Material Circumstances Research Articles

“I feel like the worst mother in the world”: Neoliberal subjectivity in Indigenous Australian oral health

Neoliberalism gained popularity during the post-Cold War period as a set of dominating ideologies, practices and policies that underpinned the movement towards globalisation. Neoliberalism champions competitive private markets, deregulation that facilitates economic activity, personal responsibility, and reduced public expenditure on infrastructure. A decade after the initial rise of neoliberalism, health inequities became concerns on the global stage. Oral health inequities aptly reflect social injustices due to the unique relation between material circumstances, access to health services and structural inequities. In Australia, Indigenous children experience early childhood caries at alarmingly higher rates than non-Indigenous children. Recently, neoliberalism has been suggested as an overwhelming contributor to Indigenous oral health disparities. This qualitative research is an extension of a single-blind parallel-arm randomised control trial that aimed to identify factors related to the increased occurrence of dental caries in Indigenous children. The objective of this constructivist grounded theory study was to generate an understanding of how neoliberal subjectivity exists for Indigenous peoples in the context of oral health in Australia. Experiences of ownership, guilt, failure, embarrassment, shame, and judgment were key in participants’ experiences of neoliberal subjectivity; these feelings were exacerbated by experiences of bullying, financial limitations, and institutional racism. We argue that individual responsibility for health, as a tenet of neoliberal ideologies, furthers Indigenous oral health inequities and that neoliberalism as a societal discourse perpetuates colonial values by benefitting the privileged and further oppressing the disadvantaged. Trial registrationAustralian New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry ACTRN12611000111976; registered February 01, 2011.

Taking territory seriously in a fluid, topologically varied world: reflections in the wake of the populist turn and the COVID-19 pandemic

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue based on the Vega symposium: ‘Bounded spaces in question: X-raying the persistence of regions and territories, edited by Anssi Paasi. ABSTRACT A concern with territory may seem anachronistic in the face of the interconnected, fluid, topologically complex political-geographic landscape of the twenty-first century. Yet in many places borders are hardening, the movement of people is becoming more limited, and state nationalism is gaining ground. The recent rise of populist-nationalist movements and the responses to the spread of SARS-CoV-2 around the world are illustrative of conflicting political and social dynamics that are simultaneously reinforcing and challenging dominant territorial ideas and assumptions. Coming to grips with this state of affairs demands an increasingly sophisticated engagement with the concept of territory–one that treats territory as a shifting, yet sticky, element of a complex system that is constantly being remade through the interplay of material circumstances and ideological dispositions.

Management of issues relating to marriage, mental illness, and Indian legislation.

Management of issues relating to marriage, mental illness, and Indian legislation.

Spotlight: Middle East Caucus

Spotlight:Middle East Caucus Kareem Estefan (bio) and Viviane Saglier (bio) The Middle East has a rich and diverse history of film and media production, but Western film markets have consolidated hegemonic media narratives by overrepresenting subjects such as terrorism and the veil. Scholars of Middle Eastern media affirm such imperialist discourse, obscuring local understandings of screen cultures and the historical conditions they register and circulate within. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies' (SCMS) Middle East Caucus intervenes in this situation by promoting rigorous, transdisciplinary study of the cinema and media of the Middle East and its diasporas. The caucus's history reflects the geopolitical stakes of the Middle East and the political responsibilities of scholars who study the region's film and media. Since its founding in 1993, the caucus shifted from a Zionist orientation to one that engages scholarship critical of Israel when current caucus members Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard became co-chairs in the late 2000s. The caucus now actively grapples with legacies of colonialism that frame the Middle East as a coherent political, economic, and cultural space, as such discourse benefits colonial epistemologies, geopolitical domination, and resource extraction.1 The institutional location of SCMS in North America similarly implicates US and Western imperialism in the region, which persevere through a diverse and expansive media apparatus. In recent years, [End Page 1] media and area studies scholars have productively contested such colonial mapping. For example, studies of media circuits across the Indian Ocean are redefining the region's porous borders and underscoring the need to examine histories of South-South cultural exchange. Today, the caucus highlights the variety of approaches to studying Middle Eastern film and media by sponsoring multiple panels at SCMS's annual conference and by compiling an annual list of representative publications. In 2019, the caucus established an annual Graduate Student Essay Award to recognize the contributions of emerging scholars and foster mentorship opportunities within the caucus. Additionally, the caucus supports our subfield's most precarious scholars through academic activism. Although the material circumstances of Middle East film and media scholars differ sharply in relation to their citizenship status, geographic location, race, class, gender, and sexuality, many face severe restrictions on freedom of expression and mobility. The travel ban imposed on several Muslim-majority countries by the Trump administration is a much-cited example. Less discussed are ongoing difficulties non-Americans face in securing visas to enter the United States from (for example) Iran or Lebanon or the discriminatory treatment—including the very real threat of deportation—that Arab and Muslim American scholars wishing to conduct research in Palestine/Israel face when crossing Israeli-controlled borders. (This threat now exists for any academic critical of Israeli policy, including many prominent Jewish activists and intellectuals.) Film and media scholars also face severe limitations on academic expression when teaching in Egypt or Turkey and when supporting Palestinian rights or investigating Israeli settler-colonial practices within the United States and beyond. To address these issues, the caucus organized "Decolonization and Transnational Solidarity in Film/Media Studies: A Workshop Towards Action" at SCMS's 2021 conference. Facilitated by Dr. Layal Ftouni, the workshop investigated potential actions to decolonize knowledge production and support transnational antiracist struggles. Attendees—most of whom were not caucus members—brainstormed steps toward enacting transformative change within the field of film and media studies, SCMS, and the institutions to which we belong. The workshop highlighted the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which originated in Palestinian civil society in 2005 as a nonviolent campaign modeled on South African calls for solidarity against apartheid. In accordance with international law, BDS demands the end of the Israeli occupation and colonization of Arab lands, full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.2 One element of BDS, the academic boycott, aims to expose Israeli universities' structural contributions to the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people; it does not impact collaborations with Israeli scholars, unless these collaborations are sponsored by Israeli [End Page 2] institutions or serve to normalize Israeli colonial rule.3 BDS asks scholars to refuse complicity with settler colonialism and actively support...

A Framework for Pediatric Health Care Providers to Promote Active Play in Nature for Children.

Aim:Time outdoors and contact with nature are positively associated with a broad range of children’s health outcomes. Pediatricians are uniquely positioned to promote active play in nature (APN) but may face challenges to do so during well child visits. The objective of this study was to understand barriers to children’s APN, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how health care providers could promote APN.Methods:Focus groups were conducted with 14 pediatric providers and interviews with 14 parents (7 in English, 7 in Spanish) of children ages 3 to 10 on public insurance. Dedoose was used for coding and content analysis. We contextualized this work within the WHO’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health conceptual framework.Results:Parents mentioned a range of material circumstances (time, finances, family circumstances, access to safe outdoor play spaces and age-appropriate activities) and behavioral/psychosocial factors (previous experiences in nature, safety, and weather concerns), many of which were exacerbated by the pandemic, that serve as barriers to children’s APN. Providers said they were motivated to talk to families about children’s APN but mentioned barriers to this conversation such as time, other pressing priorities for the visit, and lack of resources to give families.Conclusions:Many pre-pandemic barriers to APN were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Well-child visits may be an effective setting to discuss the benefits of APN during and beyond the pandemic, and there is a need for contextually appropriate resources for pediatric providers and families.

The Memories of Displaced Children: Flight Experience in the Life Stories of Exiled Latvians

This article explores how Latvian children who were displaced during the Second World War came across their displacement and how they compose the narratives of this childhood experience. Their life story interviews have been preserved in the Latvian National Oral History Archive. Recorded testimonies convey the migration experience in an intense way by vividly depicting the psychological, emotional, and material circumstances that children faced and by revealing common themes relevant to them at the time of the displacement.

Coercing to sterilization: classification of species

The article provides a concept of coerced sterilization and structuring of its varieties. The problems and the status of protecting the realization of reproductive rights both at national and international levels have been studied. This research is based on the analysis of the experience and legislation of such countries as Ukraine, Central America and Africa countries, USA, Germany, China, Uzbekistan, Tunisia, Singapore, India, Czech Republic, Japan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Moldova and others, illustrating the coercion of persons to surgical sterilization. The UN, WHO and other international and governmental organizations' international legal acts, laws, decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) have been studied. The authors have used statistics from international organizations, expert opinions, doctrinal ideas and views on this issue.
 First, it is proved that this type of sterilization occurs under the pressure of psychological, political, material circumstances. Many states either contribute financially to this phenomenon or establish discriminatory rules against those who do not wish to undergo this medical procedure.
 Then the classification of this type of sterilization is given: convicted persons, transgender people, HIV-infected persons and representatives of the poorest layers of the population in overpopulated regions are subject to coerced sterilization. The existence of this problem is also due to insufficient legal regulation, gaps in solving the problem of the responsibility for bribery or mental coercion to sterilization, which leads to profanity, so we can overcome obstacles to human reproductive rights only by eliminating or reducing the negative impact of these factors.
 On the basis of the conducted research it is offered the ways on improving the prevention and punishment of cases of forcing individuals to renounce the right to reproduce one's kind.

«SILENT ALL THESE YEARS» OR BECOMING IN EVERYDAYNESS: TORI AMOS AND HER POETICS OF THE QUOTIDIAN

Created by the American singer-songwriter Tori Amos «Silent All These Years» is a prominent cultural product of the 1990s in the domain of western popular music. Released in the beginning of the decade it has actualized the current sensibilities, ethically and aesthetically. Deploying the efficient mutual engagement of feminist and postmodernist strategies the author mobilizes the quotidian and performs its intellectual aestheticization.
 The study focuses on the ways the everyday operates in the song lyrically and musically, as well as on the author’s intention of aestheticizing the mundane. There is an important interdependence between the material circumstances in which the song was created and its genre form of an indie ballad — an ironic gesture that subverts the «heroic» becomes definitive of the piece. The embodied «women’s» experience of the mundane comes as grotesque, «women’s» time threatens to devour the time of «progress», elements of western eschatological mythology undergo domestication and the archetypal image of the Mermaid receives a re-reading, urban everyday vocabulary ruptures the «high» register. An intensification of sameness, repetition and monotony, however, accentuates a non-ironic potentiality of emancipation and insight.
 The poetics of the quotidian in Amos, thus, presents itself politically by locating the invisibly heroic becoming in everydayness as opposed to a one-time extraordinary action. One of the singular possibilities of such a becoming is a possibility of a continuing, and always risky, dialogic exchange.

Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Kevin Binfield and William J. Christmas.

In this volume of MLA’s Options for Teachings series, the editors explain their use of “laboring class”: it captures the “plurality and diversity” of experiences and authors, such as “women and authors of African descent.” “Laboring class” is denoted by “material reality” and “world view,” yet delineations should examine “the blurring of class lines” and “changes in an author’s material circumstances,” which will “enrich our understanding” of “dominant heuristic categories, of gender, race, and empire.” Even though the editors eschew imposing a laboring-class canon, certain names reappear, such as John Clare, Stephen Duck, and Mary Leapor. Nonetheless, these categories as well as varied authors and texts, perhaps unfamiliar to some instructors, are demonstrated amply in the selection of essays.Gender, Moyra Haslett suggests, functions as a “heuristic category” in Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall,” “Essay on Woman,” and “Man the Monarch.” In accounts of African descent and labor such as Briton Hammon’s A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760), Vincent Carretta argues, authors “position themselves rhetorically as strangers in strange lands to comment on the society [in which] they found themselves.” James Simmons explores relations between laboring-class and canonical writings.Theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau are invoked as offering means to theorize everyday life. One minor quibble: the editors state that “laboring class writers do not fit tidily into overarching literary or intellectual paradigms,” which is why “none of the essays” utilizes “classical Marxism.” Yet surely “intellectual paradigms” of the sort Marx has provided for almost two centuries could stimulate students’ “reflection,” as called for by the editors, in interrogating the origins, tendencies, and models of economic inequality. A second quibble: although the volume title would suggest an equal number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, it tilts heavily toward the latter period. There is thus little here of interest for eighteenth-century instructors.

Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture 1500–1780. Ed. Ronald Huebert and David McNeil.

<i>Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture 1500–1780</i>. Ed. Ronald Huebert and David McNeil.

257 POSITIVE HEALTH AND AGING FOR OLDER IRISH TRAVELLERS AND OLDER PEOPLE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED HOMELESSNESS: LIFE-COURSE MEANINGS AND DETERMINANTS

Abstract Background The position of marginalized groups of older people remains neglected in positive health and aging (PHA) agendas, whether they concern healthy, active or positive aging. Questions exist around the meaning of such constructs, and the factors that enable disadvantaged populations to achieve equitable later-life experiences. In focusing on two such groups, this study investigates the constituent dimensions of PHA for older Irish Travellers and older people who have experienced homelessness, and the role of life-course and structural determinants in constructing PHA trajectories for these groups. Methods The study involves a multi-method qualitative, participatory voice-led methodology, but the analysis draws primarily on 49 in-depth life-course interviews with the populations. Results In addition to five interconnected dimensions of PHA, four determinants related to life-course experiences and structural factors are identified: social relations; material and accommodation circumstances; formal supports and systems; and critical transitions and resilience. Conclusion While illustrating the validity of PHA agendas for these groups when understood through their lived experiences, the findings highlight the significant deprivations and risks to rights that must be accounted for to secure meaningful gains in PHA for the groups.

Binary blues: Exploring beyond dichotomized gender comparisons with a theory-driven approach

The call to move beyond binary conceptualizations of gender is not new, and yet, this categorical and contrastive approach to gender analysis remains common, particularly in health sciences. It has been posited that the problem of gender dualism rests partially in the minimal interplay between theory and method. Drawing on our experiences during a qualitative study of men’s and women’s involvement in cardiac rehabilitation, this article provides an account of the analytic and reflexive challenges of conducting research on gender and health and explores how the careful use of theory, specifically Bourdieu’s theory of practice, can facilitate a departure from narrow gender binaries. The analysis presented in this article adds to methodological writings on gender and health, offering a theory-driven process to help researchers address the fluidity of gender as lived and negotiated in the everyday social and material circumstances of men and women, particularly during times of illness.

Creating an Ethnographic Atlas of European Russia as Reflected in Peter von Köppen’s Correspondence with the Academy of Sciences

In the mid-nineteenth century, the development of ethnographic cartography was mostly driven by issues related to the classification and territorial distribution of ethnic groups. However, in the course of this work, cartographers, ethnographers, and statisticians faced economic and material challenges, which have often been overlooked in the scholarship. This article examines the ‘mapping processes’ (М. Edney) of the 1840s through an analysis of correspondence between Peter von Köppen and the Imperial St Petersburg Academy of Sciences about the preparation of the Ethnographic Atlas of European Russia (1848), one of the first ethnographic maps published in the Russian Empire. These sources held in the St Petersburg branch of the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences are published here for the first time and provide detailed information about the circumstances behind the preparation of the atlas. The academy only published a short summary of these discussions, which omitted key financial and methodological details. The correspondence thus provides an alternative perspective on the history of cartography, revealing the difficulties of everyday scientific activity behind the scenes. The exchange vividly describes the relationship between the Academy of Sciences and the Russian Geographical Society during its early years, Köppen’s struggle to finance his various cartographic projects, and the material processes of producing an ethnographic map. The article focuses on how Köppen balanced his scientific vision with his limited material and practical circumstances and the goals of the various scientific organisations he was involved in.

American Magazines and the Cultural Production of Blackness

AbstractEurie Dahn’s Jim Crow Networks (2021) and E. James West’s Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. (2020) offer compelling examples of the two main literary historical approaches to periodical studies: A survey of several different types of magazines in relation to the social networks through which they were produced, distributed, and read, and a deep dive into the editorial orientation of a particular magazine, as shaped by a dominant individual presence. Both studies present detailed accounts of how these periodicals’ publics and counterpublics resisted (and sometimes reinforced) prevailing conceptions of racialized identity at important points in the twentieth century. But the material circumstances of those productions risk being misrepresented by the model of the network, so this review essay argues for the Bakhtinian chronotope as a more expressive metaphor for the temporal dimension of the magazine experience. This approach enables a more fully historicist understanding of how the various important literary figures represented here were perceived by their original periodical readers.

International Students and Homemaking in Transition: Locating Home on the Threshold between Ascription and Achievement

How do young people such as international students understand home, and “where” do they locate it, upon their transition into adulthood? Building on in-depth interviews with forty students in a dorm in Northern Italy, we explore their home-university transition, and the attendant relocations of home, at two levels: in everyday life environments, related to their material and dwelling circumstances, and in their self-narratives, which reveal a fundamental translation of home from spatial into temporal terms. We understand these spatial and temporal relocations of home in terms of continuity, situatedness, in-betweenness and open-endedness. By unpacking the students’ balancing acts between “ascribed” and “achieved” homes, we contribute to the debate on homemaking as a combination between fixed references and temporary or portable affordances, and on the routines and tactics whereby young people mediate the contrasting pressures of family expectations and individual self-realization. Even in transiency, the narrated and lived experience of home illuminates the students’ aspirations and concerns as they struggle to position themselves between different countries, social roles and biographical stages, from a particular accommodation in the here-and-now.

The Consumption, Income, and Well-Being of Single mother–headed Families 25 Years After Welfare Reform

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families—the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing quality, and health insurance coverage. The results provide strong evidence that the material circumstances of single mothers improved in the decades following welfare reform. The consumption of the most disadvantaged single mother headed families—those with low consumption or low education—rose noticeably over time and at a faster rate than for those in comparison groups.

Art in the Time of Pandemic: Elisabetta Sirani, Artistic Agency, and Capitalist Social Reproduction

Art in the Time of Pandemic: Elisabetta Sirani, Artistic Agency, and Capitalist Social Reproduction

“There’s No Way Abraham Lincoln Could Work at Google”: Fox News and the Politics of Breaking Up Big Tech

This paper analyzes a corpus of segments from the Tucker Carlson Tonight program concerning “big tech” (focusing specifically on Google) and contextualizes this analysis within the political history of American media and technology regulation. Conservatives have long lamented the so-called liberal bias in media, but have also traditionally supported business deregulation and an antitrust approach narrowly concerned with consumer welfare. The textual analysis of Fox segments first shows that recurring complaints about the bias of Google's employees and executives is connected with its market dominance, and they frequently position corporations rather than government as the central threat to freedom. The solutions discussed, correspondingly, often favor greater structural intervention in the market to mitigate concentration’s deleterious political consequences. I show how the critique on Carlson’s show and recent attention to the issue from the executive branch represent a new manifestation of the theory of ideological evolution that Jack Balkin has called “ideological drift,” in which a political idea (in this case, the “Brandeisian” approach to antitrust law) changes valence in different material circumstances and thus finds new proponents.

The (a)symmetric effects of income and unemployment on popular demand for redistribution

Numerous studies show that those with lower income and the unemployed support more redistribution, which is attributed to material self-interest. However, recent studies assessing within-individual changes result in smaller and less consistent effect estimates. To explain why preferences do not narrowly follow material self-interest, this study argues that the effects of income and unemployment may be asymmetric, implying that improving and deteriorating material circumstances exert differently sized effects. The claims are tested using panel data from Great Britain and a weighted difference-in-difference estimator. The results show that only income increases (negatively) affect redistribution support while income decreases have null effects. In contrast, unemployment is estimated to have a strong and symmetrical effect in line with self-interest theory. These results add further evidence for the validity of self-interest theories but suggest that individuals are only boundedly rational. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1963139 .

“It Should Be on Every Surgeon’s Table”: The Reception and Adoption of Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy (1851) in the United States

This article is part of the Objects in Motion series in British Art Studies, which is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Projects in the series examine cross-cultural dialogues between Britain and the United States, and may focus on any aspect of visual and material culture produced before 1980. The aim of Objects in Motion is to explore the physical and material circumstances by which art is transmitted, displaced, and recontextualised, as well as the transatlantic processes that create new markets, audiences, and meanings.