Poststructuralist Theory Research Articles

Lithuania’s position in building denial to China’s authoritarian policymakers

The aim of the text is to verify such changing geopolitics through an increasing (possible) cooperation concerning the United States of America, Taiwan and Lithuania in the fields of politics and security, as well as to point out what China has lost by Lithuania’s withdrawal from cooperation in the format ‘16+1’. The research problem is a diplomatic discussion between Lithuania and China, which has achieved increasing interest from foreign countries. The theoretical basis of the research is post-structural theory and Gustavsson’s model. From this conception, Lithuania accepts and raises its identity as it is, primarily according to a huge and unsafe power.

An argument for method in qualitative research

Post qualitative inquiry has called for method-less research and warned against the incommensurability of the use of systematic research methods with poststructural and new materialist theories. This essay offers a counterpoint to the incommensurability argument by presenting four examples of studies informed by poststructural and new materialist theories that employ interviews, ethnography, coding, and discourse analysis. What if we were to think of combining poststructural theories with systematic methods not as taboo, but rather as an encounter of differences, with unpredictable outcomes? Theory-based, method-free research can be productive, but as the examples presented in this paper demonstrate, so, too, can research that combines systematic methods with engagement with poststructural theories.

Contingent Contradictions and the (Il)Logics of Adolescence: Examining How Undergraduates in an LGBTQ+ Young Adult Literature Course Read Queer Youth

AbstractThis article explores how undergraduate students enrolled in a postsecondary course centering LGBTQ+ young adult literature came to discursively construct notions of queer youth. Braiding postdevelopmental and poststructural theories of childhood with queer theory, we interrogated how what we name as the (il)logics of adolescence shaped who and what queer youth, as a construct, was and could be for participants. Reading across classroom artifacts and student talk about texts, our findings highlight the shifting and multiple (il)logics offered by students as they attempted to unsettle understandings of queer youth in conjunction with course novels. In particular, we examine how two constitutive theories—homonormativity and chrononormativity—generated both contingent and contradictory moments wherein the subject of the queer child was both regulated and liberated by participants. Offering implications that expand understandings in both the reading and teaching of queer young adult literature, the study closes by discussing this particularly contentious moment, noting possibilities in how LGBTQ+ adolescents can and cannot be rendered and understood through stories of youth.

Gender equity in academic knowledge production: the influence of politics, power and precarity

This paper explores the issue of gender, intersecting with other aspects of identity, in relation to academic staff and academic knowledge production in higher education institutions across Europe. The paper argues for the need to go beyond the ‘topline’ figures regarding gender equity (and intersecting aspects of identity) when considering diversity of academic staff, to a focus on the degree to which academics can meaningfully contribute to knowledge production. Looking across Europe, the paper focuses on a number of factors that are frequently brought up, but not often together, when discussing equity in the academy: gendered discourses of the most valued and legitimate forms of knowledge and the knower; the increasing levels of precarity in the academic workforce; and the growing influence of far right political discourse in Europe and beyond. Drawing on poststructuralist theories of gender, knowledge and precarity, I will be discussing how such dynamics combine to exacerbate already existing inequalities regarding who and what are regarded as legitimate knowledge and legitimate ‘knowers’ in European academia.

Opacity, difference and not knowing: what can psychiatry learn from the work of Édouard Glissant?

Martinican poet, novelist and cultural theorist Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) rejected contemporary simplistic notions of creole hybridity popularised in the 1980s and 1990s in favour of a unique and explicitly antiessentialist...

From ‘No’ to ‘Know’: a heuristic for decolonizing research with youth

ABSTRACT This paper addresses epistemic violence in social science research, drawing on a multiyear study with marginalized teenagers in Old Havana, Cuba to articulate an onto-epistemological approach to knowledge production that can contribute to the decoloniality of knowledge production. Building on decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, and poststructuralist theories, the heuristic presented here contributes an alternative to conventional positivist understandings of knowledge, by defining knowledge as social, created, performed and resistant, and illustrates how these theoretical tenets can be made material in research practice, in this case through the use of arts-based methods. Responding to calls to decolonize knowledge within the field of children’s geographies and adjacent disciplines, this paper addresses the attendant need to reconceptualize what counts as knowledge and identify methodological innovations to support the achievement of these changes.

Gender, sports, and belonging. The role of sports participation in residential preferences among girls and boys living in Norway's rural peripheries

The gender gap in residential preferences among rural youth has been documented in several studies – and for the most attributed to educational aspirations, employment, and income opportunities. The hereby study adds to this block of research by addressing the role of sports. Sports has been connected to place belonging. As a traditional masculine arena, sports can also be assumed to contribute to the gender gap in belonging. On this background, the study explores the role of sports participation in rural girls’ and boys’ residential preferences. As theoretical framework, feminist theories of gendered space contrasts feminist theories of sports participation, supplemented by elements from poststructuralist theories. Data consisted of school surveys from pupils aged 13–16 years living in Norway’s most peripheral municipalities (N=11,971). The analyses confirmed a gender gap in residential preferences. Boys more often considered living in their native municipality compared to girls. The role of sports was on the contrary more surprising. Rural girls who participated in sports had higher predicted probabilities for preferring to live in the native municipality compared to non-participants, but this was not the case for boys. Findings indicate that for girls living in rural Norway, organized sports represent arenas for positive place relations. This diverges from prevailing assumptions of gendered rural space. Furthermore, the study questions common representations of sports arenas as local hearths for masculine versions of Northern rural identity. New developments in leisure’s spatial and social organization within the rural periphery are discussed as potential reasons for these results. By combining and contrasting different strands of feminist thinking, the study gains new insights into gender, sports, and place belonging in the digital age.

Gendering and slow violence as mundane political practice in early childhood education

ABSTRACT For many years, researchers have attended to gender in early childhood education (ECE) from an equity perspective, framed initially by feminist and feminist poststructuralist theories. More recently, researchers have adopted feminist new materialism and feminist posthumanist perspectives to consider gender in ECE. Here we think with the concept of slow violence to contemplate how, in combination with extra-sectionality, gendering is a cumulative and an integral part of the mundane political practices occurring in ECE contexts, lurking in the everydayness of busy settings and ‘hidden in plain sight’. We show how the talk of educators forms an integral part of the practices occurring daily in ECE settings, and how the ways gender is discussed becomes one of the mundane political practices that are cumulative and part of slow violence. This article was prompted by nuances that emerged when probing data from interviews with Australian early childhood educators and by noticing differently, how gender can be constructed in the everyday talk and actions of educators.

Нарушенные повествования: модификация китайского языка в «Книге с неба» Сюй Бина

Through his unique approach to language and communication, a contemporary artist Xu Bing challenges language as one of the enduring elements within the Chinese semiotic field and prompts viewers to reassess their notions of cultural identity. The aim of the article is to uncover new interpretations of Xu Bing’s creative work by examining it through the lens of key ideas from post-structuralist theorists and semiotic researchers, specifically Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes. The text explores Xu Bing’s groundbreaking work “Book from the Sky” as one of his earliest experiments with language, serving as a platform for discussing the role of language in meaning-making. The analysis draws on the philosophical concepts of language by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva, revealing the complex layers of semiotics and linguistic significance in Xu Bing’s installation. The scientific novelty of the article lies in its attempt to analyze the artist’s work by engaging with the ideas of post-structuralist theorists and semiotic researchers. By offering a new analytical approach to “Book from the Sky”, we expand the understanding of the role of language and its influence on the construction of meaning in art. This analysis also aims to enrich the dialogue about the relationship between language, culture, and identity by examining the semiotic aspects of Xu Bing’s installation. In the course of the research, significant results were achieved that allowed for a deeper understanding of Xu Bing’s “Book from the Sky”. The analysis through the lens of theories by Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes identified key conceptual aspects of the work, such as Derrida’s “différance”, Kristeva’s intertextuality, and Barthes’s concept of the active reader. This revealed how the installation deconstructs conventional perceptions of language and meaning, evokes feelings of disorientation and abjection, and transforms viewers into active interpreters who reassess cultural identity. The article also contributes to a broader understanding of Xu Bing’s artistic practice and provides insight into the complexities of language as a social and cultural construct.

Who deserves help and who is bad? Race and class in ‘doing’ school exclusion

ABSTRACT This article presents findings from qualitative research on school exclusion. The study was conducted in a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU), part of alternative education provision, in England. Mixed methods used included ethnographic approaches, drama-based group work, focus group discussions and interviews. Research participants were teenage boys (age 14–16) and professionals including Teachers and Teaching Assistants (TAs). Data were analysed in multiple ways within a post structural framework, this included a participatory Data Sharing workshop with boys at the PRU and psycho social approaches. Intersectionality and post structural theories provide conceptual resources for the study. Key themes are as follows: Situated context, boys’ creative practices through rap music and the phenomenon of parents sending their sons ‘back home’ outside the UK. The article highlights school exclusion as part of a wider global context of inequity and punishment in education. It offers nuanced insights from the raced and classed experience of exclusion.

Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Elite Athletics: “There’s a Lot of Work Still Yet To Be Done”

Several female athletes have recently challenged the long-standing assumption that pregnancy/parenthood (particularly motherhood) and participation in elite-level sport are mutually exclusive. These women’s actions have elicited change across the elite athletics industry and have sparked a need for further research to understand how elite athlete-parents perceive these shifts. We used feminist poststructuralist theory, feminist participatory action research, and semistructured interviews to explore the perspectives of 21 pregnant and parenting elite/international and world-class athletes (11 women and 10 men) on the developing degree of acceptance of parenthood in elite athletics. Through feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, we identified that, despite considerable recent advancements, there is still a need for continued change in the degree to which pregnant/parenting elite athletes are accepted and supported within elite athletics.

Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History”

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Queer temporalities and the life course: Trans aging in Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby (2021)

Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby from 2021, a Women's Prize for Fiction nominee, problematizes gender norms by telling the story of three main characters: Reese, a trans woman, Ames, who de-transitioned to live as a man again, and Katrina, a Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is also Ames' lover and boss. Ames and Katrina are expecting a child and are testing the possibilities of having a non-conventional family together with Reese. Parenthood is, thus, the central theme of the novel which structures also the sections of book into the time before the conception and the weeks after it. By doing so, the temporal framework of the novel queers the linearity of heteronormative life courses on the form as well as the content level. Therefore, the interplay of form and content invites to critically investigate how the concept of trans time that challenges linearity and normative conformity (Halberstam, 2005) may provide useful insights into trans aging and the life course through this literary representation. Following, contemporary feminist theorists' commitments to negotiate what makes “life more livable for those whose gender presentation, identity, or bodily experience have been judged abnormal, nonexistent, or impossible” (Karhu, 2022, 304–305), this paper aims at carrying out a critical feminist literary analysis of trans aging, queer life courses and the thereof related gendered norms in Peters' novel. By relying predominantly on feminist poststructuralist theories (Butler 2004) and cultural aging studies (Maierhofer, 2019), it is the aim to challenge normativity and limited social norms through this critical literary reading.

Theory-informed beliefs in early childhood education: contradictions in child development theories and models of play

ABSTRACT Theory-informed practice has a long tradition within the profession of early childhood education in Australia and internationally. Aligned with longstanding policy and curriculum in Australia, the profession has seen a prominence of resources informed by biological, behaviourism/socio-behaviourist, social learning, psycho-genetic, cultural-historical, critical and poststructuralist theories. Despite the plethora of theories being supported within early childhood education and care, little research has been directed to determining if and how educators use theory to inform their play practices. This paper takes up the challenge by surveying 200 Australian early childhood educators about the theories that were most relevant to their practices and the models of play that informed their day-to-day work in centres. Higher qualified educators were informed most by cultural-historical theory whilst technically qualified educators were more guided by social learning theory. Playwork was the model of play found to be most familiar to all educators. However, the results also show a limited alignment between theories of learning and development and models of play, suggesting an interesting contradiction in understandings of educators that is worthy of further research.

A narrative inquiry of a Chinese international student’s language experiences and identities in a multilingual university in Germany

ABSTRACT This study employs a narrative inquiry approach to explore the language experiences and identity formation of an international student from China within a multilingual university in Germany. Drawing on the poststructuralist theory of identity, critical ethnographic sociolinguistic (CES) studies, and language ideologies, the study reveals that her language practices and identity construction evolve across diverse contexts. Her narratives also highlight the significant mediating role of language ideologies in shaping her situated identity construction and language practices, including the relationship between English proficiency and L1 speakers of English, English as a lingua franca (ELF), the association between language and ethnicity, as well as the relationship between German proficiency and the local/foreign student separation. This study advances our comprehension of the intricate interplay between identity formation, language practices and different language ideologies as they manifest in the lived experiences of international students amidst the backdrop of multilingualism.

The Black American Church: A Reactionary and Ideological Apparatus of Slavery

This work argues that Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, amongst a few others, were the reactionary (dialectical) exceptions to the black church, not the norm, an (ideological) institution established to interpellate and indoctrinate blacks to accept their conditions in slavery and integrate them into the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. In other words, the aforementioned were the enslaved who used Christian dogma to (negative dialectically) respond to the barbarity of slavery by violently convicting white Christian society for not living up to its values, ideas, and ideals given the treatment of African people by so-called Christians. In the latter sense it was reactionary; in the former, it was an ideological apparatus of domination and control for the institution of slavery and black integration into the bourgeois living of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The contemporary attempt to racially vindicate the black church as a sui generis revolutionary institution overflowing with Africanisms that stood against the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism is ahistorical and ideological reaped in pseudoscientific propositions stemming from postmodern and post-structural theories.

Language, Power, and the Media in the Portrayal of Wartime Sexual Violence

Sexual violence has increasingly been recognised – and framed – as a war crime. This essay seeks to unpack the normative and epistemological elements of this discourse. The literature is dominated by peacetime studies of gender and language which fail to analyse elements of shock and labels in the construction of the actors at play. This paper seeks to understand how language, power and media work together to infantilize women and create an implicit dichotomy of victims and survivors. Drawing on critical feminist and post-structural theories, it is argued that media agents play a significant role in shaping perception and defining policy on wartime rape, through language patterns and themes. It is concluded that the language employed by news articles contributes to the gendered socialization of wartime rape. The argument is illustrated by a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two news channels, Al Jazeera and Fox News, which seeks to identify the common discursive themes and demonstrates that the rhetoric employed is self-perpetuating and is conducive to gendered assumptions and shortcomings.

Genealogy, discourse and the "death of the author" as figures of poetics in the novel by Mark Z. Danilevsky's "House of Leaves".

The object of research of this article is a novel by Mark Z. Danilevsky's "House of Leaves" in the context of postmodernism. The subject of the research is some concepts of the theory of poststructuralism – discourse, genealogy, "death of the author" – implemented in the work "House of Leaves" through reductive, metaphorical or allusive implantation into the fabric of the novel. A general analysis is given and the problem of the correlation between the theories of poststructuralism and postmodernism is outlined. The selection and analysis of theoretical works on a given problem has been carried out, and working concepts have been formulated, used as tools for analyzing forms, figures of poetics, as well as for interpreting the novel "House of Leaves".As a consequence, the article presents a detailed description of one of the sides of the artistic method of Mark Z. Danilevsky (the use of poststructuralism theories as a figure of novel poetics), which allows us to judge the techniques and means of artistic expression that determined the form of the novel. In this regard, the article discusses the so-called "form effects", for example: synchrony, the capture of a real figure by a simulacrum, the creation of genealogical–artistic images, the establishment of a special time mode – "simultaneity", etc. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that we have considered the interpretation of the work from the point of view of poststructuralism theories, as a result of which new formal techniques and mechanisms of their use in the creation of a work of art have been revealed.

Representations of an Ebola ‘outbreak’ through Story Technologies

BackgroundAttempts to understand biosocial phenomena using scientific methods are often presented as value-neutral and objective; however, when used to reduce the complexity of open systems such as epidemics, these forms...

Toward a universalistic theory of political obligation: A post-structuralist approach

Developing a plausible theory of political obligation is crucial for understanding our current political lives or constructing new ones. However, it proved to be hard to arrive at a theory that is universalistic and logically consistent. Without adherence to certain universalistic principles, such as freedom and equality, one might be tempted to justify individuals’ allegiance to authoritarian regimes based on particularistic reasons. Also, one may argue that if a general theory of political obligation cannot be devised, we are justified to resort to anarchism. Despite such high political stakes involved, a contention arose that universalistic approaches to political obligation are logically inconsistent because they run afoul of a particularity requirement. The latter is a demand that any plausible theory of individuals’ obligations toward a political entity should account for the reasons why they should obey the rules and orders of a specific authority. In this article, drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-structuralist theory, I demonstrate that the dichotomy of universalism vs. particularism need not have destructive effects for a successful theory of political obligation. Indeed, it is possible to accept a particularity requirement but at the same time, argue that political obligations have a universalistic thrust.