Everyday Ways Research Articles

What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities

What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities

Ten New Lives: Swedes in the Pacific Northwest by Lars Nordstrom

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2 The company played a significant role in turning salmon, a fish that had sustained life at the river for thousands of years,into a global commodity,with unlimited demand,as biologist Jim Lichatowich has written.After 1945,the CRPA was increasingly involved in the modern industrialization of the fishing industry. But that is material for a different book. This one celebrates the glory days, when salmon was king on the river, there were plenty of fish, and Astoria was a company town. Carmel Finley Oregon State University Ten New Lives: Swedes in the Pacific Northwest by Lars Nordstrom Swedish Roots in Oregon Press, Portland, Oregon, 2011. Bibliography. 270 pages. $15.00 paper. Nordstrom’s book was born out of his curiosity about why Swedes of his own generation, individuals mostly in their forties in 2000, would choose to leave a country that provided social justice, education, jobs, and health care. Pursuing the answer, Nordstrom went about interviewing Swedes who had settled in the United States after the Vietnam War. The narratives offered in Ten New Lives do not represent the full scope of Nordstrom’s project; he conducted more than ten interviews. He describes the process of selecting interviewees as one of serendipity: ask friends, colleagues, and let the rings widen. He did stipulate that subjects must have been in the United States at least ten years and that the book would include five women and five men. At the time of the interviews, only one of the nine narrators was a U.S. citizen. The original oral histories have been translated from Swedish and extensively edited,with the author’s questions and significant chunks of the interviews eliminated. Nordstrom gave participants four pages of questions to ponder before the interviews. Narrators had the final say in the version of their stories to be published. Nordstrom’s goal was to present readable narratives, and the result is a likeable and revealing portraiture. Narrators are identified by their first names only. Roger, an inveterate traveler and highly employable electrical engineer, observes how differently Swedes and Americans form and retain friendships. He notes how the United States South is a country quite unlike the Pacific Northwest. Cecilia speaks about her sojourn in the United States,first as an exchange student,with her sponsoring family asking her to speak with more of an accent so people would know she was a foreigner. She later studied textile crafts in Sweden, married an American, and came to Oregon. Emphasizing the importance of keeping one’s original language, she says it is also fun to have a “secret” language. She and her husband took her mother to an Egyptian restaurant in Portland once,however,and they were surprised when the owner spoke Swedish. Moving eventually to Gig Harbor,Washington, she asserts that Washington is not the same country as Oregon, where there is a sense of the public good and one’s responsibility to it, as in Sweden. These narrators sometimes note the naïve approach to the globe that often characterizes the friendly Americans they encounter, who ask questions such as: Where is Sweden? Actually, is it Switzerland? The speakers reveal how they negotiate the new culture in everyday ways: insurance, bringing in-laws over from Sweden, preschools, and why not nudity in the swimming pool? They are not of one mind about socialism, taxes in either country, or even about the value of retaining their mother tongue. Questions of identity arise tellingly for Cecilia, who mused that when she dies, she  Book Notes Purchase back issues of the Quarterly. Call 503.306.5230 or send an e-mail to museumstore@ohs.org. might have some of her ashes scattered at the Oregon coast, and some at the cemetery on Kungsholmen in Stockholm. Eventually, she decided one place would be better. Nordstrom provides a helpful postscript.In 2001,Sweden allowed dual citizenship.With the exception of two,the subjects of the book have become citizens of the United States. Ten New Lives presents a fascinating portrait of Swedes living in the U.S. Kay Reid Portland, Oregon book notes Oregon Historical Quarterly volunteers and staff created these Book Notes by...

Showing Up, Remaining Engaged, and Partaking as Students: Resilience Among Students of Mexican Descent

This paper examines the ways in which 12 high school students of Mexican descent remain resilient amid difficult and stressful realities. Through an examination of students' interview responses, a case is made that students' ability to engage in school and figure out everyday ways to partake as students are signs of resilience. This work suggests the need to shift from a focus on single, specific stressful situations or experiences to a more accurate and less essentialized understanding of both constraints and capabilities around student engagement and well-being.

An Unintended Side Effect of Pepper Spray

This article tells the story of how pepper spray disrupted the everyday ways of being military men in a Swedish Armed Forces unit. It aims to show how military men are done and undone in the context of a highly strenuous military exercise. It is based on an ethnographic study carried out in a Swedish international service unit. The analysis shows how the exercise taught the soldiers how to behave as military men. Furthermore, it discusses the intimate forms of camaraderie that the soldiers practice and problematizes the scene of constraint that compulsory heterosexuality constitutes for their homosocial bonds. Theoretically, the article draws upon studies of men and masculinities and employs the concepts of homosociality and compulsory heterosexuality. By developing “repair work” as an analytical tool, it contributes to an understanding of how masculinities are done within, as well as beyond, the military context.

Growing Home

ABSTRACTUsing the concepts of “throwntogetherness” and disorder this article offers another perspective on the role of domestic disorder in making a family home. with original data generated within a qualitative research project with same-sex parented families in Sydney, Australia, the article considers some of the everyday ways parents “use disorder” to regulate and reconcile expectations of family life with lived reality, as materialized through reconfiguring existing home spaces. At the same time, the discussion fills in some empirical gaps in contemporary geographies of family by presenting some family home cultures that remain underrepresented in the empirical work on home and family: the domestic, everyday routines, and rhythms of same-sex parented families.

Thinking sociologically about sport

This paper represents, as the title suggests, an invitation to think sociologically about sport. The study of sport is embedded in sociological theory: to study sport without theory is to simply describe and reproduce the status quo. Theorizing is a process involving several interdependent and mutually reinforcing features. Theory can be understood, variously, as a ‘resource of hope’, a guide and compass, a friend and colleague, a data set and companion, a craft and a life-long apprenticeship. By providing us with the tools of interpretation, theory can help us to understand the limits and possibilities in our lives, placing biography in the context of larger historical processes and social structures. Indeed, theory can be understood as a form of scaffolding by which we build explanations about the social world we inhabit. This enables us to understand that our everyday ways of life are not natural and inescapable, but are socially constructed. So too are sport worlds.

INTRODUCTION

What is the value of medical research? The question initially provokes an ethical response: the worth of a clinical trial is generally understood in terms of the impact of its outcomes on patient populations. The evaluation of human subjects research raises normative questions of values – the future well-being of society in relation to the risk experimental procedures entail for participants. However, biomedical facts also circulate within national systems of healthcare, global policy organizations, property regimes and pharmaceutical markets. The current dominance of public-private partnerships under the rubric of ‘global health’, the uptake of pro-market strategies by governmental and philanthropic organizations, the bankrolling of the WHO by private individuals, suggest the extent to which the value of both therapeutic products and public health practices have been appropriated by a logic of profit. Clinical trials engage with and generate multiple orders of value; they straddle the world of commodities and public goods, of fiscal costs and moral virtues (Stark 2009). The papers in this special issue probe the different systems of value that exist between scientific ends, public goods, and lucrative commodities. Taking inspiration from recent ethnographic studies of finance in practice (e.g. Roitman 2005) and economic sociology (e.g. Caliskan & Callon 2009), they explore how value is variously worked through material, socio-technical relations, institutions, and research practice. To discern the value of research ethnographically, a common starting point of these papers is the work of medical research, including volunteered participation, contracted employment, scientific analysis or ethical oversight. In drawing attention to the modalities of intellectual, practical, and affective labour that drive a clinical trial, this special issue situates the production of medical knowledge with respect to other forms of productive activity. In so doing, we seek to nuance perspectives on the significance of clinical research to the welfare of societies. What follows is a selective overview of social scientific research that explores the linkages between clinical trials, pharmaceutical markets and global health inequities. We suggest that this scholarship can be roughly characterized by two distinct critical aims. The first concerns the political economy of medical research and the structural conditions under which health becomes a resource for wealth. The value of medical research is analysed through an investigation of medical markets as networks of knowledge production, therapeutic consumption, and capital accumulation. The second interrogates the ethical significance of transnational clinical experimentation. In these studies, value is elaborated as a negotiation between the interests of communities, the protocols of science, the priorities of global health; it indicates access to life saving therapies, the equitable distribution of research benefits, and the means and terms of engagement afforded by a research project. Though articulated in different registers, we suggest that both these approaches to value demarcate the ‘social’ from the ‘economic’ dimensions of clinical research. Studies that explore the sociological consequences of the commercialization of medical research and those that seek to strengthen the moral traction of experimental procedures both analyse value as a structuring and systematic logic. We take an alternative track. Concerned with how the material practices of medical research intersect with everyday ways of living, we propose a more promiscuous approach to the question of value, one that is acutely aware of the diverse valuable materials and manifold processes of valuation attendant to medical experimentation. The purpose of drawing upon categories of value theory, such as ‘labour’, ‘production’, and ‘circulation’, is to open up these variables to ethnographic scrutiny (Graeber 2001). Rather than warn against economic incursions into medical knowledge and health practice, or, alternatively, the reduction of local experience to the standards of bioethics, we hope to illuminate the array of practices, knowledges, and techniques through which the value of medical research is brought into being.

Privilege and Status in an Unequal Society: Shifting the Focus of Health Promotion Research to Include the Maintenance of Advantage

There has been a great deal of social policy and health promotion practice directed toward the inclusion of underprivileged groups with the aim of improving their health. This focus on disadvantaged people and poor communities, to help them empower themselves and improve their lot, often fails because it ignores the role of the broader society. We neglect to note the crucial part that the advantaged play in perpetuating inequalities. Theory and empirical work from sociology and anthropology points to the everyday ways in which privileged people are able to maintain their advantage and even hi-jack the benefits of public health programmes designed to improve the health of the poor. Some examples from these other disciplines suggest ways in which a social psychological perspective can contribute to an understanding of how inequalities and poverty are perpetuated in everyday life. These understandings will inform the effectiveness of social programmes to reduce inequalities.

Narrating Oneself: Reflections on the use of Solicited Diaries with Diary Interviews

In using the solicited diaries to access the everyday ways in which self-identified lesbians and gay men are made aware of their sexuality, this paper considers the role of solicited diaries combined with diary interviews. Furthermore it draws on empirical evidence to argue that a diary interview provides a richer, deeper and contextual understanding of the documented experiences. The paper reflects on the participants' experiences of keeping the solicited diary, the narratives produced through the solicited diaries and heterosexism as one the main themes to emerge from the solicited diaries and diary interview analysis. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1002160

The world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire

Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic ‘playing field’ in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America’s future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890—1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States’ expansion in the early twentieth century.

Children's Testimony and the Necessity of Critical Witness in Urban Classrooms

This article focuses on the everyday ways that children's perspectives on and experiences within urban schools are chronicled and interpreted. Drawing on illustrations from two students' experiences across a school year in one classroom, the author argues that students in urban schools are everyday documentarians, sharing their relationships to school in ways—both subtle and overt, and that reveal both challenges and resilience—that provide insights into the specific, individual ways that educators can better support them. At the same time, those everyday testimonies require critical approaches to witnessing urban students' lives that reveal and open for critique both the assumptions that are embedded within class-privileged interpretations of students' lives and the broader social narratives that feed them. The article concludes with a discussion of critical witnessing as both a conceptual and practical tool for supporting urban educators in efforts to be the witnesses students deserve in high-poverty urban classrooms.

The Domestication of Geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim Conflict and the Policing of Marriage and the Body in Ladakh, India

This paper approaches intimacy as a site of geopolitical practice. What happens when the body is the territory through which geopolitical strategies are played out? In the Leh district of India's Jammu and Kashmir state Buddhist/Muslim conflict is articulated at the site of the body and geopolitical strategies impinge on personal decisions. Over the past century religious identity has increasingly taken on political meaning in Leh, particularly since the 1980s. Interestingly, for average Ladakhis political conflict is described in terms of bodies – that is, through discussions of who should or should not eat together, get married, or have children. By destabilising the global geopolitical scale, we can arrive at a richer and more nuanced understanding of the everyday ways in which our bodies are incorporated into or reject incorporation into geopolitical strategies to control territory. In the past, the Buddhists were more. Now, it's the Buddhists, mostly, I think, who have used family planning. Among the Shia Muslims, if you look in Kargil and Chushot, even now, they have nine each or eight each. Rinpoches say that our Buddhists are getting fewer, and then our Hill Council, in the future it's going to be run by Shia Muslims. What the Buddhist Association did, it said to all the Buddhists, “You should think. Up to four, or up to six, or up to five, let them be born. Don't sterilize after two.” (Yangdol, 45-year-old Buddhist mother of three)1 In the beginning, in the very beginning, the relationship was very good. We were like one person. There were Buddhists who married with Muslims, and Muslims who married with Buddhists. Now, times have changed, and things are different. Now people don't understand, and they have bad hearts. (Razia, 45-year-old Sunni mother of two)

Normalizing Heterosexuality: Mothers' Assumptions, Talk, and Strategies with Young Children

In recent years, social scientists have identified not just heterosexism and homophobia as social problems, but also heteronormativity-the mundane, everyday ways that heterosexuality is privileged and taken for granted as normal and natural. There is little empirical research, however, on how heterosexuality is reproduced and then normalized for individuals. Using survey data from more than 600 mothers of young children, ages 3 to 6 years old, this article examines how mothers normalize heterosexuality for young children. The data suggest that most mothers, who are parenting in a gendered and heteronormative context to begin with, assume that their children are heterosexual, describe romantic and adult relationships to children as only heterosexual, and make gays and lesbians invisible to their children. Those who consider that their children could some day be gay tend to adopt one of three strategies in response: Most pursue a passive strategy of “crossing their fingers” and hoping otherwise. A very few try to prepare their children for the possibility of being gay. A larger group, primarily mothers from conservative Protestant religions, work to prevent homosexuality. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding sexual identity development and the construction of heteronormativity.

Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!

Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!

Photography after the Incidents

Photography after the Incidents

Senior managers’ business knowledge in a transition economy

PurposeTo explore senior managers’ knowledge and thinking about strategy and organisational capabilities, and developments of both during a time of transition.Design/methodology/approachInterpretive case research based on semi‐structured interviews with 44 senior managers in a number of business organisations in Ethiopia supplemented by secondary sources.FindingsSenior managers had a narrow and contingent knowledge of, and interaction with, the external environment. The notion of “strategy” was problematical for them. Managers’ knowing of their environment and organisational aspects were differentiated, context specific and subject to changes and reinterpretations depending on shifting roles, responsibilities and changing contexts.Research limitations/implicationsThis research sheds light on how assumptions about the often “taken‐for‐grantedness” of the strategic “manageability” of change by senior managers may be exaggerated. This was revealed, at one extreme, in this research but it may extend also into other situations in varying degrees. In this and other ways the study of senior Ethiopian managers could be used as a way to reflect back upon conventional thinking about strategizing in other contexts.Practical implicationsThe research can help managers gain insight into how their everyday ways of knowing and seeing are unnecessarily limited and constrained.Originality/valueWork in business knowledge is just commencing and hence its continuity would further both scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the knowledge work of managers in varied contexts and environments.

The Linguistic Challenges of Mathematics Teaching and Learning: A Research Review

This article synthesizes research by applied linguists and mathematics educators to highlight the linguistic challenges of mathematics and suggest pedagogical practices to help learners in mathematics classrooms. The linguistic challenges include the multi-semiotic formations of mathematics, its dense noun phrases that participate in relational processes, and the precise meanings of conjunctions and implicit logical relationships that link elements in mathematics discourse. Research on pedagogical practices supports developing mathematics knowledge through attention to the way language is used, suggesting strategies for moving students from informal, everyday ways of talking about mathematics into the registers that construe more technical and precise meanings.

Questions as a tool for bridging science and everyday language games

Research has shown how students can shift between different ways of communicating about natural phenomena. The point of departure in this text is that school science comprises science ways to communicate as well as everyday ways to communicate. In school science activities transitions, from for example everyday ways to explain to science ways to explain, occur and the purpose of this paper is to show what role questions play in these transitions. Data consists of video observations of a group of 24 students, 15 years of age, doing their ordinary school science work without my interference in their planning. Relevant conversations including questions were transcribed. The analysis was made by examining the establishment of relations between utterances in the transcribed conversations. Relations that bridge science and everyday language games are described in the results. Questions that were formulated in an everyday language game illustrate the difficulties of making transitions to a science language game. Without teacher guidance, students’ questions are potential promoters for making the topic drift and to develop into something totally different from the topic as planned by the teacher. However, questions promote transitions to an everyday language game. These can be used by teachers for example to adjust an everyday explanation and guide students in making science knowledge useful in daily life.

Realism in Western Narrative and the Gospel of Mark: A Prolegomenon

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.)) Professor Eucalyptus said, search for is as momentous as the search for god. -Wallace Stevens1 I define as the way objective (i.e., what meets us out there) is portrayed in narrative. I define as the way each individual perceives society and nature. Society and nature exist over against us, but only as each individual perceives them. In other words, our perceptions constitute what is real to us. Thus, one person's is not necessarily what others perceive.2 In the final analysis is subjective, although clearly commonly perceived does exist out and most of us in the twenty-first century, as heirs of the science and learning of Western culture, do share similar view of reality. To be sure, what we in the twenty-first century consider real may differ remarkably from what people in previous centuries considered real, since is subjective. In general, modern human beings conceive of in three dimensions in common, practical, everyday ways and, hence, describe the world using identical conceptual categories. For example, we describe things by color and size (viz., height, depth, width, length, and weight) and in terms of distance, speed, and time; we conceive of the necessity for rules; we share the idea of past and future. These conceptual categories seem common to diverse societies past and present and to some extent form something of common ways of conceiving of objective reality. This suggests that we are not completely misled by what is out there, since in general we interact with it in similar ways. But the core of that human beings encounter out clearly can be shaped in many different ways by different individuals on the basis of the inferences they make. Our individual inferences are much less uniform and far more significant for shaping individual views of reality. In sense, if one believes it to be so, it is so-at least it is for the one believing it! The personal inferences we make are the result of our particular social engineering and shape the we experience. My aim in this article is to describe how the realities we perceive have been portrayed as realisms in Western narrative and to examine Mark's literary in that context.3 In general, realism is approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity.4 It aims at conveying as closely as possible and strives for maximum verisimilitude.5 This article is something of trial balloon, as it were, since so far as I know no one has ever attempted such synthesis.6 I. REALISMS IN NARRATIVE Roland Barthes describes in literature as reality effect that narrative has on reader; it is caused by the author's including things in the narrative that have no significance beyond themselves. These features are essentially insignificant to the author's plot. Beyond the fact that they enhance reader's visual imaging of scene, they contribute nothing to the plot or the narrative's progress. Like so many things in life, they are just there and incidental to the activity around them.7 Eric Auerbach describes realism in literature as mimesis of everyday life. The title of his book suggests his aim: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (first published in 1946).8 He examined selected narrative scenes ranging from Homer to Virginia Woolf to see how closely they imitate everyday life. Auerbach never addresses the difficulty of defining an actual objective reality, or the problem of different perceptions of reality. He never even defines realism in literature, as such,9 although two general statements in Mimesis help me to understand what he seems to mean by realism: 1. [Realism] is a serious representation of contemporary everyday social against the background of constant historical movement (p. …

Development of the Internet in the Gambia: The Case of Nokunda

The global nature of the new information and communication network has been questioned because of the obvious exclusion of developing countries in the development of the contemporary structure. Leaving aside the troublesome term ‘developing countries’, it is still very obvious that the poorer southern countries are in a different position in applying new technology compared to the so-called advanced western countries. Even if there are good reasons to defend the argument for the unilateral and onesided quality of the global network, this article will tell a story of its enlargement into the Gambia, one of the poorest countries of West Africa. While not generalizing from this example because particular characteristics apply, it is still suggested that there are good reasons for the extension of the network right across the globe. The emphasis will be on the cultural and social aspects of the network and less on its policy and infrastructure side. The article looks at the everyday ways and needs of exploiting the Net which explain its current expansion.