Unexamined Ways Research Articles

Public charge, legal estrangement, and renegotiating situational trust in the US healthcare safety net

AbstractUS immigration law increasingly excludes many immigrants materially and symbolically from vital safety-net resources. Existing scholarship has emphasized the public charge rule as a key mechanism for enacting these exclusionary trends, but less is known about how recent public charge uncertainty has shaped how noncitizens and healthcare workers negotiate safety-net resources. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 80 safety-net workers and patients in three US states from 2015 to 2020, I argue that intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding public charge has extended a sense of surveillance into clinical spaces in previously unexamined ways. Drawing on theories of medical legal violence, system avoidance, and legal estrangement, I demonstrate how these dynamics undermined immigrants' health chances and compromised clinic workers' efforts to facilitate care. I also reveal how participants responded to this insinuation of legal violence in healthcare spaces by promoting situational trust in specific procedures and institutions.

Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel

HOW STATISTICAL MODEL DEVELOPMENT CAN OBSCURE INEQUITIES IN STEM STUDENT OUTCOMES

Researchers often frame quantitative research as objective, but every step in data collection and analysis can bias findings in often unexamined ways. In this investigation, we examined how the process of selecting variables to include in regression models (model specification) can bias findings about inequities in science and math student outcomes. We identified the four most used methods for model specification in discipline-based education research about equity: a priori, statistical significance, variance explained, and information criterion. Using a quantitative critical perspective that blends statistical theory with critical theory, we reanalyzed the data from a prior publication using each of the four methods and compared the findings from each. We concluded that using information criterion produced models that best aligned with our quantitative critical perspective's emphasis on intersectionality and models with more accurate coefficients and uncertainties. Based on these findings, we recommend researchers use information criterion for specifying models about inequities in STEM student outcomes.

The Grotesque and Obscene in post-Cold War Africa: Mbembe and the Child Soldier Novel

This article applies Achille Mbembe's formulations of the grotesque and the obscene to Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma's widely-read child soldier novel Allah n'est pas obligé (2000), highlighting under-examined aspects of Kourouma's prose style and political commentary. While critics have focused on the novel as a fictionalized description of a child soldier's experience in 1990s West Africa, a close reading of the text reveals Kourouma's preoccupation with the origins and composition of post-Cold War African political organization. The article reads Kourouma's use of obscenity and grotesque imagery through a Mbembian lens, revealing a continuity between the Cold-War era power structures that Mbembe describes in his essays and the post-Cold War political landscape in which the plot of Kourouma's novel plays out. By applying Mbembe's idea of 'illicit cohabitation' to Kourouma, the article reveals the transnational applicability of Mbembe's writing on the 'postcolony', while also highlighting the previously unexamined ways in which Kourouma satirizes his Western readership. Ultimately, the ability of Mbembe's terminology to reveal previously unexamined depths of a much-discussed and celebrated novel such as Allah n'est pas obligé shows the continued relevance of his thought to our understanding of contemporary Africa and the icons which mediate its image both within the continent and beyond.

Differences between Founder-Led and Non-Founder-Led Congregations: A Research Note

While sociologists have had a longstanding interest in religious leadership and congregational authority structures, most of the research in this area ignores the fact that many congregational leaders started the congregations they lead. Being in this unique position, founding pastor, likely gives them unusual authority to shape church policy and practice in, as yet, unexamined ways. Using three waves of the National Congregational Study, we examine differences between congregations led by their first (i.e., founding) pastor and congregations led by subsequent pastors hired by or assigned to those congregations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these differences.

Privatizing the commons: New approaches need broader evaluative criteria for sustainability

Privatization is, since Hardin, often promoted as a solution to many natural resource management challenges, particularly in common-pool resource systems. However, novel forms of privatization are being implemented in unexamined ways. In this article we explore how privatization affects natural resource management from the perspective of multi-dimensional social-ecological systems. We critique the notion that privatization is desirable due to its pure efficiency, and argue that efficiency must be relative to achieving other normative societal goals, in particular, sustainability. While sustainability outcomes often cannot be fully actualized, the processes through which privatization attempts to achieve them are more tangible criteria. First, we draw on (1) distributional and (2) procedural justice as normative societal goals to assess effectiveness of different forms of privatization. Second, we analyze the broader implications of privatization for social-ecological system functioning considering (3) path dependency and (4) spillover effects. We apply these four concepts to examine three different cases of privatization: eco-certification in fisheries, seed patents in agriculture and property rights in rangelands. We argue that the evaluative criteria for the success of privatization are often oversimplified, and highlight how privatization can influence social-ecological systems and the achievement of normative goals in largely unexamined ways.

Gælden, gaven og geden: Om skyldnere og humanitær økonomi

This article centers on the complex relationship between debt and gifts – or, more to the point, between the neoliberal economy of debt as diagnosed by Maurizio Lazzarato, among others, and humanitarian subjectivity; Between debt government and humanitarian government. Drawing on the work of Ananya Roy and looking to objects of debt/humanitarian relief such as Greece and Haiti, I suggest that what Lazzarato terms ‘indebted man’ today co-exists in hitherto unexamined ways with ‘humanitarian man’, and that these two forms of subjectivity in fact share dispositions of guilt and shame. In order to further examine the guilty or ‘indebted’ disposition of everyday humanitarians I then continue to discuss a particular humanitarian product, namely the ‘charity goat’ and other third-party gifts. Here I draw in particular on Lilie Chouliaraki’s notion of post-humanitarianism in order to suggest that third-party charitable giving gives cultural form to the experience of indebtedness of the humanitarian gift-giver. This experience is, I finally suggest, part of a broader Scandinavian, but not exclusively Scandinavian, predicament of privilege.

The Memory Exchange: Public Mourning at the National 9/11 Memorial Museum

This article argues that the National 9/11 Museum blurs the lines between first hand experience and the experiences of visitors who come to participate in a shared encounter of public mourning and non-stop documentation. All visitors to the museum are invited to contribute to its testimonial archive in two prominent ways: by preserving their own “9/11 story” in a recording booth or by composing a message in a digital guestbook that is subsequently projected against the slurry wall as part of the permanent exhibit. By encouraging visitors to “Join the Conversation,” the museum frames 9/11 less as a specific event or date circumscribed by geographical spaces and more as an unending process of subjectification, in which the category of “witness” is constituted through acts of virtual exchange without much regard to an individual's proximity to the event. Bearing witness is unbounded in time and constituted though the circulation of affects, in which the feeling of what it is like to claim the status of witness emerges as a privileged figuration of historical trauma—yet one which remains mediated by state power in unexamined ways.

Sancha Carrillo and Juan de Ávila: The Reciprocal Fruits of Spiritual Mentorship in Early Sixteenth-Century Andalusia

This essay investigates the spiritual mentorship of Dona Sancha Carrillo (1513–37) by Juan de Avila (1499–1569). The relationship shaped Carrillo’s self-reliance and Avila’s identity as educator, writer, and counselor. I uncover unexamined ways in which Carrillo, with Avila’s help, plotted a path of increasing spiritual autonomy by applying the lessons that he taught her: learning to control her visions, quell her desires, counsel others, and harness her senses to achieve heightened spirituality. Contrary to conventional accounts that briefly note Avila’s tutelage of Carrillo, this essay argues that the relationship profoundly affected Avila when he emerged as a leader of Christian life in Andalusia, during an important transitional age for the region after the Reconquest and before the Counter Reformation. I demonstrate how Avila’s schools and apostolate bear the imprint of Carrillo because he developed pedagogies with her that he later applied broadly. This essay also sheds light on the possibilities and representations of women’s religious practices in early sixteenth-century Andalusia, both of which changed after Trent’s directives and affected treatment of Carrillo’s story. First I lay out information about Avila and the spiritual program that he developed for Carrillo. Then I analyze evidence that shows how this curriculum fostered autonomy for Carrillo, allowing her to advise others in accordance with Avila’s way. This essay builds from secondary observations of Carrillo’s practices and intellect to primary evidence from her letter and visions, revealing the bidirectional nature of the influence between guide and mentee and its effects on the greater community.

Certifying the commons: eco-certification, privatization, and collective action

We examine new dynamics of privatization and collective action in common pool resource situations facilitated by the nonstate multistakeholder institutions of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the global leader in sustainability certification for wild caught seafood. Through a review of the literature and two case studies of fishing cooperatives in Baja California Sur, Mexico and on Fogo Island in the Canadian Province of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), we advance two interrelated arguments. First, certification and eco-labeling institutions privatize fisheries governance in largely unexamined ways through the injection of new forms of exclusive rights or privileges into common pool resource situations already complicated by access and property privileges, creating conditions for confusion and conflict as well as cooperation. Second, the MSC whole stock definition of sustainability places greater demands on certification clients for engaging in collective action by encouraging coordination over all social extractions from targeted fish stocks. Although rules encouraging collective action in common pool situations militate against the narrow private capture of certificate and eco-label rights, they also undermine the ability of small-scale and community-based fisheries that are embedded in larger unhealthy fishery contexts to acquire the right to the MSC stamp of sustainability. We conclude that MSC certification and eco-labeling create new institutions of private property rights and collective action, which can result in exclusionary practices, inclusionary collective action, or both. Much will depend on the specific common pool context and history of the fishery.

Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from ‘primitive’ corpulence to ‘civilized’ moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books – all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time – it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ traits. This tension between fat and ‘civilization’ was by no means univocal or stable. Rather, this analysis shows, a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals can be traced between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed ‘primitive’ in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard was sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.

Balzac's Algeria: Realism and the Colonial

Frequently mentioned but almost never shown, Algeria haunts the margins of the Balzac's La Comédie humaine in unexamined ways. This article considers the epistemological and representational stakes of that absent presence. Algeria, I argue, exposes a number of fissures in a nascent Balzacian realism. Functioning as a metonym and repository for the tendency over time of class encounters to produce unclassifiable results, the colony works to contain—and exacerbate—a creeping breakdown in signification at the heart of the Balzacian project. It also figures the limits of the spatial poetics so key to Balzac's panoramic ambitions. All of this, I conclude, symptomizes a basic disjuncture between the colonial periphery and realism's capacity for representing it, and helps explain the relative paucity of colonial settings in Balzac's work and in that of his realist inheritors.

Reflective Practice and a Process Called “Levelising”

The most widely accepted concept of reflective practice depicts a cyclic process of reflection in action and on action. Building on the tradition that begins with Schon’s seminal work, this paper describes an approach to reflective practice that incorporates the perspectives and theories of others whose own views promise to increase the potential of individual reflection on and in practice. Called “Levelising,” the process begins in our routine, unexamined ways of being; from various perspectives that are themselves subject to reflection, we come to know more about what we do as individuals in order to go on together with others. There are four different points of view that individuals or groups can take on their practice when they intend to understand and change some aspect of it, including their own role as practitioner(s). Level one is pre-reflective being; level two is reflective being; level three is framing; and level four is theorizing. It is in the last level that we identify what is new about this approach to reflective practice. Incorporating multiple ways of knowing, Levelising has particular relevancy to collaborative learning, reflective practice, and action research.

Flights of Fantasy? Or Space-Time Compression in Asian-Australian Picture Books


 
 
 Metaphors of hybridity and the like not only recognize difference within the subject, fracturing and complicating holistic notions of identity, but also address connections between subjects by recognizing affiliations, cross-pollinations, echoes and repetitions, thereby unseating difference from a position of absolute privilege...such metaphors allow us to conceive of multiple, interconnecting axes of affiliation and differentiation. (Felski 1997, p.12)
 While the concepts of space and time affect people universally, they occupy a dominant position in childhood experience by virtue of their fluidity. For a growing body that is rapidly being redefined in space as clothes, furniture and developmental phases are outgrown at what seems to surrounding adults to be an exponential rate, but that often feels to the child waiting for the next long-off birthday to be agonisingly slow. thus, space and time are understood experientially in complex but often unexamined ways. This fluidity of space and time is likewise central to but also often uncritically recognised in the representational spaces of the picture books that children consume. in order to engage with the conceptual, semiotic and socio-political dimensions of the space-time continuum in picture books, this paper will assess two stories that negotiate physical and psychical depictions of migration. the analysis will proceed by looking at the ways in which hybridised space operates as a function of power and subjectivity central to the project of mediating narratives about Asian-Australian diasporic cultures. My analysis here relates only to textual representations of migrant experience, rather than judgements about identity politics per se; and suggests ways in which diasporic experiences are negotiated across space and time in picture books.
 
 

The “Prophet-Poet’s Book”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse-novel Aurora Leigh was her intended magnum opus . Yet she has been taken to task by critics, both in her age and ours, for her seemingly strange hybrid use of the verse-novel form. In order to reconcile the disparity we must see this unusual text as something different from a fragmentary or not-very-successful instantiation of either genre separately but instead as a “literary self-portrait”—a form of polemical life narrative. I argue in this essay that Barrett Browning inherited this form from her revolutionary foremother Mary Wollstonecraft and passed it on to her modernist literary “daughter” Virginia Woolf in heretofore unexamined ways.

Workplace education and corporate control in global networks of interaction

On the one hand, contemporary corporations want people who are geographically, culturally and temporally remote to work together to generate new knowledge and accomplish routine work—they want to generate multi‐disciplinary, globally dispersed communities of practice. On the other hand, they need to exert some control over this divergent, dispersed, innovative and creative workforce. Here I explore the role that workplace education plays in mediating individual and group autonomy, and central control, in global networks of interaction. I consider the ways that three workplace educators (working in government training institutions, commercial organisations, in‐house human resource departments and unions) intervene in work practice at local (but not necessarily geographically local) worksites in unexamined ways. I argue that their stories offer us insights into the ways workplace educators help create new (face‐to‐face and virtual) learning communities, certainly, but they also help to exert centralised corporate control over work practice, work relationships and work identities, in unobtrusive ways.

MODERNISM vs POSTMODERNISM IN MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING

The debate over objective versus subjective measurement in accounting is reviewed within the broader framework of the worldviews of modernity/modernism and postmodernism. A description of these two periods of history helps to clarify their different as well as similar and often confusing characteristics. A review of the history of management accounting is conducted to highlight its role in shaping the modern period as well as how it was shaped by it. Existing and emerging problems in accounting in a postmodern era are examined. The role of critical accounting in this process is emphasized and some of its ideas and explanations are utilized in the analysis. Some implications for the accounting profession are discussed.“When social scientists import the dominant institutional logics into their analyses of individuals and organizations in unexamined ways, they unreflectively elaborate the symbolic order and social practices of the institutions they study.” (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 260)Herr Settembrini: “Do you believe in truth, in objective, scientific truth, to strive after the attainment which is the highest law of all morality, and whose triumphs over authority form the most glorious page in the history of the human spirit?”Naphtha: “There can be no such triumphs as those you speak of, for the authority is man himself-his interests, his worth, his salvation-and thus between it and truth no conflict is possible. They coincide. . Whatever profits man, that is the truth.” (Thomas Mann,The Magic Mountain)