of the representative horseshoe of the concept SUPERSTITION in the Anglo-Saxon culture, reflecting the main categories of magical thinking. The novelty of this research is that it is performed within the framework of Theolinguistics, namely, in its section – Theolinguoconceptology [Postovalova, 2016]. For the analysis of the language representatives of the concept under study, the method of ontological concept analysis, developed by the author of the paper, is used [Stepanenko, 2006; Stepanenko, 2015. P. 185–195; Stepanenko, 2019. P. 467–488]. The history of the horseshoe is rooted in antiquity, dating back to the pre-Christian civilization. As an ambivalent symbol it is interpreted in terms of the pagan and Christian conceptual systems. The astronomical attribute of the pagan goddesses – the crescent moon – was translated into the language of the Christian theology with a change in the semantics of its symbol, thanks to which the Gospel story of the transcendental world is rendered into the immanent language. Modern culture reduces the sacral in the horseshoe to the level of a profane, a kind of simulacrum for mass consumption. The word horseshoe itself has not changed its shape over the centuries. As for its content, it has gone a difficult semantic way, cumulating both profane and sacral meanings and eventually turning into a wordmythologem, the smallest unit of the myth about the Good and the Evil. This mythologem is actualized in various legends, fairy tales, parables, telling about the magic of the horseshoe, which can bring both good and bad luck, and which can protect against the evil spirits or become an instrument against a man. Our research has shown that the word-mythologem horseshoe keeps on a peculiar framework the pillars of which are five logical ontological categories, the objective universal forms of magical thinking and being. Besides, the analysis of the examples with the word horseshoe allowed us to distinguish nine pairs of dichotomies, each consisting of two ambivalent concepts: assertion and its negation, thus creating antinomy, i.e. a logically unsolvable contradiction. This is but a favorable condition for the survival of the superstition associated with the horseshoe.

An Attempt to Read Mencius’ Philosophy with Help of Cicero: Focusing on the Relationship of the Term 'ren' 仁 with the Building of Empire

Already in 17th century, Ph. Couplet (1623–1693) used Ciceronian terminology to interprete the texts of Confucian philosophy, including that of Mencius (372–289 BCE), an important philosopher especially in terms of understanding Chinese ethics and morals. This paper attempts to read Mencius’ political term “empire” in the context of political philosophy. The paper observes Mencius’s political idea with help of that of Cicero. For this, it demostrates how and why Mencius introduces the ren as a principle of Kingship and the building of Empire. According to him, the ren is a core principle in operating the empire that was formulated with the tianxia (“all-under-heaven”). However, the ren is an ambivalent concept. On one side, the ren is a universal value that stands fundamentally against violence. On the other side, historically to see, the ren was an imperial ideology, because as a part of the “all-under-heaven” policy represented by Mencius was de facto nothing but a regional hegemon.

NARASI KRIMINALITAS DAN KISAH PERCINTAAN DALAM NOVEL TJERITA NONA GAN JAN NIO ATAWA PERTJINTA’AN DALEM RASIA (1914) KARYA TAN BOEN KIM: KAJIAN PASCAKOLONIAL

Crime and romance were common themes in Chinese Indonesian literature during the colonial era. Although this literary genre falls into a subgenre, it aesthetically provides a covert narration of intermixing worlds: East and West. This paper examines the practices of liminality and identity construction in Tan Boen Kim’s Tjerita Nona Gan Jan Nio atawa Pertjinta’an dalem Rasia (1914). The construction of identity in liminal spaces in the novel is interpreted through postcolonial lens, especially based on the concepts of hybridity and ambivalence. The material object of this study is the novel, and the formal object is the meeting of the subjects in the liminal space. The data are collected from the content of the text, the topic, the social context, and other relevant sources. The interpretation technique is performed through deconstructive reading and circular reading between the text and the social context. Based on the analysis, it is found that Tan Boen Kim preserved the moral traditions on the one hand but promoted liberalism on the other hand. It is also found that the author’s attitude in “moderation” (moderate-tradition) position is based upon his choices of cultural construction which is between moderate and tradition—thus making his strategy characterized by ambivalence.

Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy. J. F. Bernard. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. ix+252.

<i>Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy</i>. J. F. Bernard. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. ix+252.

Rural Alaska: The Struggle for Subsistence

Abstract“Rural” in Alaska does not mean the countryside. It is instead a bureaucratic category that both invokes and undercuts the Alaska Native territory that it has, as a result of political compromise, come to represent. As such, it has been a site of intense turmoil and negotiation since the 1970s. In this essay, we zoom in on a rural location marked by struggles to define and shape the character of the rural; in so doing, we explore the tensions embedded in this ambivalent concept.

“How Could a Mother Do That to Her Children?”: Filicide and Maternal Ambivalence in Croatian Media and Online Discourse

Four filicide cases that occurred in Croatia in 2014-17 received wide national media coverage and caused strong public reactions. In each case, the mother of the child(ren) was the perpetrator. This paper will analyse different representations of motherhood, the contradictions and inconsistencies between motherhood as an idea and ideology and everyday maternal practices and behaviours, with special attention being paid to the concept of maternal ambivalence and the expression of violent impulses towards children. Furthermore, the research will also paint a broader picture of the ideology and representations of motherhood. This will include the prescriptive norms of the ideal motherhood present in the public discourse, encompassing the official expert discourse of parenting, as well as the ‘private’ discourse of internet forums covering the issues of parenting and child rearing. The purpose of this analysis is to show how the public profile of the mothers who committed filicide is created on the dichotomies of the ideal, self-abnegating mother and the monstrous ‘non-mother’ (Croatian: nemajka), with all of its horrifying, dehumanising characteristics, and how this influences the general construct of maternity, motherhood and the figure of the ideal mother in the patriarchal family and social structures.

Una Crítica al nominalismo y a la “metafísica negativa”. Consideraciones filosóficas e históricas sobre el concepto de “Naturaleza” en La dialéctica de la Ilustración.

The article depicts the concepts “dialectic of nominalism” and “negative metaphysics” in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. It points out how important these are not only in terms of history of philosophy. Karl Heinz Haag and Gunther Mensching, philosophers from Frankfurt, ha changed that particular Frankfurt’s School paradigm in the 1980s. First, the article summarizes the ambivalent concept of nature in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Then it shows how searching for a non-instrumental concept of nature leads to a recourse to nominalistic and realistic theorems, the key subject matter of Haag and Mensching’s interpretations. Finally, it is going to discuss Habermas’ appeal for a postmetaphysical thinking.

“The Poor Carer”: Ambivalent Social Construction of the Home Care Worker in Elder Care Services

ABSTRACTIn this article, we examine the social construction of the home care worker from the perspective of various professionals in the elder care sector in Ireland. The research, using the Grounded Theory method, involved focus groups with 31 participants comprising health and social work professionals as well as care agency managers and policy planners. The social construction of the elder care worker is characterised by ambivalence. We connect the concept of ambivalence at the micro level of human relationships to structural factors that are driving the ambivalence. Ambivalence towards home care workers is shaped by structural factors including the precariousness of care work, the commodification of time, and the stipulated personalisation of services. The irreconcilable contrasts between portrayals of care workers as both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are indicative of deep contradictions in the expectations that contemporary care systems direct at paid caregivers. Ambivalence arises from the commodified and dispensable status of care workers, and fundamental transformations in their training, working conditions and pay are required to move away from this ambivalence and towards care workers’ equal status with professionals in the care sector.

Lost in reading: The predicament of postcolonial writing in Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation

ABSTRACTKamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation (first published in Algeria in 2013 as Meursault, contre-enquête) has sparked controversy. In 2014 it won awards in France and was nominated for the Prix Goncourt, and won the 2015 Goncourt First Novel Prize. At the same time, some radical Islamists accused Daoud of apostasy and called for his execution; others described him as having “sold out” to France. This article seeks to problematize the concept of “self-imposed ḥisba” and to dispute accusations made concerning The Meursault Investigation. It proposes a postcolonial reading that contests the perception of Daoud as a self-hating Arab complicit with the French, and draws on Homi Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry to trace the emergence of cultural forms that take debates about colonial/postcolonial representation to a new level. It argues that any reading of Daoud’s novel that fails to pay attention to the complex workings of its language is incomplete.

Solidarność mimo różnic – solidarność dzięki różnicom. Działaczki Ogólnopolskiego Strajku Kobiet

W badaniu dotyczącym organizatorek Ogólnopolskiego Strajku Kobiet (OSK) – jednym z największych, jakie dotychczas zrealizowano w Polsce – przeprowadziłyśmy prawie 100 wywiadów CAWI i PAPI z lokalnymi koordynatorkami grup OSK z całego kraju. Naszym celem było poznanie uczestniczek ogólnopolskiej sieci, która w 2016 roku umożliwiła organizację protestów przeciwko próbom kolejnego zaostrzenia restrykcyjnego prawa aborcyjnego. Chciałyśmy dowiedzieć się, co skłoniło je do aktywizmu i czy przed OSK były aktywne społeczno-politycznie również w innych obszarach. Ciekawiło nas też to, jak rozumieją one niejednoznaczne pojęcie „zwykłej kobiety”. Istotnym wnioskiem z badań jest to, że chociaż prawie wszystkie nasze respondentki zgadzają się co do tego, iż uczestniczki Strajku Kobiet w 2016 roku były „zwykłymi kobietami”, to ich sposób użycia terminu „zwykłe” różni się od prawicowych operacjonalizacji tego słowa, wiąże się bowiem przede wszystkim z różnorodnością protestujących. Na podstawie ustaleń dotyczących krzyżujących się pozycji społecznych, na które zwracają uwagę koordynatorki OSK, omawiamy kwestię sprawczości i możliwe bariery ograniczające udział w życiu publicznym.

Small Victory: Imitation as Mimicry in American Pastime

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, United States Executive Order 9066 forced relocation of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast to internment camps. The story of Japanese internment has been the subject of film narratives, and assimilation narrative has occupied a hegemonic position in U.S. filmmaking for more than half a century. The 2007 film American Pastime follows the internees’ struggle to maintain the normalcy of their lives in the internment camp. American Pastime appears to follow an assimilation narrative. However, overlooked features of the narrative open up space for alternative interpretations that might encourage Japanese American audiences to produce a counter discourse against the dominant narrative of assimilation. Postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridization are used to critically read American Pastime. In this reading, baseball game scenes featuring Topaz internment camp’s baseball team and a rival, all-white, local baseball team are examined. In these scenes, a particular style of playing baseball known as “small ball” is identified. Ultimately, it is argued that the small ball played by the Topaz team is not a sign of cultural assimilation to American society, but rather is a subtle, unsettling imitation of hegemonic American culture. Topaz-style baseball mimics, but does not reproduce, the “American pastime” as American viewers might see it.

The Achievement of Ambivalence

Segal traces the development and use of the psychoanalytic concept of ambivalence from Eugen Bleuler to Freud to Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. Segal’s own argument, ultimately, is that ambivalence is an achievement rather than a problem, though only when it is acknowledged and not repressed. Her essay concludes its survey with Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” and Segal’s own meditation on the cultural implications of failure to acknowledge ambivalence. In their efforts to overcome ambivalence, groups often depend on the most primitive psychotic mechanisms, dealing with aggression by projecting it outward and thereby creating enmities. Merging with a group superego allows for the perpetrating of atrocities in wars and revolutions that would never be pursued in our personal lives. Segal warns that the price for failing to recognize ambivalence in the nuclear age is very high, perhaps even the survival of the human race.