Everyday Perspectives Research Articles

Scaling up from everyday concerns to territorial politics and constitutional debate: deliberation among women in the Irish border area

ABSTRACT A gulf between constitutional and everyday perspectives is prevalent, and often overlain by gender divisions. To explore how this gulf can be bridged to allow for the inclusion of everyday concerns in constitutional discussion, we engaged with women in the Irish border area, a region where constitutional difference has striking effects in daily life. We held a series of small-scale deliberative cafés on cross-border health provision, which is linked to dysfunctions of regional governance and contentious constitutional issues. We asked if such open-ended deliberation allows everyday concerns to ‘scale out’ to wider territorial units and ‘scale up’ to the constitutional question. We found that the deliberative café, a radically inclusive method, facilitated a limited scaling up and out from everyday experience: participants collectively and credibly defined systemic dysfunctions on the regional level with policy implications for constitutional discussion. Although participants raised important political issues, they did not easily move from regional to constitutional discussion. We argue that this discursive disjuncture between regionalist policy and constitutional politics derives from a tension between wider regionalist state discourses (which determinedly avoid constitutional contention) and constitutional discourses (which lack a spatial dimension and assume one ‘ideal’ public rather than engage with many existing publics).

Beyond Indices of Peace and Sustainability: Everyday Perspectives from Nepal

Beyond Indices of Peace and Sustainability: Everyday Perspectives from Nepal

Fundamental Thermal Concepts: An Assessment of University College Students’ Conceptual Understanding of Everyday Perspectives

The phenomenon of the basic thermal concept is a challenging topic in the early learning of thermodynamics. This research investigated students' understanding of basic thermal concepts from an everyday perspective. Nineteen open-ended multiple-choice questions equipped with written justifications for the student's answer choices were used in this study. Items based on everyday perspectives avoiding scientific terminology were given to 244 university students of Leyte Normal University Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines. This study shows that students' written responses are specific alternative conceptions commonly used. Most of the students could not provide correct reasons for their answers. The results of this study imply that the teaching style in junior and secondary schools in the Philippines may be problematic. These results can be used as a guide for developing appropriate teaching strategies in introductory physics courses, especially on heat.

Circular Utopia(s): Alfred Wellm’s Morisco and the Socialist City

Abstract In the context of the German Democratic Republic’s longstanding aesthetic and political discourse on social utopianism, this article will discuss Alfred Wellm’s novel Morisco (1987) and Halle-Neustadt as a key to understanding the relationship between the socialist new town and the East German cultural imaginary. Through Wellm’s novel, the article will argue that the construction of modernist new towns provoked a cultural response engaging with the rift between built reality and the utopian imagination/ambition of the classless, socialist city in different literary and visual media. Evoking Tommaso Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun (1602), the novel critically positions Neustadt within a cyclical Marxist eschatology, simultaneously expressing frustration with and hope for the progress of the socialist project. It therefore also represents the post-Stalin aesthetic shift from grand socialist realist narratives to subjective everyday perspectives, and the revived interest of authors in utopian themes in the 1980s against the backdrop of the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) claim that socialism had already been achieved.

A New German ‘We’? Everyday Perspectives on Germanness and its Boundaries

AbstractThis study employs the “everyday nationhood” approach to explore how ordinary, ethnically diverse, native-born Germans in Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig understand what it means to be German and whether outsiders can join that group. It puts findings from qualitative interviews conducted in Berlin in fall 2015 and in Dresden and Leipzig in April 2016 into conversation with two large-scale surveys conducted at about the same time. The interviews complicate the surveys’ finding that Germanness is now based primarily on language skills, citizenship, and workforce participation, as the respondents indicated that phenotype, ethnicity, and religion act as daily barriers to membership. This highlights the utility of the everyday nationhood approach for identifying how social categories are both understood and enacted through everyday practices of social inclusion and exclusion.

Labelling local wood: On the valorization of regionality and sustainability in timber trade

In the face of climate change and a common call for environmental protection, regionality and sustainability turn out to be as symbolic as monetary values in economic contexts. In order to highlight and certificate these ethical ambitions, an international programme of forest certification has established a label that aims at distinguishing wood as logged and processed within a specific ‘regional’ area. The article scrutinizes the implementation of this label in the timber trades and deconstructs how the actors involved establish a link between ethical and economic concerns. By describing their everyday perspectives on the micro level, the article reveals shared aims (evoking credibility) and ideals (establishing sustainable action within regional markets) but also contradictions (efficiency and range). It shows that the label borrows from established designation procedures (such as Cultural Heritage, Geopark, Geographical Indications), and yet has its own logics linked to the properties of the material wood and spatial relations that constitute and confine the label’s actors network.

Three Formulations of Cognitive Skepticism: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrīharṣa

Abstract This paper provides a study of the three most famous skeptical thinkers of classical India, examining both their commonalities and unique differences. Adepts of the controversial debate methodology called vitaṇḍā, “negative debate,” these thinkers manage to challenge the very possibility of knowledge, while espousing (at least nominal) allegiance to distinct schools of thought. They also pass negative judgement on the possibility of certainty while appealing to rational persuasion. This paper explores these paradoxes and possible contradictions, with a culminating reflection of the role of the “two truths,” ultimate vs. everyday perspectives.

Everyday Perspectives on Security and Insecurity in Japan: A Survey of Three Women’s Organizations

Abstract The existing research on Japanese security focuses mainly on the nation state and conceives of male elites as the key bearers of relevant knowledge about the phenomenon. This article problematizes these biases by zeroing in on women’s everyday-oriented perspectives, which fall outside the scope of security politics as traditionally conceived. More specifically, it analyzes the rich material provided by a survey of the members of three major Japanese women’s organizations, using a mixed-method approach premised on statistical methods and qualitative content analysis. The results show that the Japanese women in our sample accommodate and reproduce content from dominant elite views about security and insecurity. However, they also challenge and at times ignore these perspectives by identifying a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives, notably those related to environmental degradation and Japan’s political development.

An Anticapitalist Archive

This essay reflects on David Ruccio’s blog, Occasional Links & Commentary, in light of his broader work on economic representations: a project that decenters economic knowledge beyond the ivory tower in order to understand how other kinds of economic knowledge are formed and how they might offer alternatives to existing economic arrangements. The blog can be understood as an instantiation of that project: an anticapitalist archive that breaks down the boundaries between academic and everyday perspectives on the economy and between what are often seen as separate spheres of economics, politics, and culture.

Mediating anti-political peace in Abidjan: Radio, place and power

After a decade of conflict (1999–2011), peace-building in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, focused on the local as a primary site of reconciliation. In addition to being local, peace was anti-political, seeking to separate place from politics as autonomous realms of public life. Through the example of local radio peace programmes, this article offers a critical, ethnographic account of anti-political peace as a spatial process. It links local peace and its justifications to the operations of governmental power, emphasising continuities of anti-political mediation and political domination. Such a historicised perspective challenges the framing of anti-political peace as the opposite of politics-as-conflict: they have long been two sides of the same coin in Abidjan and, as a binary “choice,” prevent the search for more democratic alternatives. Simultaneously, I argue that anti-political peace it is best approached as a field of contest. An ethnographic approach acknowledges the widespread rejection of politics in the Ivoirian metropolis, while resisting the collapse of institutional and everyday perspectives into a self-reinforcing consensus. I show that radio producers and Abidjanais residents could not quite pin down the meaning of politics, as that which ought to be shunned. Rather than bypass these hesitations through normative or ontological reasoning, I suggest (following others) that we might treat politics' irreducible polysemy as a source of continued struggle.

Representing trans: Linguistic, legal and everyday perspectives

Representing Trans is not only an apt descriptor for the themes explored in this book. It also speaks to the work performed by the book as a whole: it joins a body of new scholarship giving voice to trans lives and experience, at a time when the question of the gender binary seems to have become an acute focus in popular culture and even a determining factor in politics globally.

Vernacular imaginaries of European border security among citizens: From walls to information management

AbstractOur primary aim in this article is to explore vernacular constructions of Europe’s so-called ‘migration crisis’ from the grounded everyday perspectives of EU citizens. We do so as a critical counterpoint to dominant elite scripts of the crisis, which are often reliant upon securitised representations of public opinion as being overwhelmingly hostile to migrants and refugees and straightforwardly in favour of tougher deterrent border security. In addition to broadening the range of issues analysed in vernacular security studies, the article seeks to make three principal contributions. Theoretically, we argue for an approach to the study of citizens’ views and experiences of migration and border security that is sensitive to the performative effects of research methods and the circular logic between securitising modes of knowledge production and policy justification. Methodologically, we outline and apply an alternative approach in response to these dynamics, drawing on the potential of critical focus groups and a desecuritising ethos. Empirically, we identify a vernacular theory of ‘the border’ asinformation management, and a significantinformation gapprevalent among participants with otherwise opposing views towards migration. These findings challenge bifurcated understandings of public opinion towards migration into Europe and point to the existence of vernacular border security imaginaries beyondeither‘closed’or‘open’ borders.

Language ideologies on the difference between gesture and sign

This article investigates academic and everyday perspectives on the difference between gesture and sign. A large number of language scholars have suggested that gesture is not language, that different forms of gesturing and signing exist on continua, and/or that they could be classified on a developmental cline. “Everyday” ideologies of deaf people in Mumbai showed either an analytical collapse of gesture and sign or a distinction between them, and were more focused on hearing status and on contextual factors in deciding whether something counted as gesture or sign –as compared to academic ideologies which were more focused on form. In the context of language classes and research projects, academic ideologies bleed into, are resisted, adopted or transformed in everyday contexts.

Where are the schools? Children, families and food practices

Reducing childhood obesity is an international priority and children's diets, food knowledge and practices have come under intense scrutiny in both policy and popular discourse. Notwithstanding evidence that health interventions which resonate with children's own views are the most effective, there is still relatively little research which mobilises children's everyday perspectives on food to inform public health policy. We report key findings from a qualitative study with 53 children aged 9–10, attending two socio-economically contrasting schools in the UK. The study explored children's understandings of food in everyday life and their ideas about the relationship between food and health. Throughout the study, despite recent attempts to position schools as key sites for public health interventions, children consistently emphasised families as the locus for enduring food practices. The research highlights the value of listening to children and applying our understanding of their perspectives to ensure that public health initiatives work with the important influences on their diet and health that they themselves identify.

Encountering Everyday Perspectives on the American War

The shooting ended forty years ago but American scholars still fight over how to interpret the Vietnam War. Historians, especially, continue to debate the meaning, significance, and experience of t...

O SECRETÁRIO EXECUTIVO COMO MEDIADOR DE CONFLITOS

This article aims to lead your readers to reflect on the performance of professional Executive Secretariat - SE, as a mediator in negotiation and conflict resolution in order to mitigate the existing disagreements. The problematic of search is to spread the range of action of the Executive Secretary, highlighting their professional features, including the negotiation and mediation of conflicts. Conduct that is consistent with the everyday perspectives of all business environment, because in many cases it is necessary to the intervention a professional able to appease the differences that may arise. The rationale of this study is to direct the Executive Secretary to this performance, due its multiplicity of operations, providing a reflection on the commitment that these professionals have, by their level of expertise, skill, attitudes, and productivity in the services performed , strategic inputs that affect the organizational success. About the methodological procedures adopted in this study, we opted for the deductive-explanatory method, trying to identify what factors were instrumental in its development. It concludes that the current situation in which organizations compete is necessary for professionals to meet the global market expectations, always seeking to maintain professional excellence. Thus, the SE should be empowered to act in different labor circumstances in view of the prerequisites required by the organization, planning and strategically managing the goals to be achieved.

English

Students studying Civil Engineering (CE) at the Further Education and Training (FET) colleges spend periods of time in the classroom and workshop as well as in the workplace during experiential learning. The overall purpose of education and training in the college sector is generally understood as preparing students for employability, and difficulties in colleges performing this role are well known. In this article, these difficulties are examined in a novel way. The everyday perspectives of lecturers and supervisors about student learning in their college programmes and their work experience are translated into more theoretical language, using activity theory. A theoretical argument is made, which suggests that different sites of learning create different purposes, and that these different purposes derive from a distinction between knowledge and practice, which in turn has historical roots. The study concludes by suggesting that a new, common object of integrating theory and practice at all the sites would better link the college and workplace education and training systems, and tentatively suggests how this new object could be put into practice.

Multiculture, middle class competencies and friendship practices in super-diverse geographies

In this paper we use a small number of in-depth interviews with parents with primary school children to examine social mixing and friendship practices in two super-diverse North London boroughs. In these complex geographical contexts, characterized by gentrification processes and old and new migrations, we suggest that primary schools are convergent places where adults and children from different backgrounds are likely to meet and interact, and the paper explores the extent to which adults and children, thrown together in and through these sites, negotiate relationships with those who are differently socially and culturally situated to themselves. Informed by the interview narratives, the paper highlights the importance of focusing on the micro, quotidian ways in which differences in social and/or ethnic background shape those relationships and it explores some instances of the ways in which those differences are routinely encountered, managed and/or avoided. In this way the paper contributes theoretical and empirical nuance to current concerns around difference and diversity and the interactions of complex urban populations by ‘adding’ social class to everyday multiculture perspectives and everyday multiculture perspectives to urban middle class debates.

FireWatch: Creative Responses to Bushfire Catastrophes

FireWatch: Creative Responses to Bushfire Catastrophes

Challenges in replacement therapy of hypothyroidism: everyday practice and perspectives

Проблема заместительной терапии гипотиреоза, распространенность которого в общей популяции достигает 3,7% [1], так или иначе касается любого заболевания щитовидной железы (ЩЖ), поскольку в клинической практике большинство из них гипотиреозом так или иначе заканчивается, как самопроизвольно, так и вследствие врачебных вмешательств. На первый взгляд, заместительная терапия гипотиреоза достаточно проста и в соответствии с многочисленными клиническими рекомендациями подразумевает ежедневный прием L-T4 под периодическим контролем уровня тиреотропного гормона (ТТГ). Тем не менее, даже если не считать такого важного момента, как приверженность пациента к правильному лечению, здесь есть много дискуссионных вопросов и сложностей, решение которых, по мнению автора этого обзора, и представляет перспективу в обсуждаемой области тиреоидологии.