The Sydney 2002 Gay Games and Querying Australian National Space

10.1068/d401 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Waitt
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
National Space ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
Opening Ceremony ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gay Pride ◽  
Gay Games ◽  
Sports Venues ◽  
National Boundaries

In what ways did Sydney's Gay Games reinvent the Australian nation? In this paper I set out to examine this question by drawing upon the idea that sports and parades of athletes during opening ceremonies have been definitive moments for the Australian nation. I investigate the social terrains or bodyscapes invoked by sporting gay pride during the participants' parade at the opening ceremony and sports venues of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games. This enables insights into whether these spaces subverted the heteronormativity of sporting bodies that are metaphors for Australian national space. I centre my argument within a post-Foucauldian performance theory to consider both lived experience and textual representations of queer sports spaces. This approach advocates a recursive relationship between power, discourse, and critically reflexive, geographically embedded subjects. The ethnographic basis of my findings is participant observation and a time series of in-depth interviews with over forty self-identifying gay and queer males living in Sydney. I extract two overarching themes from the bodyscapes of the games: transcendence and imprisonment. For those actively involved in the making of camp bodyscapes, mimicking the monopoly of the dominant order through the authority of national signification provided by the parade of athletes at opening ceremonies and by sporting bodies offered a transgressive vehicle. However, the pillar of hetero-normative sporting bodies in defining Australian national boundaries survived unchallenged. Sporting gay pride also worked to close rather than to open up a space for discourses about sexuality and national identity to occur. Closure from a mainstream audience occurred by jettisoning the shame that links sport, sex, and bodies. Closure also occurred amongst certain respondents who shunned the games, regarding it as disciplining bodies into ‘normalcy’.

scholarly journals Engaging Values Despite Neutrality

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Shilton
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Protocol Design ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Internet Protocols ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
Protocol Development ◽  
Infrastructure Design ◽  
The Social

Internet protocol development is a social process, and resulting protocols are shaped by their developers’ politics and values. This article argues that the work of protocol development (and more broadly, infrastructure design) poses barriers to developers’ reflection upon values and politics in protocol design. A participant observation of a team developing internet protocols revealed that difficulties defining the stakeholders in an infrastructure and tensions between local and global viewpoints both complicated values reflection. Further, Internet architects tended to equate a core value of interoperability with values neutrality. The article describes how particular work practices within infrastructure development overcame these challenges by engaging developers in praxis: situated, lived experience of the social nature of technology.

scholarly journals Stigma and segregation: containing the Roma of Údol, Czech Republic

Race & Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbora Černušáková
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Black People ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Community Networks ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Roma Population ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Measures

This article analyses the lived experience of a Czech Roma community in Údol, Ostrava. Based on the author’s participant-observation research, it demonstrates how certain neighbourhoods are increasingly targeted by policy measures which range from the denial of benefits to residents of certain areas to large-scale evictions or plans to demolish public housing. Such approaches are becoming a Europe-wide phenomenon. Although proponents of these measures argue the need to ‘protect law and order’, their policies target communities that are racialised as immigrant, Roma or Muslim. In some ways, the social exclusion of the Roma mirrors that of Black people in US ghettos, but there are also significant differences. The author demonstrates how the ‘post-socialist’ reality of Údol has been defined by the outsourcing of the state’s social functions, such as housing, to be carried out by charities and business. This has contributed, in what has now been turned into a racially defined space, to the ongoing reproduction of Údol’s containment of its Roma population, who, nonetheless, in their everyday life strategies have developed reliance on local and community networks that have replaced the state.

“Big Freaky-Looking Women”: Normalizing Gender Transgression through Bodybuilding

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelly A. McGrath ◽  
Ruth A. Chananie-Hill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
College Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Attribution ◽  
Depth Interviews

Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with 10 college-level female bodybuilders, this paper focuses on several aspects of female bodybuilding that are underexplored in existing literature, including purposeful gender transgressions, gender attribution, racialized bodies, and the conflation of sex, gender, and sexual preference. We draw on critical feminist theory and the social constructionist perspective to enhance collective understanding of the subversive possibilities emerging from female bodybuilders’ lived experience. Collectively, female bodybuilders’ experiences affect somatic and behavioral gender norms in a wider Western-type industrialized society such as the United States.

Engaging Student Mothers Creatively: Animated Stories of Navigating University, Inner City, and Home Worlds

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-114
Author(s):  
Lise Kouri ◽  
Tania Guertin ◽  
Angel Shingoose
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Student Mothers ◽  
Education Outcomes ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University ◽  
Animated Graphic

The article discusses a collaborative project undertaken in Saskatoon by Community Engagement and Outreach office at the University of Saskatchewan in partnership with undergraduate student mothers with lived experience of poverty. The results of the project were presented as an animated graphic narrative that seeks to make space for an under-represented student subpopulation, tracing strategies of survival among university, inner city and home worlds. The innovative animation format is intended to share with all citizens how community supports can be used to claim fairer health and education outcomes within system forces at play in society. This article discusses the project process, including the background stories of the students. The entire project, based at the University of Saskatchewan, Community Engagement and Outreach office at Station 20 West, in Saskatoon’s inner city, explores complex intersections of racialization, poverty and gender for the purpose of cultivating empathy and deeper understanding within the university to better support inner city students. amplifying community voices and emphasizing the social determinants of health in Saskatoon through animated stories.

Studying Globalization at Home

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Qualitative Approaches ◽  
Interpretive Methods ◽  
Significant Interest ◽  
At Home

This chapter documents the ethnographic context in which the interviews and participant observation were conducted for the study presented in this book. It also situates the study within the context of narrative inquiry and develops arguments about the role of self-reflexivity in doing ethnography at “home” and producing qualitative forms of knowledge that are based on personal, experiential, and cultural narratives. It is argued that there is significant interest in the adoption of interpretive methods or qualitative research in psychology. The qualitative approaches in psychology present a provocative and complex vision of how the key concepts related to describing and interpreting cultural codes, social practices, and lived experience of others are suffused with both poetical and political elements of culture. The epistemological and ontological assumptions undergirding qualitative research reflect multiple “practices of inquiry” and methodologies that have different orientations, assumptions, values, ideologies, and criterion of excellence.

Family Participation in Challenger Baseball: Critical Theory Perspectives

1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 372-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lupe Castañ ◽  
Claudine Sherrill
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Emotional Support ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Physical Disabilities ◽  
Head Coach ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Field Notes

The purpose was to analyze the social construction of Challenger baseball opportunities in a selected community. Participants were 10 boys and 6 girls with mental and/or physical disabilities (ages 7 to 16 years, M = 11.31), their families, and the head coach. Data were collected through interviews in the homes with all family members, participant observation at practices and games, and field notes. The research design was qualitative, and critical theory guided interpretation. Analytical induction revealed five outcomes that were particularly meaningful as families and coach socially constructed Challenger baseball: (a) fun and enjoyment, (b) positive affect related to equal opportunity and feelings of “normalcy,” (c) social networking/emotional support for families, (d) baseball knowledge and skills, and (e) social interactions with peers.

Generative pedagogies from and for the social production of habitat: Learning from HIC-AL School of grassroots urbanism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Wesely ◽  
Adriana Allen ◽  
Lorena Zárate ◽  
María Silvia Emanuelli
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Global South ◽  
Generative Learning ◽  
Social Production ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Depth Interviews

Re-thinking dominant epistemological assumptions of the urban in the global South implies recognising the role of grassroots networks in challenging epistemic injustices through the co-production of multiple saberes and haceres for more just and inclusive cities. This paper examines the pedagogies of such networks by focusing on the experiences nurtured within Habitat International Coalition in Latin America (HIC-AL), identified as a ‘School of Grassroots Urbanism’ (Escuela de Urbanismo Popular). Although HIC-AL follows foremost activist rather than educational objectives, members of HIC-AL identify and value their practices as a ‘School’, whose diverse pedagogic logics and epistemological arguments are examined in this paper. The analysis builds upon a series of in-depth interviews, document reviews and participant observation with HIC-AL member organisations and allied grassroots networks. The discussion explores how the values and principles emanating from a long history of popular education and popular urbanism in the region are articulated through situated pedagogies of resistance and transformation, which in turn enable generative learning from and for the social production of habitat.

The French Language in Russia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Offord ◽  
Vladislav Rjéoutski ◽  
Gesine Argent
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Uk

-- With support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK and the Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau -- The French Language in Russia provides the fullest examination and discussion to date of the adoption of the French language by the elites of imperial Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is interdisciplinary, approaching its subject from the angles of various kinds of history and historical sociolinguistics. Beyond its bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, this book may afford more general insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. It should also enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, it has significance in an age of unprecedented global connectivity, for it invites us to look beyond the experience of a single nation and the social groups and individuals within it in order to discover how languages and the cultures and narratives associated with them have been shared across national boundaries.

17. Covert Feminism: Female Activists on the Field of Play

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Sport Participation ◽  
Female Athletes ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Sport Policy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Impact Sport ◽  
The Impact

Because of feminist activism, what were once considered incompatible entities, women and sport, have come to be united within the social fabric of the 21st century. Recent generations of women are the first to experience sport as a commonplace reality that is largely taken for granted. After initial exclusion from the first and second wave feminist agendas, many activists now recognize sport as a vehicle for the advancement of women. The female athlete has been described by some academics as a type of “stealth feminist” who can support key feminist causes without arousing a knee-jerk social response. Although female sport participation and the status of female athletes have improved significantly, the impact this has had in the lived experience of women remains to be understood. This research project seeks to conduct focus groups with female athletes to better understand their relationship with the topic of feminism and to explore the impact sport participation has had within their lives. Deeper comprehension and documentation of sport from the perspective of female participants may not only serve to help guide sport policy and programing, but may also serve to foster a united, feminist consciousness that is capable of expanding the possibilities for female athletes and for women more broadly. 

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