Hegemonic Structures Research Articles

Políticas educacionales brasileñas: consecuencias de un currículo nacional

El artículo, de investigación cualitativa y teórica, tiene como objetivo debatir las posibles consecuencias de una Base Nacional Curricular Común (BNCC) en la Educación Básica brasileña en el contexto de las políticas curriculares. La metodología para análisis de los documentos oficiales y discurso del Estado ha sido la dialéctica. La fundamentación teórica se basa en la teoría gramsciana, y se discute si la BNCC promueve la emancipación o representa un instrumento de regulación. Se han encontrado aparatos hegemónicos en la BNCC, pues la selección de contenidos denuncia la visión de un grupo respecto a lo que es legítimo enseñar, en un ejercicio de regulación. Los resultados indican que rescatar la praxis reflexiva en lugar de la cultura de la gerencia –propia de la concepción empresarial de la investigación en política educacional– parece condición fundamental para recuperar el valor e importancia de un intelectual que organice un proyecto emancipador.

Oppositional Designs: Examining How Racial Identity Informs the Critical Design of Art and Space

AbstractThis study develops upon recent scholarship about subversive design that emerged in response to hegemonic structures such as capitalism, by introducing how racial identity informs disruptive design practices. Based upon a two-year ethnography with nine black artists during a period of racial unrest, this study presents how their experiences as black Americans informed distinctive, critical design dispositions. The participants’ deeply personal and labor-intensive design processes were both technical and political processes that involved intense prototyping, research and self-reflection. Their designs resulted in oppositional films, photography exhibits and paintings that contested racial metonymy through visceral and visual discourses that present black identities and histories within a more complex racial language. The participants also designed empathic spaces where oppositional discourses could take root and that supported communal healing, mourning and celebration. The ethnographic accounts of this study offer a meaningful way to engage and bridge scholarship about race, design and oppositional art.

Memorializing a Legendary Figure: Bayajidda the Prince of Bagdad in Hausa Land

This paper examines the various ways in which the Bayajidda legend is memorialized. In its current manifestations, the legend can be seen as an important agency for the remembrance of the past in the context of rapid socio-historical change in Africa, under the influence of modernity, technology and globalization. The analysis begins by highlighting the interface between folklore and history in everyday cultural practices in postcolonial northern Nigeria. The signposts that give a coherent structure to the paper include the chronicles of the Bayajidda legend, the essential oral version circulating in its different forms in Hausa society. Over the years, reference to the legend of Bayajidda has always been made through the use of different modes of cultural expression such as song, dramatic performance, film and other forms of narration. This range has served the political and ideological interests of the dominant power elite who are consistently alluding to the Bayajidda legend. The survival of the essential oral narrative therefore depends solely on a strategy of alluding to the legend in its various guises, including the form of museum artifacts, drama, films and musical songs. However, the paper explores each of the specific historical periods from the pre-colonial down to the colonial and postcolonial epochs with a view to highlighting how specific forms of the legend are deployed by hegemonic structures for the purposes of legitimation.

Introduction: Interrogating the ‘everyday’ politics of emotions in international relations

The focus on the everyday in this Special Issue reveals different kinds of emotional practices, their political effects and their political contestation within both micro- and macro-politics in international relations. The articles in this Special Issue address the everyday negotiation of emotions, shifting between the reproduction of hegemonic structures of feelings and emancipation from them. In other words, the everyday politics of emotions allows an exploration of who gets to express emotions, what emotions are perceived as (il)legitimate or (un)desirable, how emotions are circulated and under what circumstances. Consequently, we identify two thematic strands which emerge as central to an interrogation of ‘everyday’ emotions in international relations and which run through each of the contributions: first, an exploration of the relationship between individual and collective emotions and, second, a focus on the role of embodiment within emotions research and its relationship with the dynamics and structures of power.

When Earth Matters: Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

Abstract This essay discusses Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather from an ecocritical perspective, asking how her late 1960s’ novel already anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory, which derived directly from the colonialist past, with an agricultural revolution that aims to empower those who most closely resemble the subaltern classes variously theorized in postcolonial theory. This re-turn to the physical or even Real, to the materiality of the earth, opens up an alternative to the cultural essentialism that, from its beginning, created numerous stumbling stones on the path towards decolonization. Through its turn towards farming and the land and away from cultural forms of hegemony, the novel emphasizes the materiality of reality.

The Social Life of Speculation

The Social Life of Speculation Gabriella Friedman (bio) Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. By Michelle D. Commander. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paper). Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction. By Sami Schalk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 192 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. By Shelley Streeby. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 168 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. By Aimee Bahng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 248 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). In the past two decades, scholarly and popular interest in speculative fiction has surged. Groundbreaking anthologies like Sheree Renée Thomas's Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Grace Dillon's Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), as well as scholarship by Ramón Saldívar, Curtis Marez, Dillon, André M. Carrington, Donna Haraway, and others, deploy speculative fiction to address the interconnected histories and current realities of racism, heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. The four books under review here showcase speculative fiction studies (or perhaps, more accurately, "speculative studies") as an emerging, interdisciplinary field engaging many of the key analytics of American studies: racialization, settler colonialism, imperialism, climate change, diaspora, (dis)ability, and the transnational turn. Our current scholarly moment is marked by a turn not only to nonrealist literature but to speculation in all its multitudinous forms. As Michelle D. Commander, Sami Schalk, Shelley Streeby, and Aimee Bahng illustrate, speculation evokes an extrapolative practice that articulates the repercussions of urgent global [End Page 205] problems, a set of political tactics that shape new worlds through activism, and an imaginative strategy that etches unexpected ways to organize social life. Of course, science fiction has an established presence in academe. The prominent journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies were founded in 1959 and 1973, respectively, and the history of science fiction scholarship dates back even further. The editors of Science Fiction Studies, for example, maintain a chronological bibliography that lists Johannes Kepler's "Notes" from Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (1634) as an early work of science fiction criticism.1 Since then, scholars have painstakingly historicized, contextualized, and debated the parameters and stakes of the genre. Some, like Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Samuel Delany, and Joanna Russ, highlight science fiction's potential to unsettle hegemonic structures of power; others, such as John Rieder and Patricia Kerslake, analyze the colonial logics texturing the genre. But speculative fiction studies, though it overlaps with scholarship on science fiction, is a different animal: broader, more capacious, less concerned with technical literary and generic questions. While some have tried to demarcate the bounds of speculative fiction—with Robert Heinlein and Margaret Atwood proposing the most famous definitions—others find the ambiguity of the term attractive.2 In Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, Bahng is "less interested in literary taxonomies than in the various modalities of writing and reading that can alter relations between writer and reader, shift ways of thinking, and produce different kinds of subjects"; she sees potential in speculative fiction's "promiscuity and disregard for the proper" (13, 16). Similarly, Streeby embraces the term speculative fiction in Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism "because it is less defined by boundary-making around the word 'science,' stretching to encompass related modes such as fantasy and horror, forms of knowledge in excess of white Western science, and more work authored by women and people of color" (20). In Commander's Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic, Afro-Atlantic speculation exceeds science fiction, or even Afro-futurism, which Commander regards as only one "subgenre of Afro-speculation of the twentieth and twenty-first century that is concerned with the artistic reimagining of the function of science and technology in the construction of utopic black futures" (6). Schalk's Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis) ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction...

Christina Liddell, the Forgotten Fraser Tytler Sister: Censorship and Suppression in Mary Watts’s Life Writing

Novelist, short story writer and poet Christina Liddell (nee Fraser Tytler) (1848–1927) is one of the many neglected non-canonical women writers of the nineteenth century. Despite her fame during her day and her familial and professional connections to Victorian celebrities, including Julia Margaret Cameron, she is now relatively unknown and no study of her currently exists. She is herself a silence in the archive. It was Christina who introduced her artistic younger sister Mary to ‘England’s Michelangelo’ George Frederic Watts, facilitating and remaining at the heart of one of Victorian Britain’s most famous conjugal creative partnerships. Indeed, George called for Christina on his deathbed, and she is now buried beside the couple. This article explores their unconventional triangular relationship and analyses evidence of their eroticized interfamilial creative partnership, which reconfigured hegemonic family structures and represented a progressive if not radical approach to gender and marital politics. Through a reading of Mary’s private diaries alongside her published biography or quasi-hagiography of her husband, this article investigates censorship, suppression, and silence in the form of textual subtexts, ambiguous intimacy, dying words and hallucinations, secret parentage, missing diary pages, and posthumous interventions. It addresses omissions in auto/biography and in the archive, bringing previously unseen material to light and illuminating institutional silence. Combining literary, art historical, and theoretical perspectives, it analyses neglected diaries, auto/biography, and letters alongside poetry, paintings, and photographs in order to offer insight into the untold complexities of Victorian familial relationships and sexualities. This article uses Victorian women’s life writing to explore the complex interconnections of married couples, adult sisters, and siblings-in-law, offering a broader understanding of filial bonds, conjugal arrangements, and eroticized relationships in the long nineteenth century.

Bringing equity to underserved communities through STEM education: implications for leadership development

ABSTRACTSTEM Education is sweeping the United States, prompted primarily by the recent adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards. The surge in interest in STEM Education is beneficial for local schools and communities, and promises to positively impact students, teachers, school leaders, community members, and the future workforce. Unfortunately, inequitable hegemonic structures and practices limit urban students’ access to knowledge, resources, and a comprehensive and fair educational experience. This article explores the STEM activities in place at the Center for Innovation in STEM Education (CISE), at a local university in greater Los Angeles. From a historical context, CISE data show that an approach to STEM education that focuses on serving underrepresented populations by creating a pipeline, can serve as an example for K-12 schools, universities, and educational leaders seeking equitable practices in the field of STEM education. We identify implications for leadership development for school leaders, teacher leaders, and districts.

Homosexuality as Practice and the Social Implications of Representation

ABSTRACTWhat tends to be represented when talking about homosexuals is not the diversity of people who have sex with others of the same sex-gender, but a kind of group or a defined collective with some identifiable characteristics and specific identities: a collection of others, a historically oppressed minority, a community. As a result, not all people who practice homosexuality are included in the representations of homosexuals, nor do all included in these conform to the images projected onto them. This involves a series of social and political consequences, related to the reproduction of hegemonic gender and power structures. Therefore, I question the use of these representations in social sciences and propose to consider, as the analysis element, sexual practices and not the identities and categorizations created around them, showing the power relations that exist between them.

A Methodological Strategy for Exploring Intersecting Inequalities: An Example from Sweden

Susanna Öhman – PhD, Associate professor in Sociology, Risk and Crisis Research Centre, Mid Sweden University, Sweden. Email: susanna.ohman@miun.se
 Anna Olofsson – PhD, Professor in Sociology, Risk and Crisis Research Centre, Mid Sweden University, Sweden. Email: anna.olofsson@miun.se
 Katarina Giritli Nygren – PhD, Associate professor in Sociology, Forum for Gender Studies, Mid Sweden University, Sweden. Email: Katarina.giritli-nygren@miun.se
 The article explores the complex patterns of inequality in Sweden from an intersectional standpoint by developing a methodological strategy using data from quantitative national survey material. Intersectionality stands in contrast to the inductive and hypothesis-testing approaches, which tend to reproduce categories as having an essential and stable meaning. It is generally acknowledged that quantitative approaches to intersectionality are rare or in development. Quantitative analyses tend to disregard some of the theoretical cornerstones of intersectionality: in particular, the relational and fluid character of categories. This may be why intersectionality researchers tend to reject quantitative approaches altogether. To address this dilemma, Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) is applied as a means of linking objective structures to subjective experiences, and it is argued that this methodology is well suited to detecting and capturing social spaces of privilege and oppression. The result shows that this kind of quantitative approach to intersectional analysis can facilitate the exploration of inequalities and positions of privilege across populations and globally at particular times, as well as contributing to ontological and epistemological perspectives on intersectionality. By exploring what the category is said to describe and how these parts relate to other sub-categories, especially about time and place settings and their intersections, we were able to identify relationships between structures of oppression and subjective experiences at a particular time and in a particular place, which is important in understanding both inequalities and positions of privilege. These analyses not only illuminate the hegemonic structures of power that create subordinated and privileged positions but also help us to theorize the non-linear and stochastic relations between and within these positions. This methodological advance also has important implications for social policy.

Eurocentrism, capitalism and tourism knowledge

Global hegemonic structures of power have been a subject of debate among social scientists for decades. However, issues addressing the ‘subjugation of the intellect’ and forces shaping knowledge production – globalisation, capitalism and neo-colonialism – remain understudied in tourism. Drawing upon critical theories of Eurocentrism and capitalism, in this paper we explore and address the ideological impacts of existing global power structures on the next generation of tourism ‘knowledge producers’ in Asia. More specifically, this work critically discusses the ontological and epistemological beliefs – and subsequent methodological choices – of a group of Asian PhD scholars. The empirical material presented in this paper highlights that persisting forms of Eurocentric ideology embedded in capitalist structures of power permeate non-Western academic circles.

Sustainability and Multinational Enterprises: The Need for Diffuse Power

This is a time of global economic and environmental transition, and the balance of power between MNEs and developing communities has yet to be determined. MNEs can take a role in moving the conversation forward, but the issue and disenchantment with the status quo and the polarization between rich and poor needs to be addressed. This is especially true in the United States where shifts in power on a global basis, and the movement of power from the hegemon towards developing nations, are seen to be threats to the established culture of dominance and way of life. With decreases in availability of natural resources such as water and oil, MNEs need to take a leadership role in decreasing hegemonic power structures and working towards diffuse power relationships with labor organizations, resource industry innovators, and developing nation leaders.

The Meaning of the Feminist T-Shirt: Social Media, Postmodern Aesthetics, and the Potential for Sociopolitical Change

This article examines the potential for political or social change as part of postmodern cultural expression in consumer culture. Throughout the article, I discuss the way sociopolitical messages, circulating in contemporary culture, represent an interesting element in terms of their intertextual referencing and postmodern blurring. Postmodern aesthetic features merge commodifying, resistive, and identifying processes, which can enable sociopolitical messages to spread into new arenas of resistance and fly under the radar, so to speak. In particular, I claim that new forms of engagement in social media communication produce an alternative venue for politics—one created by neoliberalism itself. I explain that sociopolitical messages presented via postmodern aesthetics in consumer culture, particularly when circulated using social media, <em>can</em> function counter-hegemonically, even while using hegemonic structures to gain commercial success. With this, the potential for change can come about; power lies in the hands (or social media accounts) of consumers.<

Environmental justice as a (potentially) hegemonic concept: a historical look at competing interests between the MST and indigenous people in Brazil

ABSTRACTThis article explores the need to recognise and compensate the plurality of environmental justice claims, while paying close attention to the outcomes of the most marginalised groups – cultural and ecological – in political decision-making to avoid vestiges of hegemony. The early history of the Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) serves as a case study in which environmental justice claims clash with indigenous rights claims. In recent decades, the MST has refused settling Amazonian indigenous territories, consistent with the organisation’s Via Campesina platform, which focuses on redistributing the 50% of national territory controlled privately by Brazil’s richest 4%. Yet, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brazil’s military government pitted landless peasants and indigenous people’s struggles against each other, circumventing land reform potentially disruptive to the country’s de facto colonial fazenda land system. This tactic pressured competing groups – landless peasants and indigenous people – to fight against each other, concluding predictably: the most powerful factions ended up getting their way, conceding less in negotiations than their less-advantageously positioned, marginalised counterparts. When marginalised groups gain concessions in environmental justice struggles, often the goods comprising those concessions come at a cost to marginalised groups with even less political visibility. Hegemonic structures of power remain non-negotiable in the process of alleviating other injustices in perceived zero-sum politics. Such systemic displacement and dispersion of violence in systems built on violence suggests hegemony affects not just to other marginalised groups, but to nonhumans too.

“I Wonder Where They Went”: Post-Reality Multiplicities and Counter-Resurgent Narratives in Thirza Cuthand’s Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory

For Thirza Cuthand, video, media, and film became a platform for early articulations of queer and prairie disidentifications with the objectives of Indigenous resurgence. Post-reality, or the overshare age of the Internet, early seeds of which can be seen throughout Cuthand’s work, made way for multiple perceptions and perspectives in fields traditionally monopolized by hegemonic structures, including Indigenous art.

Conclusion: Dissent in the Roman Catholic Church: A Response

The contributions to this roundtable weave a rich tapestry of dissent in the Roman Catholic Church. Together, they expose some of the divergent voices within the church—voices that resist easy reconciliation and unification. Dissent, this roundtable shows, takes many forms; it can be directed ad intra (Willard) or ad extra (Gonzalez Maldonado), it can be geared toward the justification of hegemonic structures (Slattery) or aim at their subversion (Steidl). Moreover, these contributions do not just highlight the multiplicity of voices within the church. Indeed, each of them points to conflict and contestation between the diverse Catholicisms they discuss: each of these sometimes-contradictory Catholicisms claims to be authentically and normatively Catholic. This indicates that a discourse about plurality within the church is at the same time a discourse about the struggle for sovereignty of interpretation over the church. Further, the contributions also show that these contestations over the right to define orthodoxy take place under asymmetrical relations of authority and power. The struggle over right belief and right practice is first and foremost a struggle over who has a voice to define Catholic orthodoxy in the first place—who can participate, from which position, in this struggle? Ultimately, therefore, this roundtable demonstrates that questions of normativity by no means become arbitrary or sidelined once we reveal the silent and silenced voices underneath the established master narrative of the church about itself as one and stable. Yet, at the same time, it also becomes obvious that established theological approaches to this inner-ecclesial plurality no longer hold. The dominant theological readings of Catholic tradition have always reckoned with a history of plural, deviant Catholicisms, but they have subjected this inner-ecclesial plurality to the theological ideal and a historical construction of unity and consensus. However, as Gaillardetz and Slattery point out, this narrative of unity has lost both its innocence and its self-evidence as the only legitimate framework for organizing the “raw material” of Catholic tradition. Rereadings of church history through the lens of power-critical studies make visible that Catholic tradition, too, is a power/knowledge regime. They reveal that orthodoxy is, in a literal sense, “heresy”: it takes its shape through epistemopolitical choices (αἵρεσις); it is forged through the exclusion of alternative theological narratives. Where do we stand after this destabilization of tradition, after this loss of innocence? Once stability and consensus have been problematized as the normative organizing principles of Catholic tradition, how else should we think of the church? Can we develop alternative models that take conflict and contestation into account as constitutive moments in our understanding of the church, rather than an afterthought to be eradicated?

A Critical Analysis and Applied Intersectionality Framework with Intercultural Queer Couples

ABSTRACTIntercultural queer couples are growing at an extensive rate in the United States, exemplifying diversity across multiple dimensions (e.g., race, ethnicity, sexuality, affectional identity, gender identity) while experiencing multiple converging forms of oppression (e.g., racism, heterosexism, genderism). Given the dearth of conceptual and empirical literature that unifies both dimensions related to intercultural and queer, applied practices and research contend with a unilateral approach focusing exclusively on either intercultural or queer couples. Intersectionality theory has revolutionized critical scholarship to determine overlapping forms of oppression, decenter hegemonic structures of power relations and social contexts, and enact a social justice agenda. This article addresses the following aims: (1) an overview of the gaps eliciting unilateral approaches to intercultural queer couples; (2) an illustration of intersectionality’s theoretical underpinnings as a critical approach; and (3) applications for insights in practices and research with intercultural queer couples.

Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise

This paper encourages clinicians to consider how patients’ conflicts and symptoms reveal not only familial etiology but the internalization of hegemonic structures and ideology. It explores how the subject evolves within the cultural matrix of neoliberalism, the contemporary hegemonic system that shapes unconscious fantasy, conflicts and defenses. Several clinical case vignettes illustrate the benefits to both analyst and patient of exploring within the transference and countertransference how neoliberal hierarchical arrangements of class, race and gender affect subjective and intersubjective experience.

Sitting outside: Conviviality, self‐care and the design of benches in urban public space

The urban bench has been romanticised as a location of intimacy and benign social serendipity, and problematised with regard to perceptions of unwelcome loitering. In this paper we explore embodied practices of sitting on benches within an urban context characterised by corporate‐led regeneration and impacted by austerity urbanism, imperial history and ongoing racisms. Our schizocartographic methodology enables us to attend to the differentiated and shifting subjectivities and temporalities of bench users, and to emerging counter histories of space. The research is based on the case study of a central square in Woolwich, south‐east London. This involved an eclectic combination of methods, including film‐making, ethnography and interviews, and a cross‐sectoral team of activists, academics and an artist. The paper starts by conceptualising public space with respect to lived experiences of marginalisation, arguing that architectural design is intrinsic to understanding micro‐geographies of conviviality and care. The case study material is used first to provide a visual sketch of sitting and watching others in the square and then to address conviviality and the value of visibility and relative proximity in framing a mostly un‐panicked multiculture. Third, we discuss agentic, yet critically aware, acts of self‐care. Finally, our focus shifts to the design of the benches and the “touching experiences” of bodies sat in various ways, impacted by structural inequalities, yet differentiated by the particularities of individual or collective priorities. In conclusion we argue that attending to the precision of sitting on a bench can illuminate multiple temporalities of urban change in relation to both individual subjectivities and hegemonic structures. Further, the counter histories that emerge can inform policy and practice for inclusive urban design.

Rescuing the soiled dove: pop culture’s influence on a historical narrative of prostitution

American popular culture romanticises relationships between sex workers and their customers; novels, films and television depict prostitutes as innocents in need of rescue by a wealthy or powerful man. Miss Laura’s Social Club, a restored Victorian brothel in Fort Smith, Arkansas, USA, functions both as an informal house museum and the visitor centre for the city. The narrative of Miss Laura’s is influenced by popular culture depictions of prostitution and a desire to show the city in the best possible light. In this qualitative case study, the researchers use an embedded thematic analysis to explore themes that emerged from an earlier study of informal learning at Miss Laura’s. The themes under discussion are the visitor centre’s dual roles as a marketing tool and as a museum and the Cinderella/romanticised themes in the narrative of the lives of ‘the girls’ that worked in the bordello. Using a feminist framework, the researchers examined the inherent tension between the site’s role as a museum and its role as a marketing tool for the city, explicitly pondering the responsibilities of heritage tourism sites to provide information beyond the hegemonic power structures.