Narratives Of Inequality Research Articles

Looking to the Past to Understand the Present: Legacies of Inequality, Status Changes, and Collective Memory in Burundi’s Post-War Schooling

How do efforts to reduce ethnic inequality in schooling interact with narratives of inequality and past grievances in schools after ethnicity-based conflict? In this paper, I analyse interviews with 114 youth in Burundi to explore the intersection of these narratives given a power-sharing agreement and changes in group status in post-war Burundi. I show that despite government efforts, narratives of exclusion and inequality in the past persist, and have become more complex. This study has implications for our understanding of the role of redressing education inequalities in short- and long-term peacebuilding processes.

Narratives of inequality. Towards an archaeology of structural violence in Late Iron Age Scandinavia

Abstract To date, traditional narratives of the Late Iron Age have focused almost exclusively on discussions of the elite. These were the martial rulers and major landholders who occupied the upper strata of Scandinavian society. The lives of lower-status population groups, including enslaved and other ‘unfree’ or dependent peoples such as landless farmers, have long been marginalized in archaeological discourse. We have little knowledge of the ways in which the lifeways of subaltern peoples were shaped by the construction and maintenance of socio-political hierarchies and networks, or of how social inequality permeated and impacted the daily lives of communities. In this article, the authors propose that the concept of structural violence, developed by sociologist Johan Galtung, has the potential to offer an interdisciplinary framework for multi-proxy studies of (bio)archaeological and textual data.

Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics.

Whereas postcolonial criticism might have been entrapped into culturalism and identity politics, the novel, at least its best specimens, continues to address the more fundamental question of economic inequality whose relevance has been rediscovered since the 2008 financial crisis – or so Melissa Kennedy asserts in her latest book, Narratives of Inequality. The book offers an extensive survey of postcolonial fiction across different historical times and locations. Convinced that literary studies should play an important role in the critique of global capitalism along the lines of Thomas Piketty and Amartya Sen, Kennedy selects novels that explicitly handle economic vocabulary and subject-matter. According to her, these works register the same or similar structures of inequality regardless of their specific local, historical, and cultural contexts.

“Tea girl and garden boy” bankers: exploring substantive equality in bankers’ narratives

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore what narratives of inequality tell us about societal inequality both inside and outside of workplaces. It illuminates the intertwined fates of social agents and the productive potential of seeing organisational actors as social beings in order to advance resistance and substantive equality. Design/methodology/approach This research empirically examines narratives of inequality and substantive empowerment among a group of 25 black bankers within a major bank in Johannesburg, South Africa. Data were gathered through one-on-one interviews. The data were analysed using narrative analysis. Findings The findings indicate that narratives of organisational agents always contain fragments of personal and societal narratives. An intersectional lens of how people experience inequality allows us to work towards a more substantive kind of equality. Substantive equality of organisational actors is closely tied to the recognition and elimination of broader societal inequality. Research limitations/implications The implications for teaching and research are for scholars to methodically centre the continuities between the personal, organisational and societal in ways that highlight the productive tensions and possibilities for a more radical form of equality. Moreover, teaching, research and policy interventions should always foreground how the present comes to be constituted historically. Practical implications Policy and inclusivity interventions would be better served by using substantive empowerment as a theoretical base for deeper changes beyond what we currently conceive of as empowerment. At base, this requires policy makers and diversity practitioners to see all oppression and inequality as interconnected. Individuals are simultaneously organisational beings and societal agents. Social implications Third world approaches to diversity and inclusion need to be vigilant against globalised western notions of equity that are not contextually and historically informed. The failure of equity initiatives in SA means that alternative ideas and approaches are necessary. Originality/value The paper illustrates how individual narratives become social scripts of resistance. It develops a way for attaining substantive empowerment through the use of narrative approaches. It allows us to see that employees are also social agents.

Migrant margins: The streetlife of discrimination

The streetlife of discrimination emerges in the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Focusing on livelihoods forged by migrants on four peripheral streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester and Manchester, this article draws on face-to-face surveys with over 350 self-employed proprietors. Despite significant variables amongst proprietors, these individuals had all become traders on streets in marginalised parts of UK cities, and the article addresses whether ‘race’ matters more than class for how certain groups become emplaced in the city. Narratives of inequality and racism feature prominently in the proprietors’ accounts of where they settled in the city and what limited forms of work are available in the urban margins. Yet as significant to proprietors’ experiences of trade are repertoires of entrepreneurial agility and cross-cultural exchange. Through the concept of the ‘migrant margins’ the article explores the overlap of human capacities and structural discrimination that spans global and urban space. It combines urban sociological understandings of ‘race’ and inequality with fluid understandings of makeshift city-making that have emerged in post-colonial urban studies. Such combinations encourage connections between the histories and geographies of how people and places become bordered, together with city-making practices that are both marginal and transgressive.

Contending Images in Turkey's Headscarf Debate: Framings of Equality, Nationalism, and Religion

The debate over the ban on women wearing headscarves in Turkey has served as a central symbol for Turkey's soul, torn between secular and religious identities. This essay explores the multifaceted narratives of Turkish secular and religious groups that have supported and opposed the ban on women wearing headscarves on government property. Progressing from nationalism literature and image framing in public policy, the essay applies quantitative and case study analysis to reveal how the reframing of the headscarf debate—via narratives of inequality, secularism, religious freedom, modernity, and education—evolved across political coalitions to redefine issues and alter policy outcomes.

Domestic tourism encounters in the Masurian lake district: multiple tourism moralities, reversible relationships, and social well-being in contemporary Poland

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on different moral economies of domestic tourism encounters in late-post-socialist Masuria, in the rural Northeast of Poland. An ethnographic study of three different tourism entrepreneurs brings to light different, concurring legacies of the ‘good’ tourism encounter in the area and indicates a shift of tourism discourses and social aspirations of living well together in contemporary Poland. In a climate of mutual stigmatisation and boundary drawing, rural tourism entrepreneurs mobilise the encounter with domestic tourists to subvert evolving power asymmetries in Poland and to offer alternative readings to dominant narratives of inequality in the transforming country. However, their proposed alternative tourism socialities with the national ‘other’ do not arrive naturally: relationships in tourism are shown to be ambivalent and reversible to their participants; their performance demands much moral work and requires a degree of cultural complicity or compatibility with the other. The article contributes to current debates on the moral economy of encountering in anthropological literature of tourism, post-socialism, and morality.

Struggles over the Use of Public Space: Exploring Moralities and Narratives of Inequality. Cartoneros and Vecinos in Buenos Aires

AbstractBased on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009, and by analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinos in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. For this, two social situations are addressed. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their task. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city.

Narratives of Inequality

In September 2010, a full year before protestors occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City, Timothy Noah wrote a monumental ten-part series for Slate on the rise of economic inequality in the United States. The series earned Noah the 2011 Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism and has now been updated, expanded, and published in book form as The Great Divergence. The book has created buzz, including reviews in the New Yorker , the New York Review of Books , the New York Times (weekday and Sunday), the Nation , and the American Prospect .

The Police War Story and the Narrative of Inequality

This article attempts to demonstrate, through an examination of the police `war story', that narrative has at its core a fundamental inequality between narrator and audience. In collecting police narratives, through interviews with 125 Chicago police officers, I became aware that even the most seemingly direct police narrative is filtered through the narrator's sense of the chasm of experience that lies between narrator and audience, whether the audience is a fellow police officer or member of the public. This article focuses on the two audiences police address: that of police officers and `civilians', and also looks at the `excluded audience' of criminals and intimates. Police tell stories to both real and imagined audiences, in both spoken and published form, putting the police narrative in a pivotal position for demonstrating what happens to narrative along Ong's oralityliteracy shift and the way the narrator's perception of audience shapes narrative itself.