Talk Back Research Articles

Migrant parents talking back – Stigmatised identities and doing being ordinary

This article explores how migrant parents resist racist and stigmatising stereotypes about their parenthood. The analysis examines the parents’ ways of ‘talking back’ to racialised categories and c...

Tala tillbaka, tala som ”other” i domstolsnarrativ om våldtäkt

Like a prostitute, a married woman who charges her husband with rape has a special position in defending herself against doubts about coercion and at the same time vindicating her agency. This also applies to the woman who initially agrees with an unknown man to a sexual act which turns into a rape. This article investigates how women in such positions figure in historical and legal contexts, and how they have voiced/expressed themselves in courts in relation to dominant narratives about rape. Out of a larger sample of twentythree rape cases in Swedish courts, all attracting extensive media coverage, I have selected three cases for a detailed study. The examples are not representative, but they allow for in-depth discussions. The selected cases relate to the legislation that applied just before the 1998 Crime Committee and until the 2005 Act. The cases are from the late 1990s until 2007, a period of major societal changes that also affect perceptions of gender and violence. The study examines the presence in Swedish courts of two master narratives about sexual violence that, according to feminist research, dominate in the Western world, and how female plaintiffs respond to these verbally, by silence, and by bodily expression. The first, dominant since the 1980s, is “negate or blame”, that is, rape is understood to be either “just sex”, or the woman carries the blame. The second is “rape trauma”. The analysis relates to bell hook’s book Talking back. The perspective is widened with reference to Michael Bamberg, who argues that even though one always talks within dominant narratives, elements from these are picked up and an alternative speech is improvised. In different ways, women try to navigate against the dominant narratives of negate or blame and of trauma. They may not in full meet the criteria for talking back, but they are in different ways aware that their talk and performances are restrained, which is also a kind of resistance.

The ‘Inferior’ Talk Back: Suzhi (Human Quality), Social Mobility, and E-Commerce Economy in China

ABSTRACTRural migrants in Chinese cities are often stigmatized as ‘low-suzhi’ population and marginalized in urban social hierarchy. Existing scholarship has demonstrated how urbanities used suzhi discourse to justify their exploitation of migrants while maintaining class distinctions, and how migrants embraced urban lifestyles to improve their suzhi. Yet, this literature rarely addresses resistance of the ‘inferior’. By looking at the social interactions between migrant entrepreneurs and local residents in a city of southeastern China, this study shows that the emerging e-commerce economy has enabled many rural migrants to acquire financial, social, and cultural capital, which empower them to speak for themselves. Their rising wealth and self-representation as ‘high-suzhi’ entrepreneurs has reshaped their identity in the urban business world.

Mothers Talk Back: Exploring the Experiences of Formerly Incarcerated Mothers

The experiences of formerly incarcerated mothers are rarely examined despite the sharp rise in female incarceration over the past 2 decades. This project used a transcendental phenomenological approach and in-depth interviews with 12 formerly incarcerated mothers as they reflected on their motherhood experiences before, during and after their incarceration. Mothers described how they struggled to negotiate their own stress, trauma, addiction, and shame, and offer insights for how service systems and professionals can help mothers reunify with their families and re-enter society. Clinical implications for systems of care, policy and practice are explored.

Social Media, the Folk, and Bizarre Stories of Nova Scotia

This essay recounts a number of so-called “bizarre” news reports from Nova Scotia, and the reactions to them on social media, as a means of exploring the fruitfulness of a digital history approach to regionalism and the idea of the provincial “Folk.” Such stories might be considered a contemporary manifestation of the Folk - albeit one that is presented through a digital medium that creates opportunities for cultural producers and consumers to enter into conversation about the style, context, and meaning of such representations. The essay is exploratory and offers some tentative conclusions - particularly that the phenomenon of "bizarre" news reports from the province is very heavily affected by class conflict, but that social media allows a new generation of cultural producers the means to talk back to Folk representations of Nova Scotia. However, the essay is largely concerned with making a connection between media studies of what has been called “convergence culture” and more traditional studies of Atlantic Canadian society and culture.

The Power of Ambivalence: Using Ambivalence as a Healing Resource for Asian Women in the Confucian Context

The purpose of this article is to explore the power of “cultivated ambivalence” in the task of constructing Confucian feminism. Such resources of cultivated and radical ambivalence create a “third space” in which Asian women can be true both to themselves and to their ambivalence. In this space, they would be empowered to “talk back” to both Confucian traditions and Western liberal feminism.

The COMMAND trial of cognitive therapy for harmful compliance with command hallucinations (CTCH): a qualitative study of acceptability and tolerability in the UK

ObjectivesTo explore service user experiences of a 9-month cognitive behavioural therapy for command hallucinations in the context of a randomised controlled trial including their views on acceptability and tolerability of...

Identity Politics: The Dialectics of Cynicism and Joy and the Movement to Talking Back and Breaking Bread

The author argues that critical pedagogues can overcome their postmodern cynicism by connecting areas of personal and public narrative to forms of alienation, oppression, and subordination. Whether narrative is about structural elements of schools or society (such as religion) the author argues that to overcome one's own cynicism one has to joyfully and symbolically talk back and break bread - making the enlightenment and modernistic ideals of freedom, justice, and liberation a genuine possibility. The fusion of modernism and postmodemism and cynicism and joy intertwined with personal narrative becomes a "method" to answer the question critical theorists always have to ask in order to remain honest with themselves: To what end do we do what we do?

Aspirations

Aspirations

Bypassing the press gallery: from Howard to Hanson

Traditionally politicians have been dependent on political news media to get their message across to the public. The rise of social media means that politicians can bypass the Press Gallery and publish directly to their target audiences via Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. This article argues that Prime Minister John Howard’s (1996–2007) use of talk back radio and early forays on YouTube were pivotal in the trend towards ‘disintermediation’ in Australian politics. It draws on two studies. One involving interviews with 87 key media actors from the Howard era including journalists, broadcasters, politicians and media advisers; and a second, which includes fresh interviews with contemporary press secretaries. This article examines the shift from a ‘mass media logic’ to a ‘hybrid logic’, considered from a mediatization theoretical position. We also ask important questions about the press gallery’s ongoing relevance in the digital era, when politicians preside over their own social media empires.

How Gardens Talk Back

How Gardens Talk Back

Play Unpacks the Man Behind Mask of Dr. Anonymous

“The 217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous” will have nine showings between May 3 and May 11, with a discussion session following each performance.

Bodies that talk: Julian of Norwich and Judith Butler in conversation

It has become increasingly common to see medieval texts read alongside postmodern theories. Methodologically speaking, these engagements can take several forms, but are often framed within metaphors of ‘applying’ postmodern theories or ‘imposing’ frameworks on medieval sources, introducing a certain danger that the medieval source comes across as incidental to a theoretically performative reading, whether or not this is the scholar’s intention. It may be more accurate and more methodologically helpful when reading medieval texts and postmodern theories to consider each of these encounters as a conversation between past and postmodern, triangulated by the present of the researcher or reader, rather than using metaphors of superimposition. This paper presents one such conversation between fourteenth-century English anchorite Julian of Norwich and twentieth-century postmodern theorist Judith Butler. I argue that Julian and Butler both reject a strict and mutually exclusive gender binary because they both subscribe to an ontology which is queerer than human categories of language, and that the body as a site of discourse is the point at which Butler and Julian meet. This essay shows not only that postmodern theory is a useful tool when reading medieval texts, but also that the medieval has something to say to the postmodern—and will continue to talk back to theory in an unending and continually transformative exchange of perspectives.

Learning to Talk Back to Texts

AbstractThis article describes an informal study that focused on teaching eighth graders to take a critical stance and talk back to texts. In this era of “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and what has been called a “post‐truth” culture, it is imperative that students do not simply accept everything they read, see, or hear at face value. They must be made aware that information presented as fact is not necessarily true and that it is up to them to identify the messages embedded in texts before deciding whether they agree with them, disagree with them, or need more information to make a decision. Data sources include students’ responses to three sophisticated picture books, their responses to questions about what talking back means and why people do it, examples of students talking back to common sayings, and examples of them talking back to an instance of administrative censorship.

Talking Back to ‘Family’, ‘Family Troubles’, and ‘the Looked-after Child’

‘Looked after’ is a term used in the UK to describe children who are the subject of ‘alternative care’ arrangements (i.e. in the care of a statutory authority), most often away from their birth parents. Within this potentially stigmatising context, this article presents a reanalysis of data from semi-structured interviews with 17 participants during three recent small-scale studies in Scotland. Juhila’s concept of ‘talking back’ to potentially stigmatising categories informs this analysis that explores participants’ understanding of, and responses to, three categorisations: the ‘family’, ‘family troubles’, and ‘the looked-after child’. Participants were young people with experience of home supervision, birth mothers of adopted children, or kinship carers. The analysis finds clear examples of ‘talking back’ to all three categories, including through a process that linked categories, such that accepting aspects of one potentially stigmatised identity helped to explain membership of another. This suggests a potential refinement of Juhila’s model. ‘Looked after’ was widely understood, but the term was seldom used by participants. There was evidence that participants ‘talked back’ to the idea of looked-after child by problematising its appropriateness in their circumstances, including home supervision and kinship care. In their discussions with researchers, these participants privileged biological understandings of ‘family’, affirming enduring links despite troubles and separations. The article concludes by identifying briefly some implications for policy and practice.

Syrian Mothers Producing Counterstories in Co-Constructed School Spaces: Rethinking the Role of Schools in Engaging Refugee Families

This ethnographically informed field study, drawing on a blend of feminist theories and cultural learning pathways framework, reveals that Syrian mothers show strong presence and readiness to take active roles when opportunities present themselves in alternative spaces in the public schools of Turkey. As mothers produce counterstories in relation to their gendered, religious, and ethnic identities, they talk back to anti-immigrant discourses. Their dialogues with teachers show apparent contradictions between what they hoped for the future of their children and what the school envisioned. Such co-constructed conversations in alternative school spaces have the potential to shape schools’ role in supporting refugee families and children within and beyond the schools.

A Thomistic Appraisal of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the Capital Vices

A Thomistic Appraisal of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the Capital Vices O.P. Basil Cole As the desire for happiness underlies the desire for natural virtue, so the desire for God underlies the supernatural virtues, such that charity becomes the form or inspirer of all the virtues. What underlines all the vices is pride because pride influences all the mortal sins, since to choose spiritual, bodily, or material goods against reason tears one away from one's ultimate end, either directly by contempt of God or indirectly by preferring spiritual or material goods to God in such a way that envy of another's good brings sadness that tears away from a union with God. The arrogantly proud person reaches a point of not wanting to respect the limits of the natural law implanted in his soul by God or the divine precepts that are taught by revelation and associated with the theological virtues. However, committing grave sin does not mean one has lost all affection for God, just as disobeying one's parents does not ipso facto mean definitively hating one's parents. Is there an overall principle at all for undermining virtue? It seems not, since some sins occur as a result of ignorance or weakness. Can a specific moral virtue be the result of ignorance or even weakness in another virtue? By accident this can happen if humility results. Sins of omission might be only materially evil and virtues only materially good when commanded by pride or one of the capital vices. In such cases, virtue is not implanted in the faculties of soul or in the passions. Though St. Thomas did not know the work of Evagrius of Pontus (Antirrhêtikos, or Talking Back), he did know Cassian's Institutes and the [End Page 1] Moralia of St. Gregory the Great, which deal with the realities of evil thoughts, deadly sins, capital sins, or (what finally becomes settled terminology) the seven capital vices. But, before we get to Aquinas's helpful insights into human nature, it is important to see what the Catechism teaches about the capital vices. Pride and Its Property, Vainglory The Catechism of the Catholic Church mandated by Pope St. John Paul II in 1992 has become a fine example of turning a corner concerning moral absolutes and other doctrinal disputes. However, I would suggest that a few supplements would be in order concerning the capital vices to flesh out more deeply some problems of the moral life. St. Thomas Aquinas's theology can be a great help especially when it comes to making an examination of conscience or preventing major falls from grace and in keeping the Christian faithful vigilant in their spiritual life. The spiritual combat takes place primarily against the enemies that flow from within, though often suggested from without by the media or the devil himself. To begin with, unfortunately, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (hereafter, CCC) does not give a clear definition of what a capital vice is. Second, it prefers to call the seven dispositions capital "sins" instead of capital vices (§1866). Third, it merely gives a list of seven capital vices (ibid.), and it does not include vainglory in the list or follow Pope St. Gregory and Aquinas in teaching that pride is mother of the vices and not a capital vice in itself, strictly speaking, because pride pervades all the vices, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.1 The Catechism merely associates pride with selfishness (§1931) as causing both the hatred of God (§2094) and, often, the vice of envy (§2540), but it does not clearly show how and why pride causes these vices. Fourth, it merely states vainglory as an intention that can render a good action morally culpable without giving definition as to its underlying meaning (§1753). Nor does CCC mention the sins of contention or obstinacy, two daughters of vainglory, and it mentions discord only briefly, and without analysis. However, hypocrisy and boasting are mentioned as opposed to the virtue of truth (§§2468 and 2481), whereas Thomas places them as fruits or daughters of vain-glory. Further, CCC does not define anger, acedia, or gluttony. Their [End Page...

Probable Impossibilities: Historical Romance Readers Talk Back

Probable Impossibilities:Historical Romance Readers Talk Back Suzanne Keen (bio) I take as my starting point Phelan's conception of narrative progression: "the synthesis of textual dynamics and readerly dynamics" (12). I accept Phelan's claim that "[t]extual dynamics are the internal processes by which narratives move from beginning through middle to ending, and readerly dynamics are the corresponding cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses of the audience to those textual dynamics" (13). The responses of readers are hard to get at, but collaboration between rhetorical narrative theory that admits a role for audiences (narrative, authorial, and actual) and reader research is desirable. To illuminate the bridging "interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments" (13) enacted by readers in response to narrative encoding, I consider a small sampling of the copious social media and paratextual evidence of readerly dynamics in responses to Diana Gabaldon's as yet unfinished time-slip historical romance sequence, the Outlander novels (1990–2014).1 My response underscores the efficacy of Phelan's model by showing that it illuminates the vital role of audiences of [End Page 127] narratives quite different from those he presents (passing a fundamental test for a proposed theory, which should work as well to account for popular as for scholarly readerships). If, as Phelan argues, the authorial audience has attributes "assigned by the author but on the basis of the author's assumptions about likely readers," then the author's communication with her diverse actual readers (in this case, by means of her blog and through her published commentary, The Outlandish Companion) highlights some of those assumptions. Some methodological challenges arise from a commitment to considering readerly dynamics that allows actual audiences onto Phelan's chart. Gabaldon's readers are legion: she commands a worldwide audience for books that have sold more than twenty million copies and have been translated into thirty-eight languages.2 The New York Times bestselling novels have received a boost from their adaptation into a popular Starz television series. Though most of Gabaldon's readers are presumed to be women, the millions of viewers of her television series include many men: the series premiere, "Sassenach," drew equal proportions of men and women in the strongest multiplatform debut of a new series in the history of the network (West).3 With a potential authorial audience of that scale, we must assume recruitment from an actual audience of great diversity. Authorial audience members, as inferred from among other data points on her Website and those reproduced in The Outlandish Companion (369–95), enjoy reading very lengthy novels (9,073 paperback pages so far), sustain interest in a fiction delivered serially, and tolerate fairly long gaps between installments—though potentially they require the "methadone" of Gabaldon's book recommendations to tide them over (571–77). Whether they read for the sex scenes, for the historical reconstructions of events, because they find eighteenth-century medicine fascinating, or simply to follow familiar characters, can and must vary. That Gabaldon engages with her readers shows in her acknowledgement of "… the Readers, who both instigated this book and supplied me with a great deal of its content by asking questions, suggesting Things They Would Like to Know, and providing all sorts of interesting miscellanea" (Outlandish Companion v). Though Gabaldon tries to teach these readers about the error of presentism (343), their responses include passionate presentist denunciations of her representational choices, which (valuing plausibility and verisimilitude) she defends as influenced by the historical period and not under her own control at all (129, 191, 341).4 The author [End Page 128] meets her readers more than partway, blithely admitting minor errors and oversights caught by readers (136, 374), but she stoutly defends her rights as a maker. Rather than joining in the self-deprecating assessment of Gabaldon readers as Obsessenachs, who turn to fan sites to endure Droughtlander periods between novels, I suggest that Gabaldon's real audience talks back and the real author engages with them, within limits. The fictional world of Outlander consists on the one hand of a rigorously researched eighteenth century (with persuasively rendered locations and episodes in the Scottish Highlands, Paris, the Caribbean, coastal and mountain colonial North Carolina, and...

Learning to Talk Back to Texts

This article argues that to help students join academic conversations we should look for opportunities to integrate multimedia texts into the classroom, both as artifacts to study and as models for assignments. In contrast to traditional assignments like response papers, projects that invite students to engage with texts and ideas in multiple ways—digital, oral and nonverbal, and visual, as well as through writing—can make our classrooms and academic conversations more accessible and inclusive. Often our students struggle with not what to say but how to say it in an academic register; using a more accessible and inclusive approach creates space for students to join the conversation while they are still learning the norms of academic discourse. Drawing on my experience teaching a freely accessible online adaptation of a classic novel, I emphasize that models of more inclusive and accessible ways for students to respond to course material can be found all around us. I offer teachers strategies and a rationale for integrating more digital texts, tools, and platforms into their course and assignment design.

Talk Back with Yik Yak? Exploring User Engagement via Anonymous Social Media in an Academic Library

ABSTRACTThis article presents results of a study of library-related posts on Yik Yak, a former social media app, and questions received via more traditional library-maintained virtual reference service platforms—namely, chat/instant messaging, SMS/text messaging, email, and LibAnswers' Query Spy—at College of Charleston's Addlestone Library. Based on an analysis of the results, suggestions are made for using social media tools similar to Yik Yak as a tool for interacting with patrons in academic library settings, specifically as a means to gather feedback about the library and to provide basic reference services.