Subject Positions Research Articles

History education as prevention: the topic of right-wing extremism in German educational media

The rise of right-wing populism and extremism has challenged Western societies in recent years and raised fears of the destruction of liberal democracy. Against this backdrop, it seems reasonable to encourage students in history lessons to study the rise of National Socialism in order to prevent similar developments today. However, researchers and educators have emphasised that ‘learning from history’ does not take place in a straightforward way; moreover, it is questionable whether contemporary right-wing extremism can be best understood by studying the Nazi era. In order to understand how history education could contribute to citizenship education in this respect, this article asks how the topic of contemporary right-wing extremism is approached in German educational media, and how it is linked to the Nazi era. Based on an analysis of the pedagogical approaches towards the topic in 28 history textbook series, it investigates how the pedagogical approaches, the narrative about right-wing extremism and the subject position of the reader/player are intertwined in two selected textbooks and in one serious game. In conclusion, the article reflects on whether the innovative educational design of the serious game could inspire history education to find new approaches to the topic and thereby to contribute to citizenship education.

Negotiating caste, gendered and colonial subjectivities in the neoliberal academy

This paper highlights how researchers are subjugated through hegemonic academic norms and how they simultaneously recognize the privileges attached to their subject positions. I illustrate difficulties in negotiating my privileges, particularly of caste, and my experiences of marginalisation as a ‘third world woman’ in the European academy. Such competitive insecurity is illustrative of both neoliberal logics of enterprise and responsibility as well as caste-based logics of merit and deservingness. Academia as a field of knowledge production historically consolidates power in the hands of a shrinking set of elites. Attitudes of competition and uncertainty produce subjects that turn to selfinterested modes of acquiring and analysing data, thereby producing hegemonic knowledges, which ignores the situatedness and politics of the research context. Caste is addressed together with gender, coloniality, ability, sexuality and ethnicity (among other subjectivities) as an intersectional co-producer of exclusion. Invoking caste-based imperialist logics is essential for unpacking the privileged subjectivities that produce elitism and exclusion in academia and in knowledge production.

In the Grip of Traditionalism? How Nigerian Middle-Class Working Mothers Navigate Normative Ideals of Femininity

Changing socioeconomic conditions are enticing more and more Nigerian mothers to work and pursue careers. This article explores how middle-class professional women navigate working mother subjectivities in the context of Nigeria’s strong patriarchal culture, where traditional notions of maternal femininity prevail. We argue that the working mother’s subjectivity is a key site where the struggle over gendered cultural meanings takes place. Drawing on 32 qualitative interviews, we demonstrate how a small group of women refused traditional feminine subject positions; however, most mothers either embraced or reluctantly acquiesced to traditional femininity, despite having access to broader cultural repertoires and material resources. By unveiling the complexities of the cultural appeal of traditional femininity and social penalties for breaching it, the article extends our understanding of how patriarchal cultures resist gendered change and the nuances and limits of individual patterns of resistance.

Odissi on Screen: A Meditation on Regional Television

This article aims to interrogate the role of the television screen in creating, re-creating, disseminating, and deconstructing the dancing body. It presents a study of the contemporary landscape of odissi dance, a nationally recognized Indian traditional art form from the eastern Indian state of Odisha, through its on-screen representation. As an odissi soloist, I register, analyze, and interpret screenic data, mainly televised interviews of dancers, live telecasts of dance festivals in Odisha, and performances recorded for the camera in the studios. I focus on content primarily broadcast on the state-owned satellite channel broadcasting in Odia, the official language in Odisha. My position is of a Sahrdaya, an observer tutored in the codes and conventions of the art form and critically responsive to the structure of emotion in the presentation. I locate the dancing body across discursive, disseminative, and choreographic renditions. This subjective positioning, I argue, democratizes the expressive ethos of odissi embodiment. Commenting on the contemporary curation of the dancing body by the state network, this essay brings larger questions around the representation of gender, sexuality, caste, and regionalism on the television screen.

Динамика профессиональной идентичности студентов аграрного колледжа в процессе профессионального обучения

The study aimed to identify the dynamics of professional identity of students of an agricultural college in the process of their professional training. The study was carried out using the cross-sectional method. It involved students of the 1st (n = 42), 3rd (n = 38) and 4th (n = 36) years studying in the areas of agricultural education. To identify the features of the professional identity of respondents, the methodology of A.A. Ozerina was chosen, with the help of which the educational and professional plans of students studying in different years, their professional position, motivation, professional intentions, attitude to the acquired profession and its representatives, self-assessment of themselves as a future specialist were studied. It was revealed that professional training has a positive effect on the formation of professional identity in students of an agricultural college, which is reflected in its positive dynamics from the first to the third year. However, in the final year, due to the crisis of professional training, there is a decrease in the number of students ready to build a professional career in the agro-industrial complex. The study concludes that in the process of professional training of future specialists in the agro-industrial complex, it is necessary to develop and implement targeted programs to form their professional focus on work in the field of the acquired profession. The main areas of such programs should be the development of educational and professional motivation, subjective position, the formation of a positive attitude to the acquired profession through overcoming the stereotypical image of an agricultural worker, fixed in the mass consciousness, the ability and readiness of students to independently and maturely choose their professional future.

‘Creating strong Sámi children’: teachers’ positioning of heritage language students

ABSTRACT This article presents an ethnographic study of Sámi heritage language education in public schools in a city in Norway. The Sámi people, the only recognised Indigenous people in Europe, are reclaiming their language and culture after intense assimilatory efforts by the Norwegian state. Based on ten weeks of fieldwork in Sámi heritage language (HL) education in an urban setting far from the Sámi core areas, the current article investigates how Sámi teachers and students negotiate subject positions in HL education based on Sámi culture, values, and traditional knowledge. The researcher observed lessons, wrote field notes, collected teaching materials, conducted interviews, and made video and audio recordings of classroom interactions. The analysis demonstrates how the teachers purposefully and iteratively attempted to position their students as Sámi and how the students responded to their teachers’ construction of a Sámi subject position. The findings suggest that HL teachers need to recognise and accommodate the complex and diverse connections that HL students have with their culture, language, and community, particularly in contexts of historical colonisation and assimilation. By making multiple subject positions available to students, teachers can contribute to a more inclusive and empowering learning environment that acknowledges the nuances of HL students’ subjectivities.

How do we teach about ethnic and cultural diversity in PETE? A discourse analysis of interviews from Norway, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada

ABSTRACT Background Although social justice has been a topic of interest in physical education for over 40 years, research still shows that physical education excludes and marginalises students based on various identity dimensions. Presently, with societies becoming more diverse, there is heightened anticipation for teacher educators to demonstrate ‘cultural responsiveness’ or ‘cultural competence’. Purpose This paper investigates how Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) educators in Norway, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada construct teaching about ethnic and cultural diversity. Methods This study’s data comprise 23 interviews with PETE educators from three countries. We analysed the interviews using concepts from discourse theory and a framework from multicultural education. Findings While the way teacher educators discuss teaching about issues of ethnic and cultural diversity in PETE highly depends on each country’s contexts, there still are overlaps encapsulated by discourses. Our analysis suggests most discursive articulations from interviews reproduced liberal discourses, with fewer discursive articulations from conservative and critical discourses. Furthermore, the discourses constructed certain subject positions for students and teacher educators that carry implications for practice. Conclusion Although there are consistent attempts to engage with critical discourses, the dominance of liberal discourses persists in PETE in all three countries. This prevalence poses a risk of perpetuating othering and marginalisation.

How should we study interactions between translation policies, practices, and beliefs? Comparing case studies from a time of crisis

ABSTRACT This article is a methodological reflection based on a particular research experience around the following question: if effective translation policy must align with translation practices and beliefs, how should we study situations where those factors do not align with each other? When vaccination information had to reach multilingual communities in Brussels and Melbourne in 2021, in both cases there were moves to community-based translation practices, without clear adjustments on the level of official policy. The resulting tensions created problems for research methodology with respect to the variable availability of language data, the influence of media reports, and especially the different opinions expressed by community representatives, translation users, dissenters, and translators. In confronting the difficulties thus imposed and the many subject positions in play, we argue that researchers should invest added efforts to recognize and work with the uneven nature of the data while at the same time including the full range of expressed beliefs. Only then can we presume to identify some of the more local aspects that effective translation policies must address.

Tracce d’uso del pronome dimostrativo espletivo nelle varietà d’italiano vernacolare fiorentino e pistoiese

This research into the expletive demonstrative pronouns consists of a comparison between the varieties of Italian language in Florence and Pistoia and the dialect of Salerno. The linguistic analysis points out the use of this pronouns like extra-phrasal elements with explicative semantic function. They are used only during the conversations, but not in the monologues. unlike the expletive pronouns in the non-pro-drop languages like English, French and Northern Italian dialects, in which these pronouns are expressed in both situations. The form quello, I have observed in the varieties of Italian Language of Florence and Pistoia, as well as chello/chillo I have observed in the dialectal variety of Salerno, correspond to the expressions il fatto è che.../sta di fatto che… In italian language spoken in Florence and Pistoia the expletive demonstrative pronoun quello is exclusively used in the initial position of the main clauses, otherwise in the dialect of Salerno it can occur also in the causal, temporal and completive clauses, in which the expletive demonstrative pronouns occupy the subject (or topic) position between the complementizer and the verb and they are used with explicative semantic function and their use is optional and limited to the conversation.

Walking the tightrope: experiences of teaching gender and development practice

ABSTRACT This paper accounts for the experiences of the authors who teach feminist approaches to gender and development practice at a university in India. As a space for discourse and debate on development, the university is consistently shaped by the embodied experiences of students who enter the university from diverse subject positions through affirmative action policies. This practice note shares how the teachers engage with teaching a course titled “Women, Development Practice and Politics”. The paper highlights the inadequacies in gender and development (GAD) literature that views gender as a binary and women as a homogenous group, remains silent on the intersectional axis of gender inequalities, and uncritical of the development paradigm. The paper shares how the teachers overcome these deficiencies in the literature by creating a fluid connection with the “field”, thereby highlighting the centrality of place-based (time–space-embodied) knowledges and reclaiming the legacy of critique, an attribute which is at the core of the GAD approach.

Text-free diffusion inpainting using reference images for enhanced visual fidelity

This paper presents a novel approach to subject-driven image generation that addresses the limitations of traditional text-to-image diffusion models. Our method generates images using reference images without relying on language-based prompts. We introduce a visual detail preserving module that captures intricate details and textures, addressing overfitting issues associated with limited training samples. The model's performance is further enhanced through a modified classifier-free guidance technique and feature concatenation, enabling the natural positioning and harmonization of subjects within diverse scenes. Quantitative assessments using CLIP, DINO and Quality scores (QS), along with a user study, demonstrate the superior quality of our generated images. Our work highlights the potential of pre-trained models and visual patch embeddings in subject-driven editing, balancing diversity and fidelity in image generation tasks. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/8eomio/Subject-Inpainting.

Abdominal Drawing-In Maneuver is Less Effective for Core Stability During High Load Tasks: A Systematic Review

Context: The abdominal drawing-in maneuver (ADIM) is a technique commonly used to activate deep core muscles for the prevention and rehabilitation of low back pain. However, its benefits during high-load tasks (HLT) are unclear. Objectives: The primary objective of this article is to review the literature to determine whether the use of ADIM enhances core stabilization during HLT. Additionally, we will examine if other factors, beyond load, could influence the effectiveness of this activation maneuver. Methods: A search was conducted using PubMed databases for studies that compared interventions using ADIM to those without ADIM. The literature search spanned from January 1981 to March 2024. Only studies that included kinematic assessments were selected. Results: The search yielded 359 studies, of which 24 were included in the final analysis. Task load was analyzed based on Mottram and Comerford's criteria, alongside other approaches such as the source of the perturbation applied to the subject and body position. In conditions using ADIM, better performance was observed in only 16.66% of interventions with HLT, whereas other conditions (OC) without ADIM performed better in 83.33% of interventions using HLT. When core stability was tested against external perturbations, ADIM was less effective in all scenarios. In lying positions, ADIM performed better in 4 tasks, while OC performed better in 2. In upright positions, ADIM was more effective in 7 tasks, while OC performed better in 6. Conclusions: The findings suggest that ADIM should not be used if the goal is to train core stability and strength during HLT. Abdominal drawing-in maneuver was less effective for stabilizing the core during tasks involving external perturbations, and its use was also less effective in upright positions.

The unhappy category of nature: sexuality and Hegel

ABSTRACT Hegel insists that the category ‘nature', expressed in relation to the ideal of aesthetic beauty, is not nature as such but a supplementary deviation coloured by the subjective position from which this ‘nature' is posited. We cannot distinguish nature ‘in itself' from the ideological-artistic conditions of the distorted ‘use' of nature. Nature exists to us only by reference to what is subjectively treated as non-natural. A similar relation is posited by Lacan in his famous assertion that ‘there is no sexual relation'. For Freud and Lacan, the ‘all too human' sexual drive derives from a deviated/distorted enjoyment of the initial failure to enjoy a purely natural sexual relation: an inevitably castrated enjoyment, where ‘natural' sexuality is revealed as impossible. In other words, sexuality is for Lacan and Freud its own distortion of the category of ‘natural'. Sexuality is a perpetually distorted and abnormal form of enjoyment, for which the alternative is not ‘normal/natural enjoyment’, but rather the negative state of a fundamental lack of any relation. Through Hegel and sexuality, this paper argues that the unavoidable misuse of nature is not caused by improper application/categorisation, but instead reflects an internal incompleteness or indeterminacy in nature as a category.

Knowledge of Life and Death! A Classroom Study of Gender Negotiations among Pupils and Teachers in Primary School History Education

In this article, we analyse how gendered subject positions during the Middle Ages are talked about in the history education classroom in primary school. Discourses about gender norms in the past were followed by discourses about how to interpret these differences and injustices, where we see that: i) the interpretations are constructed as being linked to biology, ii) teacher and pupils construct a present ‘us’ who understand better than a past ‘they’, an us who have greater freedom of action to choose for ourselves how to live our lives, and where iii) this is explained by the view that mediaeval people did not understand very well. It is between these discourses that the negotiation of how to interpret gender norms and gendered positions takes place. Negotiations result in a discourse that stresses today’s society as one of equality and equity. These discourses also enable various counter-discourses in which pupils challenged the constructions of women in the past offered by the teacher and textbook in the classroom.

Between two worlds: the scientist’s dilemma in climate activism

Environmental activism presents an ideological dilemma for environmentally concerned scientists, who must balance traditional scientific values of objectivity and impartiality with the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis. This paper presents a critical discursive analysis of interviews with 27 scientists from 11 countries. It details the linguistic repertoires scientists draw on and the subject positions adopted to manage this dilemma. We observed that scientists employ two strategies to reconcile their professional identities with their activism: redefining the scientist identity, and reframing the work that scientists do. The subject positions adopted broadly serve to legitimize action, such as arguing that activism as a scientist is objective and rational, or that being a scientist conveys a moral duty to advocate for scientific information. By analyzing how scientists negotiate conflicting identities and values, this research offers valuable insights into fostering informed decision-making and action in addressing urgent environmental challenges.

The cruel optimism of contact improvisation: Dancing between neoliberal subjectivation and practices of commoning

Within the social world of Contact Improvisation, the question of class relations remains conspicuous by its absence. Whilst ongoing debates in the global Contact Improvisation (CI) community and recent scholarship have foregrounded the problem of Whiteness, there have been few attempts to provide intersectional analyses of the racialised, classed subjectivation of contact dancers. To make such future enquiry possible, this paper dismantles originary CI myths about ‘natural’ movement, also attended to by Bojana Cvejić, and explores the question of social antagonism through analysing the dance form’s discursive norms and movement vocabulary. As this essay argues, the contact dancer occupies a paradoxical subject position: between a neoliberal embrace of risk-taking and precarity, and a cruelly optimistic prefiguration of the commons.

Discourses in Swedish preschool music teachers’ conversations: proficiency, subordination and resistance

ABSTRACT In recent years, Swedish preschool has been subjected to significant changes. As there is a lack of studies examining how teachers in music rhetorically position themselves within this context, the aim is to study subject positions that are constructed in conversations between preschool music teachers (PMTs) and to discuss these positions in relation to the quality of preschool practice in music education. The theoretical and methodological framework is grounded in social constructionist theories and the empirical material consists of group conversations with PMTs. The results reveal three prominent discourses, the discourses of Proficiency, of Subordination and of Resistance. In conclusion, the PMTs show that they are opposed by other pedagogues in various ways. This makes the possibility of establishing a music-teaching practice on their level of expertise severely restricted, which in turn has an impact on the quality of the preschool practice in music education.

Makers across computers and heliotropic algorithms and can we talk about what to become?

Digitalization needs to be storied for me to become critical of and creative with its functionings. In today’s algorithmic condition, knowledge production and learning are complex posthuman entanglements: the human as materially affective has become fabricated hybrids of organism and machine. Storying is seen as simultaneous processes of fictionalizing and functionalizing hence enabling celebrations of alterations and of irreducible plural logics possibilizing nonlinear material arrangements of concepts creating alliances between the environment, technology and the social. Storying thus making trajectories and becomings present in the other rendering their mutual presence perceptible, asking if we can talk about what to become – together? Storying on the premises of the child and me, that is, highlighting the subject position instead of that of technology. It implies a view of technology that should serve humanity and being oriented toward life-affirming, human-centric goals. Always asking about what we want, and do we want it? And what is it that we currently do not seem to understand? In the posthuman project, humans as affective are significant and I suggest a view of algorithms as heliotropic designed as life engendering tools only. Ignoring the affective dimension of becoming, digitalized environments give way to an ethical and conceptual vacuum, wherein education risk being sacrificed at the altar of technology and development. The primary task for the digital spacemakers/makerspace is thus being to train the imagination through teaching critical and creative encounters affirming intradisciplinary perspectivists ethos. Makerspace/spacemaking first and foremost being an onto-epistemological endeavour pointing paradoxically towards the importance of the teacher. The child being the knower however, the teacher has sadly been trained not to. I address the need for studies approaching digitalization by way of affects and storying: the child seen as a metaphysical political being, as knowing and knowers of affect. Therefore, I meander through some complex ideas and discuss data as bioinformatical practices of data simultaneously situated and fictional. Instead of speaking about evidence-based teaching, research, analysis, and results, I speak of something imperceptible and inclusive that collectivizes digital freedom as processes of subjective becomings, teaching towards moments of non-governance.

Investigation of Video Ocular Counter-Roll Findings According to Head and Body Tilt Positions in Healthy Subjects.

A vestibulo-ocular reflex called the ocular counter-roll can be used to assess how well the otolith organs are functioning. The video ocular counter-roll (vOCR) test is a recent addition to the videonystagmography test battery that allows for video recording and quantitative ocular counter-roll analysis. The purpose of this study is to investigate potential discrepancies in vOCR measurements obtained from a 30° lateral head tilt in the roll plane versus measurements obtained from a 30° tilt of the head and body. Thirty otologically, and neurologically healthy subjects aged 18 to 30 (M = 23.32 years, SD = 2.66 years; 8 men, 22 women) participated in this study. Pure-tone audiometry, oculomotor tests, and vOCR evaluation were performed for all participants. The vOCR assessment was performed in 2 positions, 30° lateral head tilt, and 30° body tilt position. The degree of static vOCR eye position and vOCR asymmetry in both positions were calculated and compared. There was no statistically significant difference between the vOCR findings obtained in the right and left 30° lateral head tilt (p = 0.546) and body tilt (p = 0.114). vOCR asymmetry was determined as median (interquartile range) 0.08 (0.07) in lateral head tilt position and 0.09 (0.06) in body tilt position. The degree of static vOCR (8.75° [1.91]) detected during body tilt was statistically greater than the static vOCR (6.62 [1.69]) detected during head tilt (p < 0.001). There was no statistically significant difference in terms of ocular counter-roll asymmetry detected between head tilt and body tilt (p = 0.918). Our study shows a significant difference in the vOCR responses during head tilt and body tilt, a finding that should be considered during clinical evaluation of vestibular function. There was no significant asymmetry between the responses with either head or body tilt.

Legal regulation of the provision of electronic services in the field of social protection of the population

The article is devoted to the analysis of the legislative consolidation of the provision of electronic services in the sphere of social protection of the population in Ukraine, taking into account the trends of reforming the institute of electronic services in the state. The current state of legal regulation of the provision of electronic services in the field of social protection of the population and directions for improvement of normative legal acts in the specified field have been studied. Summarizing the legal basis regulating the provision of electronic services in the field of social protection of the population, such acts can be classified by legal force (legislative, sub-legal) and by the content of the subject of regulation (determine general theoretical provisions and some aspects of an organizational nature; administrative jurisdictional activity of public administration bodies regarding provision of electronic services in the field of social protection of the population; guarantees of legality of the provision of electronic services in the field of social protection of the population). It has been established that today there is a significant number of normative legal acts that regulate certain aspects of the provision of electronic services in the field of social protection of the population. This is natural given the wide range of social relations subject to their regulation. Instead, for further systematized reform in this area, it is necessary to determine the general principles of organizational and legal regulation of the provision of electronic services in this area on the basis of a unified legislative act with the aim of a systematic approach to the elimination of legal gaps in the regulation of such an institution in view of the special legal position of subjects of public administration of providing electronic services in the field of social protection of the population.