Narrative Of Decline Research Articles

Vocal renewal, revision and revival in Annie Lennox’s 2021 cover of ‘Why’

ABSTRACT Annie Lennox (b.1954) is a popular musician whose career exemplifies renewal through the many stage personas she has portrayed over the years as lead singer of Eurythmics and in her solo work. Lennox’s return to live performance during and post COVID-19 pandemic has seen Lennox embark on her latest series of renewals through revisiting her songs. Responses to Lennox’s later-life performances largely bypass ‘decline narratives’ and ‘double standards of ageing’ that ageing female popular musicians are usually subjected to. I position Lennox’s voice as one which moves back and forth between past and present. Exploring Lennox’s voice, I analyse Lennox’s 2021 cover of her song ‘Why’ (1992) in relation to age and time. I begin by examining the concept of ‘renewal’ in relation to age, moving beyond its associations with ‘anti-ageing’. I then consider Lennox’s voice and its mirroring of the past and embellishment upon the present. Finally, I discuss Lennox’s omission of the chorus in her cover, considering this ‘absence’ a space which creates reflection on the past, as well as placing the song within the 2021 pandemic context.

Fringe discourse networks 1932–2022: a media archaeological approach to (Ex)communication and (De)platforming

ABSTRACT In 1932, the Dutch writer Ernest Michel was banned from publishing with a Catholic publisher for critiquing the Catholic church and Dutch democracy. After his ban, Michel joined Verdinaso, a political organization with strong ties to upcoming National Socialist movements in the Netherlands, where he continued to write, frequently advocating for free speech, and against censorship. In this paper, we will compare the case of Michel with the case of Laurens Buijs, as well as contemporary processes of deplatformization and replatforming. We will discuss the removal of right-wing political actors from mainstream platforms, and analyze their narratives of victimhood and cultural decline, as well as the ‘network of technologies and institutions’, i.e. the ‘discourse networks’ that make far-right and populist political communication possible. We follow a media archaeological approach allowing us to show the continuities in seemingly distant times and seemingly different material and institutional networks, as well as the discontinuities in the development of contemporary media. With this analysis, we aim to contribute to current debates concerning the governance of anti-democratic and right-wing media, and their material and institutional networks.

Slow resistance: Feminist and queer activism in ‘illiberal’ contexts

In recent years in China, NGO activism, street gatherings, and the direct expression of gender and sexual rights have been curtailed, yet paradoxically, online feminist expression and organizing, as well as gay visibility, are happening on an unprecedented scale. Inspired by the notions of slow violence and slow hope, this article proposes the concept of slow resistance in relation to ‘illiberalism’ to think through this paradox. Analyzing recent rich and multifaceted, yet often overlooked, feminist activism in China as an example of slow resistance, the article considers slow resistance in ‘illiberal’ contexts as characterized by its context-dependent (in)visibility due to censorship and limitations in global knowledge production and information circulation. Furthermore, slow resistance can be used to understand activism on a global and transnational scale, beyond the oversimplified liberal/illiberal binary. This binary often fails to capture the complexity of political shifts and social changes within ‘illiberal’ contexts. Moreover, the concept of slow resistance challenges the understanding of power solely as state power and resistance solely as opposition to state power. Developing the concept within feminist activism also highlights the importance of gender and sexual politics in understanding social and political change. Slow resistance offers an indeterminate temporality of resistance that challenges narratives of progress in modernization projects and narratives of decline and despair often associated with ‘illiberal states.’ It is important to note that an excessive emphasis on state oppression or illiberal tendencies may paradoxically hinder, rather than facilitate, the potential for (slow) resistance in such contexts.

Crisis? What Crisis?: Rethinking How We Talk about Rural America

Abstract It has become conventional wisdom to say that rural America is (and rural Americans are) in “crisis,” and this has generated a cottage industry of commentary from journalists, academics, politicians, policy makers, and others. Sometimes the story of crisis is economic: jobs harder and harder to find in the rural pockets of the nation. Sometimes it is social: rural isolation and desperation that lead to drug addiction and suicide. Whatever its cause, the result has been that rural America has been “left behind,” to borrow from the title of sociologist Robert Wuthnow's recent book on the topic. And the sub-title of his book encapsulates the politics this crisis has generated: decline and rage. This article interrogates the narrative of crisis and decline by historicizing it more deeply, by examining how enduring rural mythologies continue to shape our discourse about rural places, and to argue that far from being “left behind” in the national parade, rural America has often been leading it.

“We’re not as great as we used to be”: Perceived national status threat and the desire for strong leaders

We examined whether perceived national status threat—i.e., perceiving that one’s country’s status on the international scene is in decline—predicts increased desire for a strong conservative or progressive leader through greater national nostalgia and collective angst. A pilot study on strong leaders’ speeches from the 2017 French presidential election campaign first revealed that both conservative and progressive strong leaders use the status threat narrative, albeit in another form. In four quantitative surveys conducted across France, Malaysia and Chile, we then found that national status threat predicted increased desire for both conservative and progressive strong leaders. In France and Chile, but not Malaysia, the underlying path was contingent on the type of leader, such that nostalgia predicted increased desire for a conservative but not a progressive strong leader. Although correlational, our data suggest that decline narratives might provide a fertile ground for the desire for diverse forms of strong leadership.

5Ecocriticism

Abstract Over the last two decades, the Anthropocene and its calamitous signatures of climate upheaval, species loss, and biocultural fragmentation has garnered dedicated attention from ecocritics, ecologists, and the public. As the culmination of a fifteen-year scientific process, however, in early 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences, or IUGS, rejected the Anthropocene as a unit of geological time in favour of a view of the Anthropocene as a temporally transgressive event. Prominent within the year’s work are trajectories in empirical ecocriticism, ecocritical ageing studies, intermedial ecocriticism, and blue ecocriticism, all of which place emphasis on agency, narrativity, and temporality. As the example of the blue humanities reveals, explored in this essay’s conclusion, intersections between ecocriticism and emerging areas of the environmental humanities continue to generate novel directions. The expansion of interdisciplinary research engaging ecocritics, social scientists, ecologists, and geoscientists is a potential outcome of the IUGS decision. As ecocriticism evolves in the era of the Anthropocene as an event, concerns of more-than-human agency, expression, and creativity will likely attract greater focus. In addition to presenting a broad overview of publications, each of the sections below hones in on one specific work. This review of ecocritical publications in 2023 comprises six sections: 1. Introduction: The Anthropocene from Epoch to Event, which contextualizes the IUGS’s refusal to ratify the Anthropocene as an official geochronological designation; 2. Ecocritical Directions: Towards More-than-Human Agencies, which focuses on the special issue of the journal Anthropocenes, ‘Life Out of Place’; 3. Empirical Ecocriticism: Appraising Environmental Narratives, which considers the landmark edited collection Empirical Ecocriticism; 4. Ecocritical Ageing Studies: Rethinking Narratives of Decline, which turns to the edited collection Aging Studies and Ecocriticism; 5. Intermedial Ecocriticism: Diversifying Anthropocene Narratives, evaluating Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose’s monograph Intermedial Ecocriticism; and 6. Conclusion: Ecocritical Agency and the Environmental Humanities, which reflects on developments in the blue humanities.

Are Australian students' academic skills declining? Interrogating 25 years of national and international standardised assessment data

AbstractStandardised tests of academic basic skills are an established feature of contemporary Australian schooling. Assessment results are widely reported and directly influence educational policymaking. Furthermore, Australian national educational priorities are linked to educational system accountability via the results of standardised tests. Given the influence and importance of assessment data, this paper aimed to collate publicly available data from four assessment programmes undertaken by Australian students, and document long‐term trends in average achievement across all available assessments. Results are reported from three international assessments, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), along with the only Australian assessment, the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy. Of these four, only PISA demonstrated systematic declines in average scores over time. For the remaining three programmes, results in the primary school years showed initial improvements that were subsequently maintained over remaining iterations of the tests. In secondary school, students' average results neither declined nor increased appreciably over time. The consensus of the four largest assessment programmes undertaken by Australian students since 1995 thus fails to support the prevailing narrative of a broadscale decline in academic skills attainment.

‘The boots will be on the coffin!’: multiple meanings of ageing for older people playing walking football

Abstract A narrative of decline dominates the ageing process in the Global North. At the same time, older people have shared more positive stories of ageing, particularly with respect to their leisure practices. I explore this tension by drawing on an interview-based study with people playing walking football in the United Kingdom. My contention is that older people express multiple meanings of ageing that disturb deficit-focused cultural scripts of later-life, albeit in ways that can be fraught with tensions and contradictions. First, I explore how older people cultivate an alternate identity departing from assumptions of loneliness and degradation, with walking football providing an opportunity to develop friendships and a sense of belonging. Second, older people emphasise their own (good) health and the embodied demands of walking football, yet in doing so, can reinforce ageist discourses by distinguishing themselves from the inactive and isolated (older) other. Third, older people reflect on their current and future involvement in walking football in positive ways. However, through attending to the temporal character of their experiences, I show how, whilst older people express a desire to continue participation, this is threatened by the realities of their ageing bodies in ways that align with deficit framings of later-life. I conclude by calling for recognising the multiplicity of older people's experiences and exercising caution about reproducing over-simplistic and sweeping celebrations of ageing.

“You Belong to My Time, Not His”: Ageing, Queerness, and “Allotted Time” in E. Nesbit’s Dormant

ABSTRACT E. Nesbit’s fiction is recognised for conveying the author’s unconventional stance upon issues of paramount concern to fin-de-siècle and post-1900 Britain, including socialism, women’s suffrage, and marriage. This essay reads her neglected novel Dormant (1911) through the lens of literary age studies to argue that it participates in the era’s imaginative re-shaping of life-course possibilities, which focused especially on women. It finds Nesbit’s notoriously contradictory feminist impulses mirrored by, and intersecting with, the novel’s representations of age and ageing. Through age-defying and un-ageing characters, Dormant tantalises with queer prospects and “second-chance plots”, which signify an expansive later-life potential that sits in seeming opposition to the youth-centric Bildungsroman. The eventual circumscription and withdrawal of such non-normative possibilities – through notions of “allotted time” and age-appropriateness – re-inscribes a narrative of decline in which age entails a narrowing of possibilities. Dormant’s navigation of these ambiguities, this essay contends, makes it a crucial but as yet understudied reflection upon the tensions evoked by re-negotiations of age and ageing, and how the limits of an individual life are structured by them.

Declining to be church? Rediscovering God’s time and action through paying careful attention to a numerically declining church

ABSTRACT Church decline is typically seen as a problem to be solved. Many denominations have developed strategies of renewal to address the problem of numerical decline. By paying attention to a particular church in numerical decline through a theological action research project, this paper asks whether there might be different narratives to be uncovered, and particular gifts that declining churches might offer; gifts such as quietness, presence, and welcome. While recognising some of the descriptive value of the typical narrative of decline, taking the example of the life-cycle of a church model, this study shows its diagnosis to be misplaced. It challenges the model’s assumptions around aging, time and hope, and by developing the conversation with the work of Andrew Root, Rowan Williams and John Swinton it shows how a declining church actually offers a different perspective on aging, time and on God’s action in the world. The paper concludes by suggesting that a church in numerical decline is not just a problem to be solved, but an invitation to pay attention to God in the present.

Dismantling the House that Albright Built: Dever’s Rise and Decline Narrative in the Reorientation of American Biblical Archaeology

William G. Dever’s contribution to the reorientation of ‘biblical archaeology’ should not be under-estimated, although his historiography of the movement’s transition to ‘Syro-Palestinian archaeology’ certainly requires adjustment. In the paper, the significance of Dever’s 1972 Winslow Lectures, delivered at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, is examined.

Inventing Climate Change

By engaging with and bringing together Chinese environmental humanities and science fiction studies, this article argues that the narratives of weather and climate revealed in late Qing science fiction serve as a metonymic vehicle and a medium for addressing China's social and political crises. The author analyzes three late Qing science fiction works—Bingshan xuehai 冰山雪海 (Iceberg and Snow Ocean), Dianshijie 電世界 (Electrical World), and Xinshitouji 新石頭記 (New Story of the Stone)—and delves into the intellectual history of modern Chinese environmental ideas. In exploring literary representations and environmental ideas surrounding topics on the air, this article makes three contributions. First, it compels us to reconsider the promises and pitfalls of evading the narrative of nature's decline. The imagination of the air in late Qing science fiction is characterized by its global scale, inclusive of the surface, but imperial in nature. Second, it illustrates that Chinese domestication of modern environmental ideas is not a one-way street when Chinese intellectuals appropriated Western notions for their own discursive maneuvering. Third, it suggests that the defamiliarization of the air serves as a barometer of understanding the repressed modernity in Chinese literature from an environmental perspective.

Age as Adventure: Restorying Later Life

<p>For many people, aging is perceived and experienced in implicitly tragic terms: as a narrative of decline, as little more than a downward trajectory toward decrepitude and death. Such a way of storying later life can set us up for (among other things) narrative foreclosure, which can fuel the mild-to-moderate depression to which older adults are susceptible in the face of aging’s many challenges. Insofar as our experience of aging is inseparable from our story of aging, this paper argues for an alternative narrative of later life. Drawing on concepts from narrative gerontology and narrative psychology, it outlines how later life can be re-genre-ated from tragedy to adventure in at least four inter-related directions: Outward, Inward, Backward, and Forward.</p>

Cared for masculinities in nursing homes - A material perspective on the intersectionality of institutional, spacial, gendered and corporal materiality

This paper takes the co-construction of age and gender over the course of a life as a starting point and expands this perspective by looking at the intersectional interplay of institutional, spatial, and bodily materiality in the setting of a nursing home. Nursing homes are often perceived as a female space, both socially and physically. Moreover, they are institutional spaces that are primarily oriented towards the deficits of aging and bodies in need of care so that age and aging are reproduced in a narrative of decline, and gender hardly has space to be constructed. This interweaving of institutional spaces, bodies in need of care, and gender poses the question: How are age and gender produced through the space(s) of the nursing home and its materiality, and vice versa? On this basis, the influence on the construction of masculinities in the context of materialism is discussed.This paper draws on two case studies, Walter Probst (age 93) and Günther Schiffke (age 78), based on biographical interviews, to focus on the perspective of very old men in need of care and work out the interplay between the material nature of the institutional space and the body in need of care. It will be shown how closely the performance of age, gender, and masculinities is determined by spatial materiality in the nursing home and the increasing dependence of bodies in need of care, as well as how these bodies produce the spaces in turn. On the basis of the case studies, three aspects of materiality of care home spaces are highlighted. The first aspect of this materiality shows how the body can be increasingly perceived and treated as a material object. The second aspect is defined by the body situated in space, and its relationship to objects and aids. As a third aspect, the possibilities of interacting in communal and private spaces of the nursing home are explored. The article thus contributes to linking the (re-) construction of biographic narratives more strongly to spatial materiality and to embedding the construction and performance of age and gender in spatial and institutional structures, thus demonstrating that spaces and environments shape age, gender, and masculinities in a reciprocal way.

‘Growing a World Wonder’: The Great Green Wall and the History of Environmental Decline in the Sahel, 1450–2022

This article offers a historical critique of the Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahel and the Sahara (GGW) – an audacious project to stop the southern encroachment of the Sahara Desert by constructing a wall of trees across the continent. By situating the GGW within the longue durée of the Sahel’s environmental history, it examines how the narratives of environmental decline that underpin the initiative are not only misguided but born out of the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, and the neoliberal development projects of the postcolonial period. In doing so, it argues that narratives of environmental decline have not only served as a dynamic framework to rationalise Western exploitation of the Sahel’s environments over time, but have obscured, or even silenced, the effective practices of dryland regeneration of Sahelian communities.

Post-Ghazali Islamic Philosophy in the Sunni and Shi‘ite Traditions

This study refutes the unfounded yet prevalent view among Western scholars and some contemporary Muslim scholars that Islamic philosophy has declined after al-Ghazālī due to his vehement critique of the philosophers. This study supports the previous studies by George Saliba and Frank Griffel who criticised the decline narrative and argued that Islamic philosophy and science continue to thrive after al-Ghazālī. Moreover, this study gives a general overview of the development of intellectual sciences which include works on metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics and politics both in the Sunni and Shiʻite traditions, and especially in the Malay world. Contrary to the decline narrative, the study shows that the Sunni epistemic framework which was crystalized in al-Ghazālī’s work contributed positively to the development of Islamic philosophy. His critique of Aristotelianism should be considered part of the Islamisation of Greek philosophy, and his works laid down a robust foundation for the development of intellectual sciences in the Islamic world.

‘Growing a World Wonder’: The Great Green Wall and the History of Environmental Decline in the Sahel, 1450–2022

This article offers a historical critique of the Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahel and the Sahara (GGW) – an audacious project to stop the southern encroachment of the Sahara Desert by constructing a wall of trees across the continent. By situating the GGW within the longue durée of the Sahel’s environmental history, it examines how the narratives of environmental decline that underpin the initiative are not only misguided but born out of the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, and the neoliberal development projects of the postcolonial period. In doing so, it argues that narratives of environmental decline have not only served as a dynamic framework to rationalise Western exploitation of the Sahel’s environments over time, but have obscured, or even silenced, the effective practices of dryland regeneration of Sahelian communities.

Increased dispersal explains increasing local diversity with global biodiversity declines.

The narrative of biodiversity decline in response to human impacts is overly simplistic because different aspects of biodiversity show different trajectories at different spatial scales. It is also debated whether human-caused biodiversity changes lead to subsequent, accelerating change (cascades) in ecological communities, or alternatively build increasingly robust community networks with decreasing extinction rates and reduced invasibility. Mechanistic approaches are needed that simultaneously reconcile different aspects of biodiversity change, and explore the robustness of communities to further change. We develop a trophically structured, mainland-archipelago metacommunity model of community assembly. Varying the parameters across model simulations shows that local alpha diversity (the number of species per island) and regional gamma diversity (the total number of species in the archipelago) depend on both the rate of extirpation per island and on the rate of dispersal between islands within the archipelago. In particular, local diversity increases with increased dispersal and heterogeneity between islands, but regional diversity declines because the islands become biotically similar and local one-island and few-island species are excluded (homogenisation, or reduced beta diversity). This mirrors changes observed empirically: real islands have gained species (increased local and island-scale community diversity) with increased human-assisted transfers of species, but global diversity has declined with the loss of endemic species. However, biological invasions may be self-limiting. High-dispersal, high local-diversity model communities become resistant to subsequent invasions, generating robust species-community networks unless dispersal is extremely high. A mixed-up world is likely to lose many species, but the resulting ecological communities may nonetheless be relatively robust.

The Silk Lampas in the Binding of the Great Meteoro Codex 301: Material Evidence on Late Byzantine Textile Culture

In the library of the Monastery of the Transfiguration (Great Meteoro) is a Byzantine manuscript, the binding of which is decorated with a patterned silk fabric. By contextualising this late medieval remnant, this article aims to address the issue of late Byzantine weaving beyond the mainstream narrative of decline. This is because its weaving structure and association with Palaiologan and Serbian ornament perhaps points to a local workshop in tune with the wider artistic context of its time. Although a relatively modest finding, the Great Meteoro fabric raises important questions regarding the prevailing views on late Byzantine textile culture.

Gerontology in Bryony Lavery’s A Wedding Story (2000) and Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland (2002)

Old age is perceived as a narrative of decline, recently, an alternative perspective was introduced known as positive aging or Gerotranscendance. This paper examines ageing in Bryony Lavery’s A Wedding Story (2000) and Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland (2002) through the theory of gerontology. Gerontology in British and Irish modern theatre, according to Giovanna Tallone (2020) and Heather Ingman (2018), is a new category in literary studies and theory. The paper aims to examine the challenges of retaining agency in old age in comparison to the notion of aging as a process of inner harmony further proving that despite the process of ageing being an individualised experience, the commonalities of growing old are universal as depicted in Lavery’s and Barry’s works.