Everyday Tensions Research Articles

Weaving the real and the virtual: young urban Indonesians’ lived experiences of making psychological homes

ABSTRACT Home-making processes have been an important subject of investigation for decades. This research furthers the scholarship in this area by exploring how young urban Indonesians develop psychological homes to create habitable spaces for themselves, with reference to their various relational networks, activities, objects, and pets. We draw on fieldwork conducted over a 16-week period with 45 young people in Surabaya and subsequently extended through diary analysis. To analyze and interpret the empirical materials generated, we drew insights from assemblage theory which revealed that the lived experiences of youth in developing psychological homes for themselves are fluid and dynamic processes, involving both human and physical elements. Our exploration began with the key elements that participants used to develop psychological homes. We then also explored their practices in weaving together these key elements to navigate everyday tensions within their broader relational networks. This article demonstrates the utility of assemblage thinking in unpacking the everyday practices of homemaking among youth.

The mouse, the snake, and the devil’s collar: Soviet symbols in the memory of Old Believers of the Upper Kama region

The Soviet project of creating the “new man” included the construction of a collective memory which was not only a legitimate version of the past, but also a repository of cultural values, and the background or space for celebrating Communist rituals. The project itself was rather uniform, but had multiple local incarnations that were determined mostly by the ethnic and religious identity of the local population. The Old Believers’ communities of the Russian North shared with the rest of the country symbols of the past, sites of memory, and commemorative rituals. Still, local perceptions of the Communist regime and its symbols depended in this milieu on a variety of factors: first, the high literacy rate of the deeply religious Old Believers, as well as their erudite knowledge of Christian, and specifically Old Russian literature; second, the very critical attitude toward Soviet power; and third, local beliefs. This article analyzes the process of adaptation of the Communist project to Old Believers’ persistent religious and cultural traditions and seeks to explain how Communist symbols symbiotically coexisted with hostile local attitudes and why they even survived the collapse of the regime. Mutual adjustment of the imposed Communist project and the local symbolic language took many decades, yet finally, by the end of the Soviet era, when three or four generations had seen no other reality than that they were surrounded by, the strong rejection of this reality was smoothed out, everyday tensions mostly disappeared, and the earlier alienation itself became part of collective memory on both family and community levels. The article is based on interviews with Old Believers of the Upper Kama region (Verkhokamie), conducted by the author in 2011 and 2013.

Remedios for Relationships: Social Precarity and Amatory Therapeutics in the Early Circum-Caribbean

This study argues that practices sometimes referred to as “love magic” operated instead as relational therapeutics in colonial Latin America. Focusing on women's roles in Spanish Caribbean port cities from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century, I analyze a range of relationship remedios (or cures) ranging from divination and prayers to spells and potions by interrogating early modern Spanish Inquisition records from Mexico and Cartagena de Indias. Far from simple reflections of religious deviance, these trials show women searching within their relational networks for practical remedies to cure structural and personal problems in their sexual partnerships. Some remedies were clearly offered on a basis more transactional than therapeutic, a reflection of the inequality, violence, and trauma of life in the colonial Caribbean. People in the region drew on a range of amatory therapeutics to relieve emotional pain, soothe everyday tensions over power, and cope with economic precarity.

Black frontline workers navigating everyday workplace tensions through professionalism

Abstract Professionalism has been widely criticized for its biased standards modeled around dominant identities while excluding minoritized groups. Nevertheless, it remains a powerful social discourse, adopted widely by workers and organizations, and frontline workers—who became particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic—are no different, even as they are mainly Black and Brown. Our exploratory study, based on in-depth interviews with 15 Black frontline workers, examines how they use discourses of professionalism to navigate everyday tensions stemming from both their minoritized racial identity and the precarious nature of frontline work. Participants described three intersecting communicative practices—bottling their emotions, striving for (elusive) excellence, and navigating (in)visibility. Our research thus addresses the communicative practice of professionalism among an important yet undeserved category of workers, showing how it is both hegemonic and exclusionary, but may nevertheless be subverted strategically by precarious workers.

Barista Diary: An autoethnography studying the operational experience of third-wave coffee shop baristas

This study explores the day-to-day operational intricacies of front line food and beverage employees. Situated in the third-wave coffee sector, the authors offer an evocative autoethnography about baristas’ operational experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using personal memory mining practices, observational fieldnotes, focus groups, interviews, and storytelling as a means for dramatic enactment, the authors present “Barista Diary,” a story about how baristas navigate the everyday tensions and complexities when working behind a coffee bar. Informed by Deweyan philosophy and contemporary hospitality literature, the authors reveal how baristas develop skills as habitual powers, manage operational chaos through aesthetic experience, and transform simple coffeemaking services into nourishments with hospitality merit. The authors depict that a barista’s job entails more than just making coffee, but a nexus of intricacies that often go undiscussed in academia and practice.

Critical Knowledge Mobilization: Directions for Social Gerontology.

The concept of knowledge mobilization (KMb) is prominent in governance frameworks of tri-council funding in Canada. Yet there are a number of conceptual and practical challenges when such ideas are proposed for adoption across large multidisciplinary contexts. This research note introduces the concept of critical knowledge mobilization as a way to understand KMb in large multidisciplinary teams and social gerontology. It begins with a high-level sketch of the historic changes in knowledge production and knowledge sharing, followed by a definition of critical knowledge mobilization and examples of historical ideas and everyday tensions in practice. Building on these, we propose the need to advance and shift the culture of KMb, and to embark on engaged research as a means of innovation. We suggest that a reflexive process of critical KMb can facilitate innovation and promote a culture of knowledge mobilization in Canadian social gerontology.

CONFLICT, COMMUNITY AND THE ‘NATIONAL’ AUDIENCE: REMEMBERING TURKISH CYPRIOT CINEMAGOING IN 1950s NICOSIA

Drawing on oral history interviews, contemporary newspaper sources and the archives of the British colonial administration, this article examines the experiences of the Turkish Cypriot cinema audience in Nicosia, the capital city of Cyprus, during the 1950s. This period was marked by rising anti-colonial and intercommunal conflict, but film exhibition nevertheless flourished and the cinema played a substantial role in the social, economic and political lives of many Turkish Cypriots. Memories of cinemagoing in Nicosia are marked by the experience of British colonial power, but they also reflect commercial interactions with the city’s more dominant Greek Cypriot community. The encounter with Turkish culture through the viewing of films imported from Turkey also contributed to the development of nationalist political aspirations. As Nicosia’s Turkish and Greek communities became increasingly polarised, cinemagoing experiences were influenced more and more by external political events. Nevertheless, the cinema of the 1950s is remembered as a communal, egalitarian and romantic space which provided the means to escape from everyday tensions.

Body Breakdowns as Politics: Identity regulation in a high-commitment activist organization

Recent studies on identity regulation emphasize the significance of the body in mediating individuals’ responses to cultural control within organizations. However, little is known about how such responses are concretely enacted by individuals through their bodies. Based on an ethnography of an activist organization, this study discusses the culture of self-sacrifice through which activists’ identity is regulated. It reveals the everyday tensions between passionate commitment and vulnerable bodies, exploring how body breakdowns lead activists to separate their passion for a cause from the organizational culture and ultimately make their exit. We thus aim to contribute to research on identity regulation by highlighting the precariousness of this process and demonstrating the political potential of bodies to resist controlling regimes. We interpret breakdowns as political events emerging at the interface between the docile enactment of a bodily norm and its concrete physical violence.

NA ERA DA MULTIPLICIDADE: FRAGMENTAÇÃO, INTENSIDADE E VELOCIDADE NO CONTO CATÁSTROFE, DE LUIZ VILELA

A narrativa contemporânea, em seus múltiplos suportes, converte-se num espaço amplo e privilegiado ao retratar temáticas sociais e ficcionalizar tensões cotidianas. Como marca desse período, a literatura apresenta-se de maneira esfacelada e fragmentada revelando novas nuances e possibilidades de configuração. A partir dessas considerações iniciais, o presente artigo intenciona tecer considerações acerca dessa condição experimentada pela literatura contemporânea. Para tanto, analisará o conto Catástrofe (2002), do escritor Luiz Vilela. Identificamos nessa narrativa, as características marcantes desse cenário em que a fragmentação e a intensidade ditam a tônica das relações sociais. No conto cotejado, a expressividade se apresenta pela ausência de um narrador. Assim, o leitor é levado à apresentação dos fatos pela força constitutiva de diálogos fragmentados, intensos e velozes que desvelam um sujeito fragmentado.

Microfoundations of Organizational Paradox: The Problem Is How We Think about the Problem

Competing tensions and demands pervade our work lives. Accumulating research examines organizational and leadership approaches to leveraging these tensions. But what about individuals within firms? Although early paradox theory built upon micro-level insights from psychology and philosophy to understand the nature and management of varied competing demands, corresponding empirical studies are rare, offering scarce insights into why some individuals thrive with tensions while others struggle. In response, we contribute to the microfoundations of organizational paradox with a theoretical model and robust measures that help unpack individuals' varied approaches to tensions. Following rigorous scale development in Study 1, including samples from the US, UK, Israel, and China, we test our model in a large firm in the US using quantitative and qualitative methods. We identify resource scarcity (i.e. limited time and funding) as a source of tensions. We also demonstrate that a paradox mindset - the extent to which one is accepting of and energized by tensions - can help individuals leverage them to improve in-role job performance and innovation. Our results highlight paradox mindset as a key to unlocking the potential of everyday tensions.

Negotiating interdependence and anxiety in community economies

The burgeoning literature on diverse and community economies has been relatively hopeful, exploring how people learn, enact new and reclaim other ways of meeting their needs outside of capitalist practices. For good reasons, much of this work has sought to avoid a conventional critical-leftist orientation, instead adopting what Gibson-Graham call a ‘weak theory’ approach ‘that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and offers care for the new’. Within this literature until recently, less attention has been given to how community economy collectives negotiate the everyday ethical dilemmas to enact interdependence. In this article, I draw on Jean Luc Nancy's understandings of subjectivity and what he terms an ‘inoperative community’ to explore the everyday anxieties and relational tensions in the Wellington Timebank, a community economy in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I use Nancy's framing of the inoperative community and Gibson-Graham's engagement with his ideas as a lens to explore the ethical tensions involved in enacting community economies. I show how Nancy's ideas help us to better understand the apparent contradictions experienced in communities, by exploring the tensions between community myths of diversity and labour equality, which are unworked and interrupted by everyday anxieties and fears. This is not to suggest that community economies like the Wellington Timebank are a failure, but rather that openly discussing such examples help us as researchers to better understand the everyday tensions collectives necessarily negotiate in enacting interdependence.

Editorial Issue 16.4 — Advertising artistry

Editorial Issue 16.4 — Advertising artistry Linda M. Scott Advertising is undoubtedly an aesthetic and cultural object, yet advertisers are rarely recognised as artists. In this issue, we explore the relationship between advertising and the arts from the practitioners perspective. We reprint a delightful chapter from Shirley Polykoff s autobiography Does She...Or Doesn’t She?, in which she details the making of one of her most famous campaigns. The eponymous Miss Clairol tagline, which originates from a hilarious exchange with her mother-in-law, could be said to have single-handedly created the market for hair dying products. Polykoff reflects on how her personal life came to bear on her professional successes, during a time when female advertising executives where few and far between. In Is it Possible To Be a Commercial Artist? Dilemmas Faced by Advertising Industry Employees with Artistic Backgrounds in Poland, Kamil Luczaj interviews Polish creatives on the everyday tensions they face between artistry and commerce. He hereby continues to document an already rich history of artist advertisers, but shines a light on the Polish context. It is clear that the artist identity is difficult to uphold in commercial contexts, and a reconciliation seems unlikely. Michael L. Ross delves deeply into these precarious tensions and dual identities in his book Designing Fictions: Literature Confronts Advertising (McGill-Queens University Press, 2015), which Astrid Van den Bossche reviews for this issue. Ross documents a history of literary renditions of advertising, in which each tale varies in its celebration or condemnation of the realities of the promotional world. Copyright © 2016 The Advertising Educational Foundation, Inc.

Aspectos da desordem urbana: imigrantes ibéricos e a contravenção no Rio de Janeiro republicano (1880-1930)

A imigração ibérica no Rio de Janeiro do período da Grande Imigração (1880-1930) ocupou lugar de destaque nas principais freguesias da cidade. Nos espaços populares e nas tensões cotidianas que faziam parte do cenário urbano, os espanhóis criaram assentamentos étnicos e concentraram-se em determinados ofícios e profissões, formando redes de solidariedade. Sua participação em atividades consideradas ilícitas, de caráter eminentemente popular, como o jogo do bicho, demonstra o entrosamento desses grupos com a sociedade carioca e a sua inserção e adaptação no cotidiano da cidade. Através de fontes históricas como os processos policiais e os processos de expulsão, esse estudo busca reconstruir algumas histórias de encontros e conflitos, apoio e repulsão, que envolveram os imigrantes ibéricos

The Micro-Politics of Urban Transformation in the Context of Globalisation: A Case Study of Gurgaon, India

Through a case study on Gurgaon in the state of Haryana, this article explores how local political factors, the rural–urban divide and conflicts between multiple tiers of government influenced the governance process of a globalising urban region in India. In two decades, Gurgaon was transformed from a small rural town to a global hub for the outsourcing industry. This real estate sector-driven rapid urban makeover, through conversion of peri-urban agricultural land to create production and consumption spaces for the new economy, is leading to a fragmented landscape that contains glaring inequalities. The everyday tensions and contradictions of this transitional journey, which came sharply into focus with the formation of a new municipal corporation, form the immediate backdrop of the study.

A Comparative Analysis on the Micro-level Genealogies of Conflict in the Philippines' Mindanao Island and Indonesia's Ambon Island

Through a comparative micro-level study of conflicts in the Indonesian island of Ambon and the Philippine island of Mindanao, the article will show how the master narrative of a Christian–Muslim cleavage obscures the prominence of localized sub-identities in shaping the escalation of conflict in both places. Whilst in Ambon communal violence erupted between Muslims and Christians from 1999 until 2004, armed conflict on the island of Mindanao is generally understood as a decade-long struggle between Muslim armed groups fighting for autonomy against a Christian-dominated Philippine state. Yet, despite these different types of armed struggle, in both cases, everyday tensions about resource access became incorporated in a complex conflict dynamic. These localized tensions are linked to sub-identities within the general Christian versus Muslim dichotomy, thereby creating alternative fault lines and alliances. In conclusion, this article puts forward a renewed understanding of armed conflict as a dynamic and transformative process, producing new opportunities, alliances, contradictions and narrative frameworks.

Everyday resilience: Narratives of single refugee women with children

This article offers a critical exploration of the concept of resilience, which is largely conceptualized in the literature as an extraordinary atypical personal ability to revert or ‘bounce back’ to a point of equilibrium despite significant adversity. While resilience has been explored in a range of contexts, there is little recognition of resilience as a social process arising from mundane practices of everyday life and situated in person-environment interactions. Based on an ethnographic study among single refugee women with children in Brisbane, Australia, the women’s stories on navigating everyday tensions and opportunities revealed how resilience was a process operating inter-subjectively in the social spaces connecting them to their environment. Far beyond the simplistic binaries of resilience versus non-resilient, we concern ourselves here with the everyday processual, person-environment nature of the concept. We argue that more attention should be paid to day-to-day pathways through which resilience outcomes are achieved, and that this has important implications for refugee mental health practice frameworks.

When talent meets mobility: un/desirability in Singapore's new citizenship project

Singapore's marketing strategy as a ‘gateway’ between East and West, a project developed at the end of the 1990s, is based on the city–state's re-positioning in the knowledge-based economy between an emerging China and Western societies. This project targets elite populations whether they are locals or migrants to frame a citizenship design combining mobility and talent. I will critically assess the impacts of Singapore's gateway strategies on the formation of citizens–subjects through the notion of un/desirability. By focusing on stories of desirable subjects, I will stress the everyday tensions arising in the production of neo-liberal citizens. I argue that desirable subjects are struggling with the neo-liberal pressures to become ‘self-governed entrepreneurs’ at the gateway, which is symptomatic of schisms between the city–state's citizenship project and their own practice. I especially target the crucial role of community associations in mediating these tensions and supporting the city–state's citizenship project.

Tobacco consumption and the poor: An ethnographic analysis of hand-rolled cigarette (bidi) use in Bangladesh

Bidis, or hand-rolled, filterless tobacco cigarettes, are largely marketed to and consumed by the poor in Bangladesh. In exploring perceived rationales and the situational contexts of smoking, this study identifies the crucial connections between bidi smoking and the social and economic forces that influence choices and shape the contexts of individual suffering. Ethnographic research in Netrakona District revealed that inexpensive bidis were used to gain relief from physical ailments specific to the poor, such as hunger, indigestion and constipation. Bidis were found to be a socially accepted mood-altering drug that symbolizes relief from their everyday tensions, angers, perceived exploitations and disappointments. I argue that both cultural norms of reciprocity and hierarchy as well as the socio-economic structure of Bangladesh with its inequality, poverty and exploitation contribute to the tobacco consumption and related health problems of the poor.

Professional Development for Ethical Teaching

The routine dilemmas faced by teachers sometimes provoke heated reactions from colleagues, government and sections of wider civil society as to their practical resolution. Everyday tensions of teaching can produce polarised views about the ethics of decisions and actions that are taken in workplace contexts. How do teachers reach solutions and determine their own “right” or “best” answers to these dilemmas? Using the case of a professional development programme to raise awareness of the New Zealand Teachers Council Code of Ethics for Registered Teachers, this article illustrates how working through a range of carefully constructed, authentic, polarising real-life scenarios allows teachers to safely learn to challenge their assumptions, values and beliefs rationally. The learning process also helps teachers to articulate their tacit theories of “good” teaching practice (including curriculum and assessment), and permits them to justify their decisions and actions based on sound reasoning according to shared ethical principles and commitments.

The Mobility of Elderly Residents Living in Suburban Territories

Many authors have observed die elders' unanimous aspirations to age in place. Such residential aspirations echo theoretical concepts such as “environmental-fit.” Aging residents adapt to their residential environment according to their autonomy level, their financial and social resources, as well as the meanings they invest in both residential situations and lifestyle (Lord, 2004; Wagnild, 2001). Therefore, the suburbs constitute a challenge for aging residents' intentions to remain in their home for as long as possible. These low-density environments encourage car dependency for almost every daily activity. In that regard, many studies have investigated the daily mobility patterns of elders living in such areas. However, most of them have focused on aspects linked to transportation and driving security (Rosenbloom, 2003). In this context, with a socio-anthropological (in-depth interviews) method, the elders' daily mobility is explored in a complex layering of issues. Two interdisciplinary qualitative researches on the daily and residential mobility of elderly suburbanites have been used: a group living in Quebec City's Post-War suburbs in Canada (n = 56) and another in Marseille's periurban suburbs in France (n = 36). The results show that we must investigate beyond the elders' “emotional attachment”to their “home” in order to explain the everyday tensions underlying accessibility and daily mobility. Aging in a single-family house is more than a deliberate choice. Moving away from one's neighborhood is considered a last resort alternative by the majority. Instead, the elderly from both milieus will adapt their lifestyles to the environment by redesigning their daily activities and their mobility practices in order to age in place. Therefore, adapting daily mobility practices to social interactions and social representations all become a sine qua nonecondition.