People Negotiate Research Articles

Righteous Dopefiend and AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa

This essay offers a comparative reading of two ethnographies, Ida Susser's AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (2009), a multisited text focused on community responses to dynamics of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in Southern Africa, and Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg's Righteous Dopefiend (2009), a photo-ethnographic exploration of lumpen subjectivity within an encampment of homeless drug addicts in San Francisco. Pointing out these texts' common focus on circumstances of the precarious and marginal poor under conditions of neoliberalization, social conditions shaping dynamics of HIV prevention, and poor people's negotiations of affliction and structural violence, this essay highlights the theoretical and practical effects of these books' divergent methodologies, scopes of analysis, and differing degrees of emphasis on subjective experience as well as women's experiences. It also considers a key commonality across these texts: their attention to the role of historical experience and political-economic context in shaping responses to affliction and structural violence.

Everyday antiracism in interpersonal contexts: Constraining and facilitating factors for ‘speaking up’ against racism

AbstractEveryday conversations among non‐Indigenous Australians are a significant site in which racism towards Indigenous Australians is reproduced and maintained. This study explores the possibilities of everyday antiracism by asking how people negotiate racist discourses in interpersonal contexts. Twelve first year psychology students (10 female, 2 male, aged 18–50) who had completed a compulsory Indigenous studies course were recruited as participants. Semi‐structured interviews were thematically analysed for the constraints and facilitators for responding to racism in everyday contexts. As constraints against speaking up, participants offered ‘social expectations to fit in’, ‘fear of provoking aggression and conflict’, assessments of ‘the type of relationship’, whether they ‘could make a difference’ and the ‘type of racism’. As a facilitator for speaking up, participants reported they were confident in challenging erroneous statements when they felt well informed and authoritative about the facts. The research suggests that everyday antiracism requires a preparedness to deal with possible discomfort and ‘bad feeling’ which participants reported avoiding. The paper concludes with suggestions for stimulating critical thinking and intergroup dialogue in relation to everyday antiracism. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reinvigorating the Concept of Land Tenure for American Urban Geography

AbstractTenure rights are durable privileges to use and benefit from specific pieces of land. In the USA, tenure rights are typically conceptually folded into the ‘bundle of rights’ associated with formal land ownership. Legally, this model rests on well‐documented principles: private, serial, single‐party property ownership and clear, well‐regulated surveying. However, tenure does not begin and end in property. People negotiate the terms under which they use spaces – and the durability of those terms – through implicit and explicit social processes. Many geographers focused on US cities have tacitly conceded that existing forms of tenure are adequately captured in the concept of property rights despite extensive discussion about the complex construction of non‐property rights in the development literature. This article argues that a vocabulary adapted from the conversation about land tenure, specifically regarding use and usufruct rights, would enhance the ‘critical property’ literature by exposing additional, already‐existing rights in land.

Turn-Taking for Turntaking: Mobility, Time, and Action in the Sequential Organization of Junction Negotiations in Cars

This article draws on audio-video data of people driving in cars and on methods used in multimodal interaction analysis and conversation analysis to study how people negotiate where to turn at the next junction. The analyzed activity is called negotiating the next junction. The article describes the participants' talk and embodied actions that are produced for this activity and the impact that mobility and a moving environment have on how it is achieved as a situated practice of driving. First, this article shows that the activity is sequentially organized into 3 verbally produced parts. However, second, despite the apparent verbal element of the sequence, drivers and passengers display through the design of their actions that they orient to various features of the mobile context as relevant to the production of the junction-negotiation activity. This article specifically focuses on how participants can be seen to orient to the physical shape of the junction and movement through the environment (e.g., movement toward the junction and the turn at the junction). The analysis shows that interlocutors' actions are reflexively connected to the moving semiotic environment, and that talk and the features of the mobile environment are conflated and sequentially organized relative to each other. Finally, the article supplements prior interactional research by showing that compared to static social situations, participants design and temporally adjust their actions by quickly modifying them relative to the mobile situation. This shows that drivers and passengers together orient to the criticalness of the correct timing of actions in a mobile environment in cars.

Mind the gaps: higher education language policies, the national curriculum and language research

What emerges repeatedly in research regarding language choice in South Africa is that people negotiate culture, face and identity through more than one language, and balance the need for modernity and the value of tradition, together with awareness that multiculturalism is normative in South Africa. South African scholarship focusing on bilingualism is also informed by the experiences of other countries in which multilingualism has become a feature of language planning. In South Africa, parents are not blind consumers of hegemonic languages, and learners are not insensitive to the dangers of language attrition or subtractive bilingualism. This paper argues, based on its focus on the gaps between policy intentions, research and practices, for closer collaboration between education sectors (the tertiary, and the primary and secondary) in South Africa to better support the development of multilingualism as envisaged by national and higher education language policy documentation.

The Popular Press and its Public in China

The result of media reform in China has led to the profit-driven popular press, instead of the Party press, developing rapidly and heavily influencing the public life in the country. How do the people negotiate with the political power and form their own “public” in daily life through reading the popular press? On the one hand, as the ordinary Chinese people keep their distance from public affairs, they fail to respond to the coverage that is always controlled by the power of the state; this leads to people’s dissent from or indifference to the headlines or important news in the popular press. On the other hand, compared with the stuffy and always-positive news of propaganda that is far from their daily lives, trivial news happens under circumstances that are more sensible and meaningful for them. People refer to their reason and sense in daily life to criticise what the truth is. In the meantime, the “public” is aroused through controversy and disagreement.

‘Bikes are Such a Nuisance’ – Visually Impaired People Negotiating Public Space in Groningen

Groningen, the seventh largest city of the Netherlands, has a long tradition of improving accessibility of its city centre. In 1977, the centre was radically modified by replacing a six-lane motorway with an increasingly car-free centre (Nicholson-Lord, 1993; see Tsubohara and Voogd, 2004 for extensive discussion) with a central market square, reclaimed from a traffic roundabout. The leftist city council of Groningen has since promoted the use of bicycles and provided the necessary infrastructure (bicycle paths and public transportation) in a top-down procedure which virtually excluded target groups or social organisations. This approach was initially heavily opposed by shopkeepers until they realised the positive impact of the council’s measures on their profits in the mid1980s and began to pressure for more pedestrian areas (Bratzel, 1999). In order to keep the city accessible, policy developments and city planning were based on the principles of the ‘compact city’ which intended to restrict suburban sprawl by shortening distances between residential areas, the workplace, and locations for shopping (P. Allen, 1994; Bloemkolk and Huis in’t Veld, 2001). As a result, more than 50% of Groningen’s 182,000 residents use the bicycle as a key means of transportation making Groningen the Dutch city with the most bike trips per day (Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek, 2007). In 1993, an American Bicycle magazine already labelled Groningen the Number 1 bicycle city of the world and

Pukinjalalla koreasti

The construction of social distinctions in Hilja Valtonen’s Nuoren opettajattaren varaventtiili In this article I analyse Hilja Valtonen’s popular novel Nuoren opettajattaren varaventtiili (1926) taking as my point of view the representations of social distinctions and power relations. Nuoren opettajattaren varaventtiili is a diary novel which is usually read as romance. My aim is to show that despite the fact that it tells a love story, the novel focuses strongly on the processes by which people negotiate and understand their positions in social hierarchy. In this article I ask how people position themselves and each other in the social space, how they make their positions visible, and what do they reveal about themselves through the way they classify other people? The central question in Nuoren opettajattaren varaventtiili is whether the socially constructed subjective positions are genuine or false. The categorization of people into their “real” social groups occurs through the interpretation of their appearance, behaviour, tastes and values. Sophistication, moral respectability and self-discipline are the most salient signifiers of social status. Through them people are classified into truly civilised and quasi-civilised, or in other words, people whose cultivation is only superficial or feigned. In Nuoren opettajattaren varaventtiili “civilization” becomes a property of middle-class individuals defined against the masses, but also the upper classes of the rural population. The masses are classified as exhibiting lack of morality, manners, sense of style and discipline, whereas the lifestyle of modern, urban people is represented as distinguished and admirable. The novel shows, however, that different groups have differential access to the mechanisms for generating and displaying their status. For example, age, sex and place of residence limit the processes of identification and differentiation.

Wildland Fire and Organic Discourse: Negotiating Place and Leisure Identity in a Changing Wildland Urban Interface

A lack of research on the conceptual intersection of leisure, place and wildland fire and its role in identity prompted this exploratory study. The purpose of this research was to gather evidence regarding how people negotiate identities under the threat of wildland fire. Qualitative interviews with 16 homeowners and recreationists who value leisure activities in undeveloped places in Colorado's Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest were conducted. Results show that wildland fire plays a varied role in the identities of many of the research participants. Three dominant discourses of nature (i.e., humanist, protectionist and organic) helped explain these identity-related reactions to wildland fire. An understanding of the multidimensional aspects of place and leisure identity highlighted in this research could help land managers particularly related to the organic discourse.

Occupational Therapy and the Current Ecological Crisis

It is argued that occupational therapy's focus on activities related to wellbeing puts it in a privileged position to contribute practical measures to stem the social and ecological threats posed by current human impacts on the natural environment. Three areas in which occupational therapy could contribute such measures are summarised briefly. These are (1) help in understanding how people negotiate and adjust their daily activities in situations of ecological and social stress; (2) interventions that link the conservation of biodiversity with the conservation of occupations; and (3) a renewed focus on balance in the everyday activities of people in the industrialised world.

A Taste for Law: Rule-Making in Kabylia (Algeria)

There has recently been an upsurge in anthropologists' interest in law, with North Africa and the Middle East taking a prominent position. One of the foci is the coexistence of multiple sets of legal practices, and the ways in which people negotiate between different legal “systems.” This emphasis closely mirrors the more general shift in anthropology from “discourse” to “practice,” and shares both its strengths and weaknesses. Among the latter is that the resulting emphasis on “legal pluralism” (Griffith 1986) runs the danger of eroding the concept of law as such, subsuming it within more general and all-encompassing notions of “conflict resolution.” Similarly, there is a risk that one of the most striking aspects of legal procedure, namely the value placed on the act of making rules, is being neglected, and the actual content of local law codes and their underlying principles are receiving less attention than they deserve. As a result, “customary law” is more often implicitly defined by what it is not. Here, my aim is not to shift the focus from “practice” to “discourse,” but rather to understand the internal logic of one such set of ‘customs,’ and to consider the act of making law in itself as a special kind of practice (see also Comaroff and Roberts 1981: 15–16).

Negotiated or Negotiating Spaces Korean Churches in Flushing, Queens of New York City

Negotiated or Negotiating Spaces: Korean Churches in Flushing, Queens of New York City Keun‐joo Christine Pae Introduction Just as Robert Orsi describes that the influx of the post‐1965 immigrants has brought cultural, religious, and demographic changes in Bronx (Orsi 1999),1 so Queens has experienced the drastic changes since 1965. Flushing, the largest urban center in Queens, is well known for its Asian immigrant communities formed by Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, and so on. Every day the New York City Metro 7 Line—“Oriental Express” by its nickname—carries thousands of people in and out of Flushing, the microcosm of the world diversity. As one steps out of the Main Street station, s/he faces the largest Chinatown in the East coast and encounters the non‐English‐speaking crowd on the bustled and whistled streets. The historic St. George’s Episcopal Church neighbors a modern Sheraton Hotel surrounded by Chinese restaurants, clothing stores, groceries, and convenient stores. Downtown Flushing, where Main Street, Roosevelt Avenue, College Point Boulevard, 38th, and 39th street intersect with each other, is filled with tall buildings for office spaces, shopping malls, and apartment complexes. Flushing shares similar urban characteristics with other major cities in the world—transportation, density, diversity, new construction projects, economic injustice, as well as limited spaces for housing, for offices, and for parking to name only a few. The influx of a large immigrant population has accelerated urban development which results in the shortage of residential spaces and in increasing real estate prices. Then, how do religious institutions in Flushing understand and cope with the economic changes in Flushing? More specifically, when ethnically, racially, culturally, and religiously diverse groups of people negotiate with each other for their own worship, communal, and cultural spaces, what roles do religious institutions play in creating and maintaining these spaces when facing the steep prices in the real estate market? And how do these institutions understand their physical spaces? Focusing on Korean Christian communities in Flushing through the ecological frame, this paper contemplates religious organizations’ spaces in Flushing. Particularly, how has Flushing’s urban development affected Korean churches’ understandings of religiously and culturally secured spaces? By the same token, how have the expansion and development of the Korean community and Korean churches affected urban spaces? From the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2008, the Ecologies of Learning Project directed by the late Dr. Lowell Livezey had researched the ecology of the Korean churches in Flushing: mutual influences between the Korean religious institutions and the urban setting. Needless to say, Korean churches have played a pivotal role in constructing the Korean community in Flushing. The history of Flushing’s Koreatown is often equated with that of Korean churches in Greater Flushing. Using a qualitative ethnographic research method, this paper explores the relationships between the urban spaces and the Korean churches. As I mentioned above, these relationships will be analyzed through the ecological frame. The research included interviews with Korean pastors, lay leaders, and local residents (both Koreans and non‐Koreans) and participant observation of worship and community services. Although the Ecologies of Learning (EOL) research widely contacted Korean churches in Flushing, this paper primarily focuses on two congregations: Q Catholic Church and F United Methodist Church (UMC). In spite of the growing number of research projects focusing on ethnic Korean churches in the United States, most scholarly work are focuses on theological issues, identity politics, and cultural locations of these churches rather than addressing regional differences among Korean churches. The relationship between urbanization, especially the changes in the urban real estate market, and Korean Christian institutions is a generally neglected area. I hope this paper will contribute to the future scholarly research about Korean churches, one of the most vital elements of our contemporary U.S. religiosity. Community profile: formation of Flushing Just as many immigrants have found their new homes in Flushing, so their faith organizations—Christian churches, Buddhist temples, Hindu temples, Mosques, and Sikh Temples—have grown up over three decades. Just as newcomers in Flushing struggle to adjust with their diverse neighbors within limited spaces, their religious institutions have attempted to find their locations in vitally changing Flushing. Perhaps it is not...

Amor fati?

In recent years, the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has sparked the interest of some feminist sociologists who, in response to a perceived cultural determinism of the postmodern turn, are seeking theoretical space to consider women's and men's agency within a changeable, albeit constrained, world of gender relations. This article draws upon the voices of young women and men (aged 14—24) talking about their perceptions and experiences of love/sex relationships. It explores the potential for an adaptation of Bourdieu's central concepts of habitus and symbolic violence, to understand the interplay of structure and agency in young people's negotiations of (hetero)sexual encounters. Finally, the implications of this analysis for young people's relationships and for the prevention of sexual coercion will be considered.

How people negotiate for success as psychosis emerges

This study focuses on how people try to successfully manage daily life despite emerging but undetected psychosis and explores how those who know them support their success. The findings we report here are part of a larger qualitative study. After a diagnosis of psychosis was made, participants were asked to reflect on the period before their first episode. We categorize and describe how participants actively negotiated for success in activities and social situations during the prepsychotic period. We also explain strategies used by significant others to support this success and how all study subjects portrayed emerging difficulties as normal. We give some examples of how early detection and recovery programmes may modify their current practices as they consider that individuals may have already discovered strategies to actively deal with functional and social decline that was occurring during the prepsychotic period.

`University's not for Me — I'm a Nike Person': Urban, Working-Class Young People's Negotiations of `Style', Identity and Educational Engagement

This ar ticle explores how urban working-class young people's performances of embodied identities — as enacted through practices of `taste' and style — are played out within the educational field.The ar ticle considers how such practices may contribute to shaping young people's post-16 `choices' and their views of higher education as `not for me'. Drawing on data from longitudinal tracking inter views with 53 individual young people and discussion groups with a fur ther 36 pupils, the article discusses the double-bind experienced by these young people as a result of their performances of style. It is argued that whilst the young people seek to generate wor th and value through their investments in style, these practices may also play into oppressive social relations and contribute to fixing the young people within marginalized and disadvantaged social positions.

Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (review)

Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in Nation-State. New York and London: Routledge, December, 2004 (2nd edition), 280 pp. From his earliest days in discipline, Michael Herzfeld has shown an inordinate interest in theory. His first book, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and Making of Modem Greece, is a theoretical treatise and even his ethnographies (The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village; A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town; and The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in Global Hierarchy of Value) are notable for their combination of high quality ethnographic description and extensive theorizing. Other books, like Anthropology through Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in Margins of Europe and The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy, are entirely theoretical. Even his introductory textbook is entitled, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Moreover, virtually all of his dozens of published articles are largely theoretical commentaries. The trajectories of his career and publications strongly suggest that Herzfeld is determined to make a truly significant theoretical contribution, not just to discipline of anthropology or even social sciences in general, but to intellectual world at large. With publication of Cultural Intimacy in 1997, Herzfeld made his bid to join ranks of elite company of social theorists of nationalism like Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson whom scholars of nationalism fail to cite at their peril. The concept of intimacy, despite some criticism (most of it constructive rather than damning), has resonated with scholars from a number of disciplines and now, ten years after Herzfeld coined it, it seems destined to join such seminal concepts as Andersen's imagined community and Foucault's gouvernmentalite as sine qua nons of any discourse on subject of nationalism and concept of nation-state. In and of itself, cultural intimacy is a rather simple and not-very-profound concept. Herzfeld describes it as the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality... (3). Exploring what he calls creative dissent within seemingly seamless fabric of nation-state, he strives to understand how people negotiate terrain of social identity and daily life in the...modern nation-state, and how they can be fiercely patriotic and just as fiercely rebellious at same time (91). Cultural intimacy can be registered in many ways and Herzfeld admits that it is not unrelated to simplistic self-stereotypes or national traits like stiff upper lip of British; but despite apparent simplicity of this concept, Herzfeld is able to imbue it with profundity while also demonstrating quite convincingly how cultural intimacy has serious implications for our understanding of nationalism and nation-state. Ultimately Herzfeld achieves his goal of demonstrating that ideologies and intimacy of everyday social life are revealingly similar (3), even when latter appear to stand in direct opposition to former. One way Herzfeld illustrates this is through an exposure of ironies, inversions and paradoxes in which he so delights. Throughout book he demonstrates how disparate groups often invoke same rhetoric/images/tropes to justify contradictory actions or ideologies. For example, he argues that law and lawless often resort to same cliches when acting in opposition to each other, citing case of Cretan sheep rustlers and authorities of Greek state as well as that of self-styled militias and U.S. government, all of whom invoke a formerly perfect social order to justify their contradictory actions (109). …

Sociolinguistic oppression or expression of 'Zuluness'? 'IsiHlonipho' among isiZulu-speaking females

The linguistic complexities in the Nguni language cluster which females traditionally confront, are most notable. Many Zulu women, for instance, who grow up in rural KwaZulu-Natal still largely adhere to the linguistic custom of 'isiHlonipho', the 'language of respect'. This linguistic register has been investigated with reference to Xhosa women (Finlayson, 1978; 1995; 2002; Dowling, 1988) but only marginally as regards isiZulu-speaking females (see Zungu,1985; 1995). Arguably, the value of this linguistic custom is contested as, on the one hand, 'isiHlonipho' is widely considered a source of enrichment among isiZulu speakers; on the other hand it has been argued, with reference to isiXhosa, that 'the historical existence of the language of respect has influenced the way in which Xhosa males have marginalised women in their literature, and in their social, educational and political institutions' (Dowling, 1988: 180). In this paper, we critically evaluate the extent to which this language variety determines gendered power relations and associated identi- ties within the context of the construction of 'Zuluness'. We suggest, inter alia, that 'isiHlonipho' is a linguistic remnant of 'traditional' Zulu culture. It can thus be considered a linguistic and cultural resource in the sense that it provides a means by which isiZulu-speaking people negotiate and take pride in 'Zuluness'. However, one has to acknowledge that Zulu society continues to be highly patriarchal, and the emphasis on female agency linked to the maintenance of the variety suggests that there are circumstances and situations in which 'isiHlonipho' socially disempowers women. Hence, the linguistic register plays an ambiguous role in the life-experience of Zulu females today.

Youth Labour Markets in Post-1984 New Zealand: Young People Negotiating School to Work Transitions

This paper is part of a larger project exploring the school to post-school choices of New Zealand’s first post-1984 generation. In this paper we analyse census data relating to the employment of young people (aged 15-24 years) in two of the project’s sites, Southland and Auckland. We then discuss out participants’ perceptions of the labour market and find that these perceptions are broadly in line with general labour market trends, and that they incorporate a reasonable sense of the local opportunities for part time employment while at school. But participants lacked this ‘local literacy’ when considering future employment possibilities. That is, they lack a clear sense of engagement with ‘place’ in relation to their imagined working futures.

Landscapes of Survival and Escape: Social Networking and Urban Livelihoods in Ghana

The interactions that take place between individuals, and the reciprocity networks and trust that people negotiate daily, are important assets that reduce socioeconomic vulnerability and increase opportunities. However, the pressures of economic change can exert opposing forces on social capital—strengthening it, as reciprocity networks are increasingly called into play, and eroding it, as households' ability to cope deteriorates and trust breaks down. Drawing on the above, I examine the complex ways in which individuals in Koforidua, Ghana network for resources, identity, and space by using their social interactions. I focus specifically on how networks are employed as assets to guard against and alleviate the hardships of a changing socioeconomic landscape. Network interactions are explored through four key lenses: (a) household, kin, and neighborhood ties; (b) alumni ties; (c) occupational ties; and (d) religious associations. I conclude that the ongoing networks, symbolizing different scales of social space, are what guide individuals to appropriate forums. They make survival possible. They also encapsulate and communicate identity.

Emplaced professional identities: Restructuring and the contested space of town nursing skill

Abstract: Health sector restructuring influences most health professionals, and those working in small town hospitals in New Zealand have been affected in particular ways. This paper focuses on the shift in skill requirement for nurses as a result of the loss of surgical services and the downsizing of a town hospital. The shift in nursing skill was contested by nurses who perceived it to be an assault on their skilled professional identities. However the majority of the nurses acquiesced and remained at the town hospital. Rather than read this acquiescence as passivity and victimization on the part of the nurses, their narratives suggest a more complex interpretation which prompts an exploration of the ‘investments’ that nurses may have in at least temporarily acquiescing. The interdependent relationship between profession and place in which neither profession nor place appear to operate independently in the constitution of identity, is highlighted. Understanding professional identities as emplaced in this way, provides a way of beginning to make sense of how people negotiate, contest, accept or reject change at work in small towns.