Notion Of Shape Research Articles

Flowing Body: The Collision of Power Relations, Mind and Body Agency

This article constructs a novel theoretical framework for understanding the body in feminist theory by critically engaging with existing non-binary and non-essentialist views. It advances upon foundational critiques, particularly those by Haraway, Connell, and Butler, integrating the dynamics of body agency, power relations, and mind to propose a more fluid and intersectional approach to body politics. The new framework posits the body as an active participant in its continuous formation, interacting with and reshaping societal norms and expectations. Empirically, the paper analyzed four artworks displayed in art galleries and museums in Lund and Malmö in Sweden as case studies, focusing on how these works represent and shape notions of the female body across various themes including beauty, reproduction, migration, and sexuality. These artworks serve as a medium to explore how corporeal experiences are constructed through the interplay of power relations, mind, and body agency. Through critical analyses of theory and textual analyses of artworks, this paper points out that the body is a language of fluidity, simultaneously influenced and shaped by power relations, the mind, and its agency. Feminism should treat the body more carefully, avoiding biological essentialism or absolute social constructs.

Ideal early childhood teacher?

In policy, teachers are persistently positioned as central to improving the quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC). They are frequently the targets for policy reform that proactively seeks to shape teaching priorities and practices. The constructions of teachers in policy shape notions of ideal professional identities, opening up spaces for certain identities and closing spaces for others. This critical discourse analysis of seven key ECEC policy texts assembles a range of discourses to identify and critically examine two prevalent and distinct 'ideal' professional identities for early childhood teachers: The Professional and The Kaiako.

Early Exit Decisions in Finland: Investigating the Limbo between Unemployment and Retirement

Despite efforts to extend careers, workers continue to withdraw from working life before reaching the old-age pension age. The complexities behind early exit decisions have been extensively studied to understand the individual factors influencing the decision-making processes. However, fewer studies have attempted to understand how underlying cultural notions of age shape these decisions. Using qualitative longitudinal interview data from Finland, this article examined how individuals in the Finnish unemployment pathway to retirement position themselves between unemployment and retirement by drawing on age-specific discourses. Findings show that early exit was framed as the least problematic career option, although colored with ambiguity and anxiety. Individuals did not view themselves as retirees, and some expressed interest in continuing work. Nevertheless, age norms together with experienced, internalized, and expected ageism pushed individuals toward exit, highlighting the need to better understand and support individuals experiencing late-life unemployment.

Masculine enhancement as health or pathology: gender and optimisation discourses in health promotion materials on performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs)

ABSTRACT The consumption of performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) is commonly pathologised in public health discourse as stemming from an unhealthy relationship to masculinity, and is often framed as intrinsically ‘risky’ and fundamentally at odds with ‘good health’. This article examines Australian health promotion materials on PIEDs to analyse their role in shaping notions of good health, normal gender and appropriate self-improvement. To do so, it draws on the work of Butler, Law and Latour to consider how these materials co-constitute men and their health, often in problematic ways. First, we examine the ways in which PIEDs are constituted via a politics of the ‘natural’, then consider how the health promotion materials on PIEDs participate in the regulation of appropriate, healthy masculinity, and conclude by examining how adolescent masculinity is co-constituted with PIEDs. We observe a key tension between health promotion’s avowed interest in improvement and optimisation and its treatment of PIED consumers as aberrant, vulnerable and insecure subjects whose drive to enhance and optimise is characterised by pathology and addiction. We conclude by arguing that health promotion materials on PIEDs fail to acknowledge the exceedingly normative character of enhancement practices in contemporary society.

Employable femininity and multisensorial hierarchies: becoming aesthetic citizens in Nepal’s aviation training industry

ABSTRACT This article discusses Nepal’s private airhostess training industry and trainees’ bodily and personal transformations in relation to hegemonic norms and practices of citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kathmandu, it examines everyday encounters in a training institute where young women learn to become flight attendants for international and domestic airlines. The article demonstrates that interactions between instructors and trainees make visible and (re)shape notions of employability, urban modernity, and the Nepali nation in relation to bodily appearance, grooming practices, and self-presentation. By acquiring new orientations and habits, trainees are encouraged to overcome some gendered norms while adhering to others in order to embody a particular vision of employable femininity. Analysing how becoming an aesthetic and modern citizen is put into practice in the aviation training industry, the article centres the role of embodied aesthetics and the senses, thereby contributing to a conceptualization of ‘aesthetic citizenship’ as multisensorial.

Possible versus desired diets: food legislation as additional stress for low-income mothers

ABSTRACT Deciding what, where, when and how much to feed a child occupies much of a mother’s time, energy, and financial resources. This study aids our understanding of the effects of legislation promoting healthier eating on mothers from low socioeconomic groups and on their families. We interview mothers and nutrition experts in Santiago, Chile – the site of the most recent and comprehensive effort to change a population’s food habits via legislation. We introduce the notions of ‘desired diets’ – ideal diets promoted by health experts and public policy discourses that moralise food consumption and promote consumer responsibilisation for health-related issues; and ‘possible diets’ – diets that mothers can adapt to and habituate in the household, considering their life realities. We argue that the notions of possible and desired diets often find themselves at odds, leading to mothers facing moral scrutiny, anxiety, and stress, which affects their sense of self, shaping notions of ‘good mothering’.

Introduction

The present situation urgently calls for the multifaceted studies of Russophone literature against war. The authors of the following essays develop their inquiry through the following questions: How does the relationship with the notion of the enemy shape the war poetry of Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii? To what extent can the war poetry of the latter be seen as a matrix of his biographic narrative construction, especially considering that Satunovskii's lyrical subject is shattered, stuttering, de-language/d? How does today's popular poetry of protest differ from today's avant-garde poetics? What are the differences between their means of expression, address, and foci? All of these studies seek to explore the anti-war position in modernist poetry that has been developed through drastically different means, yet the general purpose is aptly formulated by one of our authors as “to bear witness and respond to the ongoing atrocities and destruction.”

Literary study of playing activities to increase the mathematical geometric shapes concept understanding for early childhood students

The background of this study is that learning mathematics in terms of geometry is crucial to introduce to early childhood, and many teachers are still unaware of what activities might boost knowledge of geometric shapes. So, this study aimed to learn about playing activities that can develop an understanding of the concept of mathematical geometric shapes in early childhood. The method employed is a qualitative approach with library research where the data source is secondary data from published research journals. Using labyrinth geometry playing activities, finger painting playing activities, and dakon playing activities, the results for developing knowledge of the notion of geometric shapes in early childhood mathematics may be acquired. The result of this study is based on prior research, namely employing maze geometry playing activities, finger painting playing activities, and dakon playing activities to develop knowledge of mathematical geometry. The point is that playing using geometric shapes provides an understanding of mathematics for early childhood.

Fata ho poto: Tongan science learners and engagement, enjoyment and success in secondary school and university settings

Engagement and success are prominent in education discussions, research and policy in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally. Yet, little is known about how successful Tongan science learners define engagement, enjoyment or success, and which teaching and learning experiences have enhanced or detracted from their engagement, enjoyment and success during their studies. This article shares the stories of 26 successful Tongan science learners who participated in talanoa (open discussion without an agenda) about their engagement, enjoyment and success in secondary and university science education in Aotearoa, and, for some, their schooling in Tonga. The Manulua framework (Fonua, 2021) informed how their stories were gathered, analysed and woven together. The article presents the Fata ho poto model to demonstrate how engagement, enjoyment and success are considered by successful Tongan science learners. This model is useful for those increasing Tongan and Moana/Pacific learning achievement. It offers important insights related to the role of education policy and practice in shaping notions of engagement, enjoyment and success among Tongan and Moana/Pacific learners.

Dominant or dominating? Imaginaries of higher education in Turkey and Northern Syria

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ways in which administrators, academics and students living under conditions of authoritarianism come to imagine the university’s political possibilities and horizons. To this aim, we first consider how alternative imaginaries are constructed and contained at Boğaziçi University, where the parameters of political possibility are pre-figured both by the current ruling regime and the enduring histories of empire that pre-date it. Then, we turn to Aleppo countryside, where we compare Syrian opposition universities to newly established Turkish ones. In doing so, we attempt to trace the ideational lifeline of Syria’s revolutionary imaginary as it persists in higher education under conditions of disillusionment and co-optation. When taken together, we argue, these two cases point not to the primacy of belief in creating or sustaining imaginaries, but rather to the constitutive role of violence, coercion and control in shaping notions of who and what the university is for.

Balancing the Books: Valuing Household Work in Weimar Germany

AbstractThis article explores the way that bourgeois women academics and social reformers adopted the quantified language of economics to advance their own position in the Weimar Republic. As statistics and indices proliferated as measures of national recovery, women attempted to record and describe their own economic realities within the household. They promoted bookkeeping as an indispensable tool of household rationalisation. This article argues that these bookkeeping practices enabled prominent women, including Henriette Fürth, Alice Salomon and Erna Meyer, to delineate the household – in its role as both economic unit and unit of reproductive and care work – as a site of economic importance and a field of intervention in the nascent social welfare state. Furthermore, the article shows how in the 1920s and 1930s, the market intruded into domestic life to shape notions of value and worth.

What do we mean by justice in sustainability pathways? Commitments, dilemmas, and translations from theory to practice in nature-based solutions.

Justice and fairness have become key considerations in sustainability pathways and nature-based solutions (NBS), following activists and critical scholars who have long argued that the urban environment is an inherently political space that requires an analysis of benefits and burdens associated with its existence, use, and access. However, what justice means and how it is expressed, recognized, or achieved is often implicit in the literature on NBS, even though underlying notions of justice shape the analysis done and actions proposed. This paper starts from the premise that justice knows many different interpretations, therefore warranting scholars and practitioners working on NBS to carefully consider the differences and frictions between competing meanings of justice. Drawing from the history of social and environmental justice theory, we give an account of some key justice dilemmas and discuss their tenets as it relates to the end, means, and participants in the making of justice. From this, we draw out questions and commitments academics and practitioners in the NBS space should grapple with more explicitly. We argue that the emergent tension between pragmatic policy approaches and critical theoretical engagement is hindering a version of NBS that goes beyond a reflection of the justice implications of NBS to ensuring that NBS contributes to the furthering of justice. We advocate for the inclusion of critical social sciences and humanities perspectives and approaches beyond tokenism to instead encourage ontological, epistemological, and political reflection of the work academics and practitioners do in the NBS space.

Naming who performs care: Occupational segregation in the creative arts therapies

The creative arts therapies, similar to other helping and mental health professions, are occupationally segregated with white women predominating the fields thus shaping notions of who can provide care and who is deserving of care. However, while membership data and observational accounts support the existence of occupational segregation, there is a lack of systematic understanding of the extent to which it exists in the creative arts therapies. Furthermore, there is a lack of understanding of how this is experienced in work life. A secondary analysis of data from a qualitative pilot study with three (n=3) creative arts therapy faculty of color who identify as women was conducted to analyze, from their responses about their experiences of changes in higher education, how the four aspects of managerialism – productivity, accountability, efficiency, and standardization – were experienced. Results focus on the standardization aspect, categorized as three themes: 1. Challenge and critique of standardization by centering diversity, 2. See remote learning as a possibility to remove negative gatekeeping strategies, and 3. Identify the inequities within measurement requirements of faculty and courses. This article concludes with a call for action to obtain data on who practices and teaches in the creative arts therapies, with particular attention to gender expansive and women identified persons of color. By looking to those creative arts therapists who are most ignored and at risk to the adverse effects of racism, sexism, and managerialism, new solutions can be imagined to create systems that are beneficial to all.

Conceptualizing “the end” of COVID-19: temporality and linear mobilization toward health

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has crystalized how Western sociopolitical, cultural, and biomedical understandings of health advance the spaciotemporal logic of “the end.” This logic defines health in terms of linear accessibility to cures while ignoring the intersectional mechanisms of systemic inequality. Such logics stress an individual’s ability to mobilize along the timeline of health, ignoring the stoppages shaped by race, class, ability, and gender. This effectively casts public health as a matter of managing individual choice without attending to systems of power. The logic of “the end” works in tandem with the metaphors of “darkness” and “light.” Within the context of COVID-19, these metaphors demarcate health as a universally attainable good defined by Western medicine, whiteness, and normative ability. This temporal logic of the pandemic crystalizes how whiteness and ability shape notions of health in ways that render precariously situated bodies immobile and essentially ill.

Digitisation and Sovereignty in Humanitarian Space: Technologies, Territories and Tensions

ABSTRACT Debates are ongoing on the limits of – and possibilities for – sovereignty in the digital era. While most observers spotlight the implications of the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence/machine learning and advanced data analytics for the sovereignty of nation states, a critical yet under examined question concerns what digital innovations mean for authority, power and control in the humanitarian sphere in which different rules, values and expectations are thought to apply. This forum brings together practitioners and scholars to explore both conceptually and empirically how digitisation and datafication in aid are (re)shaping notions of sovereign power in humanitarian space. The forum’s contributors challenge established understandings of sovereignty in new forms of digital humanitarian action. Among other focus areas, the forum draws attention to how cyber dependencies threaten international humanitarian organisations’ purported digital sovereignty. It also contests the potential of technologies like blockchain to revolutionise notions of sovereignty in humanitarian assistance and hypothesises about the ineluctable parasitic qualities of humanitarian technology. The forum concludes by proposing that digital technologies deployed in migration contexts might be understood as ‘sovereignty experiments’. We invite readers from scholarly, policy and practitioner communities alike to engage closely with these critical perspectives on digitisation and sovereignty in humanitarian space.

Indian cotton textiles and British industrialization: Evidence of comparative learning in the British cotton industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

AbstractThis article contributes to a topic central to interpretations of British industrialization and the role of Indian cotton textiles in shaping notions of cloth quality and, eventually, innovations. Textual evidence indicates that manufacturers in the early British cotton industry compared the quality of their products to that of Indian cottons. These texts suggest the hypothesis that there was a shift towards finer cotton textiles in Britain, via attempts to make the cotton warp yarn match Indian quality. Using a novel dataset of surviving British and Indian textiles of the period, the article puts this hypothesis to the test, and concludes that between 1746 and 1820 there was an increase in the quality of British cottons, leading to a convergence with the quality of handmade Indian cottons.

How does the commercial and personal use of data influence and shape notions of value and worth?

In the age of social media, the generation and use of data are at the heart of how media operates. The media sector is a popular area for capital investment. In the process, commercial use of data has become more frequent. At the same time, the values of individual users collectively shape the media value system, and the importance of media platforms in turn influences individual behavior and values. This paper discusses the impact of commercial and personal use of data on contemporary values through the commercial use of data, the management of quantitative values, and changes in social values.

Loose Can(n)on: Literary tradition in Daljit Nagra’s British Museum

ABSTRACT This paper considers Daljit Nagra’s engagement with concepts of canon and tradition in British Museum (2017). Throughout the collection, Nagra provides readers with a multifaceted insight into the ways in which a plurality of ‘cultures’ and ‘traditions’ — literary, historical, political, religious — inform contemporary notions of Britishness and shape his work as a writer living with the legacies of literary heritage. British Museum, this paper argues, explores how Nagra’s work relates to canons of English Literature, and how he makes sense of his own position. The discussion is framed by a consideration of what happens when we review canons of culture and their place within an increasingly diverse society. Underlying the inevitable conflicts and dislocation involved in (re-)defining traditions and cultural canons, this paper considers the ways in which Nagra identifies, through plurality, a fundamental desire for the meaningful connection of canonical culture with the diverse 21st century world.

Time and temporality in library and information science

PurposeThe article introduces selected theoretical approaches to time and temporality relevant to the field of library and information science, and it briefly introduces the papers gathered in this special issue. A number of issues that could potentially be followed in future research are presented.Design/methodology/approachThe authors review a selection of theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of time that originate in or are of particular relevance to library and information science. Four main themes are identified: (1) information as object in temporal perspectives; (2) time and information as tools of power and control; (3) time in society; and (4) experiencing and practicing time.FindingsThe paper advocates a thorough engagement with how time and temporality shape notions of information more broadly. This includes, for example, paying attention to how various dimensions of the late-modern time regime of acceleration feed into the ways in which information is operationalised, how information work is commodified, and how hierarchies of information are established; paying attention to the changing temporal dynamics that networked information systems imply for our understanding of documents or of memory institutions; or how external events such as social and natural crises quickly alter modes, speed, and forms of data production and use, in areas as diverse as information practices, policy, management, representation, and organisation, amongst others.Originality/valueBy foregrounding temporal perspectives in library and information science, the authors advocate dialogue with important perspectives on time that come from other fields. Rather than just including such perspectives in library and information science, however, the authors find that the focus on information and documents that the library and information science field contributes has great potential to advance the understanding of how notions and experiences of time shape late-modern societies and individuals.

The romantic tourist gaze on Swedish national parks: tracing ways of seeing the non-human world through representations in tourists’ Instagram posts

ABSTRACT Tourism in national parks is on the rise and contributes to shaping notions of the non-human world (often depicted as ‘nature’). One country that is currently facing a shift towards an enhanced emphasis on tourism in its national parks is Sweden. This article aims to unravel, illuminate, and problematize ways of seeing the non-human world in tourists’ Instagram posts about Swedish national parks, and also to consider the productive effects these might have on the relationship between humans and the non-human world. In a discursive and visual cultural analysis, representations of the non-human world, how they are situated in historically inherited ways of seeing, and what implications they might have for how humans approach and understand the non-human world are traced and reflected upon. These representations construct ways of seeing the non-human world as a sublime, desolate, and physically challenging treasury of unique character. In this way, a romantic tourist gaze is constructed, which approaches the national parks as isolated enclaves and commodified havens that offer tourists an escape from humanity, grand views, and seclusion. The main implication of this tourist gaze is a sustaining of the approach to the human world and the non-human world as separated.