The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Helen Keller ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Biographical scholarship provides a means by which to understand the past. Disability biography writes disabled people into historical narratives and cultural discourses, acknowledging power, action, and consequence. Disability biography also analyzes the role of ableism in shaping relationships, systems of power, and societal ideals. When written with skilled storytelling, rigorous study, nuance, and insight, disability biography enriches analyses of people living in the past. Disability biography makes clear the multiple ways by which individuals and communities labor, make kinship, persevere, and both resist and create social change. When using a disability analysis, biographies of disabled people (particularly people famous for their disability, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Helen Keller) reveal the relationality and historically embedded nature of disability. In an ableist world, such acts can be revolutionary.

Contesting the past on the Chinese Internet: Han-centrism and mnemonic practices

2019 ◽  
pp. 175069801987599
Author(s):  
Yi Wang
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Online Groups ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Historical Accounts

Digital technology has brought critical changes to mnemonic practices in China, such as the empowerment of social groups to discover previously underrepresented historical accounts and produce alternative historical narratives. This article examines the mnemonic practices of Han-centrism, a type of ethnic and cultural nationalist movement based on the Chinese Internet. It analyzes how Han-centrist netizens reinterpret national history through their efforts to rediscover forgotten historical narratives of glory and trauma. It suggests that digital technology in China facilitates the emergence of online groups that are dedicated to the struggle for “historical truth” and social-cultural changes, motivated by a crisis of identity. Their mnemonic practices may be partly tolerated by the authoritarian state under some conditions. However, given China’s complicated and conflictual history, such online groups can easily turn the Internet into a battlefield of nationalism. This article highlights the confusion and contestation of memory and identity in contemporary China and the role of digital technology in the long battle.

History Repeating Itself. The function of turning points and continuity in three historical narratives on operetta

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Mikael Strömberg
Keyword(s):  
Turning Points ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

The article’s primary aim is to discuss the function of turning points and continuity within historiography. That a historical narrative, produced at a certain time and place, influence the way the historian shapes and develops the argument is problematized by an emphasis on the complex relationship between turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts within an argumentative framework. Aided by a number of examples from three historical narratives on operetta, the article stresses the importance of creating new narratives about the past. Two specific examples from the history of operetta, the birth of the genre and the role of music, are used to illustrate the need to revise not only the use of source material and the narrative strategy used, but also how the argument proposed by the historian gathers strength. The interpretation of turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts illustrate the need to revise earlier historical narratives when trying to counteract the repetitiveness of history.

How to Turn History into Scenario

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Lane
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
The Past ◽  
Normative Content ◽  
Normative Account

In this chapter, Lane argues that Plato in Republic Book 8 emancipates the logic of social change from the past while infusing it with normative content. From this perspective, Plato might be said to invent a logic of intelligible choice to explain social change in the form of an explanatory scenario rather than history. Whereas Herodotus and Thucydides investigated the record of observable social changes in the past and present, Plato undertakes a new intellectual enterprise: an exploration of the mechanisms of social change that is not merely adduced from the happenstance character of those events that have actually occurred. Furthermore, what Plato offers is a form of sociopolitical explanation that is premised on a normative account of the objective moral good, centered on the role of law as a principle of order oriented to the good, and on rule as essentially aiming to serve the good of the ruled.

scholarly journals THE CONDITION OF CRISIS AND THE SYMPTOMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE: FIVE FLIGHTS OF THOUGHT ON THE POST OF THE GREEK POST-POLITY ERA

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandros Kyriakopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Greek Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The World ◽  
Of Greece

It is a well-known fact that Greece faces one of the most precarious and transformative periods of its modern history. Greek society has come to learn, in a baleful manner, that crisis is the sequence of its former political inefficiencies and a slump that must be overcome. The pressure of this awareness leads people to deface previously established social convictions about the self and the world. In this procedure, social and mass media articulate and (re)produce discourses from above, below and the past so to capitalize the present for a new and solid horizon for the future. This article challenges five beliefs that circulate in the Greek public sphere, inculcating in the collective consciousness their incontrovertible realities. The end of Post-Polity era (the “former” political status quo of Greece), the revival of ethno-socialist movements, the debt crisis of eurozone countries, youth's stand for social change and the role of Greece in this global financial turmoil comprise the contents of this critical debate; one that aims to make sense of what social change feels like in the context of the current global crisis.

scholarly journals THE ROLE OF URBAN SUFISM OF SHALAWAT MUHAMMAD ASSEMBLY ON URBAN MIDDLE CLASS SOCIETY

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 183
Author(s):  
Rubaidi Rubaidi
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Value System ◽  
Cultural Brokers ◽  
Inherent Value ◽  
The Past ◽  
Class Society ◽  
New System

This article critically examines the role of Sufism in the process of social change in society,especially among urban societies that are symbolized by their middle class society. The subjectin this study is the Shalawat Muhammad Assembly under Mursyid Gus Kahar and his successor,Gus Mustakim. Although the assembly represents the urban sufism, but it has rooted fromclassical Sufism. In analyzing the role of this assembly in the process of social change in society,the theoretical framework of Cultural Brokers and Cultural Trendsetter of Geertz and Hirokosiare used as perspectives. The result simultaneously, consistently, and progressively shows thatSufism has a major contribution in any social change of societies to the value and ideology fromthe outside. The inherent value system in Sufism symbolized by the guru (murshid), is not just arole as a cultural broker as mentioned by the theory of Geertz. In fact, all gurus (mursyid) arewilling to change the value and ideology from the outside into a new system of traditions andcultures. This phenomenon resembles the cultural role of kyai in the Islamization of Indonesiain the past. It is the same like the theory of the cultural trendsetter of Hirokosi

Ubiquitous Creativity, Imagination in Dialogue, and Innovative Practice-in-Action

2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (10) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori A. Custodero
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social And Physical Environment

Background Over the past century, the role of creativity in teaching and learning has been interpreted in many ways, leading to often conflicting discipline-specific definitions, measurements, and pedagogical applications. Purpose/Objective This issue takes on the perspective of creativity as ubiquitous, and follows that line of inquiry in its psycho-social manifestations, its application in innovative educational settings, and the persistence through which ideas and imagery become active forces for transformation and social change. Research Design As an introduction to the issue, this article summarizes and articulates the relatedness between scholars within a variety of educational fields. Conclusions/Recommendations When viewed as ubiquitous, creativity can be a lens through which to interpret learning as a transformational experience, where the learner resources the social and physical environment to move from not knowing to knowing. Motivating such transformation are (a) the ability to identify what is not known, (b) the juxtaposition of difference to reveal alternate ways of knowing, and (c) the openness to possibility and willingness to explore.

The Precious Seed of Christian Virtue: Charity, Disability, and Belonging in Guatemala, 1871–1947

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-295
Author(s):  
Heather Vrana
Keyword(s):  
General Hospital ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Access To Resources ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Gain Access

Abstract This article addresses the role of disability and disabled people in the construction of citizenship and nation through the ideologies and practices of charity from the 1870s through the 1940s. These periods of Guatemalan history are generally thought of as distinct: the Liberal triumph over Conservatives, Liberal dictatorship, and democratic revolution. To the contrary, practices of charity reveal the continuity of these political forms. This article explains the three models of charity that characterized modern Guatemala—caridad, beneficencia, and asistencia social—and outlines how they reflected understandings of the relationship between individuals and the state. It also provides a window into the daily lives of patients at the nation's insane asylum, leprosarium, and general hospital, who were not merely objects of charity but also political subjects who engaged charity models to gain access to resources, people, and mobility. In sum, this article integrates disability into broader historical narratives.

scholarly journals Canonical Generations and the British Left: The Narrative Construction of the Miners’ Strike 1984–85

Sociology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 850-864 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nettleingham
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

‘Generations’ have been invoked to describe a variety of social and cultural relationships, and to understand the development of self-conscious group identity. Equally, the term can be an applied label and politically useful construct; generations can be retrospectively produced. Drawing on the concept of ‘canonical generations’ – those whose experiences come to epitomise an event of historic and symbolic importance – this article examines the narrative creation and functions of ‘generations’ as collective memory shapes and re-shapes the desire for social change. Building a case study of the canonical role of the miners’ strike of 1984–85 in the narrative history of the British left, it examines the selective appropriation and transmission of the past in the development of political consciousness. It foregrounds the autobiographical narratives of activists who, in examining and legitimising their own actions and prospects, (re)produce a ‘generation’ in order to create a relatable and useful historical understanding.

scholarly journals Blinkered Learning, Blinkered Theory: How Histories in Textbooks Parochialize IR

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 957-982 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brieg Powel
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
The Past

Abstract Calls for a more “global” international relations (IR) based on theories grounded in world rather than Western histories have highlighted the Eurocentrism of history within the discipline. Global IR literature, however, neglects the role of tempocentrism in fostering that Eurocentrism. Tempocentric IR portrays the past as an extrapolation of the (Eurocentric) present, suggesting an inevitability and normality to Western dominance of international relations and obscuring non-Western significance. It also deprives IR theory-building of a broader pool of examples to inform existing theories. This article locates those centrisms in the textbooks of the discipline, while drawing on interdisciplinary research to reveal the disproportionate influence of the first years of higher education on students’ future worldviews. It is here that students are exposed to a historical grand narrative that establishes the boundaries of their inquiries and outlines what is, and what is not, significant. For a more “global” IR, therefore, it is suggested that textbook historical narratives require reconstructing in two ways. First, textbook history should be presented through connections and relations rather than substances. Second, historical chapters should reveal the multiple layers of time, including the deeper past, that have been instrumental in constituting the international relations of today.

Dewey, Addams, and Design Thinking

2018 ◽  
pp. 312-332
Author(s):  
Judy D. Whipps
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Experimental Approach ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Past

Looking at Dewey’s and Addams’ aspirations for an ethical democracy, this chapter examines the philosophic and methodological connections between pragmatist social change and contemporary design thinking innovation. Design thinking, a method of problem-solving based in understanding the values and needs of people, has become a useful method of social change in the past decade. It is in many ways comparable to pragmatist social ethics that require empathy as a foundation for democracy and embrace experimentalism, meliorism, and fallibilism. Design thinkers talk about the importance of difference/diversity but often have limited critical reflection on the theoretical underpinnings on the role of power and privilege in the design process. A feminist pragmatist lens can address this and strengthen this experimental approach. Reading Addams’ and Dewey’s work also provides historical context for a contemporary culture of innovation while providing guidance for future social imagining.

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