Embodied Subjectivities: Intersections of Discursive and Critical Psychology With Socio-Cultural Exercise Research

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirkko Markula
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Critical Psychology ◽  
Physically Active ◽  
Research Traditions ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Individual Actions ◽  
Sociocultural Research

There has been a longstanding divide between the sociology and psychology of exercise despite common interests in individual subjectivity and identity construction through exercise practices. In this paper, I aim to find possible intersections for the two disciplines by using theoretical insights from discursive and critical psychology as well as sociocultural research on embodied experiences in exercise. Drawing from both psychological and sociocultural research on exercising bodies, I problematize different conceptualizations of subjectivity, identity, and power relations to critically examine interconnections between these different research traditions. I also highlight some of their theoretical limitations to suggest further theoretical readings that might enhance interdisciplinary analyses of change emanating from the microlevel of individual actions by both psychological and sociocultural research on the physically active body.

Accent Policy and Accent Modification Enterprises as Potential Indicators of Intercultural Power Relations: A Call for an Updated Research Agenda

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brynne D. Ovalle ◽  
Rahul Chakraborty
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This article has two purposes: (a) to examine the relationship between intercultural power relations and the widespread practice of accent discrimination and (b) to underscore the ramifications of accent discrimination both for the individual and for global society as a whole. First, authors review social theory regarding language and group identity construction, and then go on to integrate more current studies linking accent bias to sociocultural variables. Authors discuss three examples of intercultural accent discrimination in order to illustrate how this link manifests itself in the broader context of international relations (i.e., how accent discrimination is generated in situations of unequal power) and, using a review of current research, assess the consequences of accent discrimination for the individual. Finally, the article highlights the impact that linguistic discrimination is having on linguistic diversity globally, partially using data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and partially by offering a potential context for interpreting the emergence of practices that seek to reduce or modify speaker accents.

Designing Learning Activities for Sustained Engagement

2011 ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Brock Dubbels
Keyword(s):  
Bone Density ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Design ◽  
After School ◽  
Physically Active ◽  
Phenomenological Interview ◽  
Dance Dance Revolution ◽  
Over Time

The experience of a successful adolescent learner will be described from the student’s perspective about learning the video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) through selected passages from a phenomenological interview. The question driving this investigation is, “Why did she sustain engagement in learning?” The importance of this question came out of the need for background on how to create an afterschool program that was to use DDR as an after school activity that might engage adolescents and tweens to become more physically active and reduce the risk of adult obesity, and to increase bone density for these developing young people through playing the game over time. The difficulty of creating this program was the risk that the students would not sustain engagement in the activity, and we would not have a viable sample for the bone density adolescent obesity study. Implications of this study include understanding the potential construction of learning environments that motivate and sustain engagement in learning and the importance of identity construction for teachers to motivate and engage their students. In addition to the analysis of sustained engagement through the four socio- and cultural-cognitive theories, four major principals were extracted from the operationalized themes into a framework for instructional design techniques and theory for engaging learners for game design, training, and in classroom learning.

The postcolonial perspective: an introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Situated Perspective

In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in international relations (IR), such as ‘norms’. In this perspective colonisation appears as a foundational shaper of these orders, to a degree and with effects still under-appraised in the discipline. The postcolonial perspective is thus deeply historical, or rather genealogical, in its dual concerns with, first, the genesis of norms, or the processes by which particular behaviours come to be taken to be ‘normal’. Second, it is centrally concerned with the power relations implicated in the (re)drawing of boundaries between the normal and the strange or the unacceptable. Together, these concerns effectively shift the analysis of the ideational processes underpinning international orders from ‘norms’ to the dynamic and power-laden mechanisms of ‘normalisation’. In addition, I show how theorising international politics from a postcolonial perspective has implications for IR’s conceptions of time, identity, and its relationship to difference, as well as agency.

Actantial analysis

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Wang ◽  
Carl W. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Versus Communication ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
Formal Procedure ◽  
The Subject

This paper introduces a formal procedure for analyzing narratives that was developed by the French/Lithuanian structuralist, A. J. Greimas. The focus is on demonstrating the utility of Greimas's ideas for analyzing one aspect of personal narratives: identity-construction. Reconstructing the basic actantial structure from self-narratives is shown to provide cues to power differentials among actants as perceived by the narrator. Distinguishing narrated events along conflict versus communication axes helps the analyst determine whether an experiential or a discursive domain is of primacy for the narrator. Moreover, investigation of communicative outcomes can be used to validate (or invalidate) findings on power relations. Analyses of narrative plots may afford insights into how people engage objects with cultural valuations within the various social contexts recounted in narrative data. Finally, Greimas's theory of modalities can be used to differentiate among these plots within narrative trajectories. This approach to narrative analysis differs from more traditional “denarrativization” and “renarrativization” approaches in that it affords the researcher a language (or discursive structure) according to which the narrator's, not the analyst's, understandings of character relations and reality conditions become the subject matter of one's research.

Affective entanglements with the sexual imagery of paradise in the Qur’an

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-70
Author(s):  
Mahdi Tourage
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Sexual Imagery ◽  
Symbolic Function ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Qur'an Commentary

This paper examines affective structures and power formations that are constructed,maintained or contested when the significance of the sexual imageryof paradise in the Qur’an is divided into sensual and spiritual. I take a fictionalstory by Mohja Kahf as an example of a Qur’an commentary that centresgendered and embodied experiences in the text, and contrast it with MuhammadAbdel Haleem’s commentary, who views the sexual rewards of paradiseas allegorical. Using affect theory, I will argue that allegorical interpretationslimit the affective efficacy of the sensuality of the text to their symbolic function,associating spirituality with a disembodied, hence transcendent masculinity.Kahf’s exegesis, however, shows that affect and meaning are not pre-given, butproduced in interaction with the text. I will conclude that configuring the textas sensual or spiritual is not due to any intrinsic or predetermined content, buta product of power relations.

scholarly journals Priest, development worker, or volunteer? Anthropological research and ascribed identities in rural Mozambique

1970 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Peace Corps ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Conducting Research

Over the last two decades anthropologists have devoted increasing analytical space to questioning, challenging, and reflecting on how different identities and positionalities structure power relations and shape social interactions in a diversity of research contexts. Many of these works reveal how identities are constructed, contested, and negotiated through the process of conducting research. During 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in central Mozambique I was mistaken for a priest, alleged to be a spy, and assumed to be a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. In this article, I explore how my identity, and the identities ascribed to me, shaped my interactions with people living in rural Mozambique and structured the types of relationships and data I was able to collect. My experience highlights the contextually grounded and negotiated nature of identity construction and how individual identities are understood and interpreted through broader historical, political, and economic contexts.

“No-Body’s Perfect”: Women, Aerobics, and the Body Beautiful

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Maguire ◽  
Louise Mansfield
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
Process Sociology ◽  
The Way

This paper seeks to synthesize aspects of feminism and figurational (process) sociology. Women’s bodies are viewed as sites for studying interrelationships between power, gender, and identity construction. The behavioral and emotional rituals of women in a specific aerobics class are mapped out and located within the “exercise–body beautiful complex.” We explore the way in which social constraints and individual self-control interweave in the rationalized management of women’s bodies. The embodied experiences of these women are intertwined with long term enabling and constraining features. Covertly disempowering, the “exercise–body beautiful complex” reinforces established standards of femininity. The realignment of dominant images of femininity is advocated in order to extend the liberating features of the figuration in question.

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