Contested Terrain: Differing Interpretations of Co. Wicklow's Landscape

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamonn Slater
Keyword(s):  
Native People ◽  
Compositional Techniques ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Ideological Structure ◽  
The Way

This paper looks at how Irish landscape was interpreted in the mid 1800s, when modern tourism in Ireland began. It attempts to discover the ideological structures present in this appreciation of Irish landscape, and it does so in relation with the Hall's description of Co. Wicklow landscape. It argues that there are two ‘socially constructed’ ways to read Irish landscape, the picturesque and the oral interpretations, which create senses of detachment and attachment respectively to the local terrain. It explores in this context how the picturesque corresponds to the way an outsider wishes to gaze upon a landscape, either as a colonialising landlord or as a tourist. Although the picturesque excludes human work from its vision, it was manufactured in the demesnes of the landlord class according to compositional techniques. But the ideological structure of the beautiful aspect of the picturesque excludes the native people who actually live in the landscape, because they are seen as a source of disharmony. The native gaze, on the contrary, creates a sense of attachment to the local place.

scholarly journals Ambivalent Gender Identities in Contemporary African Literature: A Butlerian Perspective

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Léonard KOUSSOUHON ◽  
Fortuné AGBACHI
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Good Will ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
The Way

<p>This paper is an attempt to examine the way male and female participants perform gender in 03 novels, <em>Everything Good Will Come</em> (2006), <em>Swallow</em> (2010) and <em>A Bit of Difference</em> (2013), by a contemporary Nigerian writer called Sefi Atta. The study draws on Gender Performative Theory as developed by the feminist Butler (1990/1999). This theory considers gender identities as being socially constructed. The study highlights the multiple ways in which male and female participants perform gender according to established social norms in the selected novels. Regarding the existing social norms in Nigeria, the findings by scholars like Fakeye, George and Owoyemi (2012), Mejiuni and Awolowo (2006), Bourey et al (2012), Gbadebo, Kehinde and Adedeji (2012), Okunola and Ojo (2012) exude that men are traditionally portrayed as career people, assertive, powerful and active, independent and violent while women are stereotypically depicted as housewives, submissive, powerless and passive, dependent and non-violent (or victims). Based on the above dichotomies between men and women, the study unveils the ideology that underpins gender performances in the novels.</p>

scholarly journals A Tutela do Animal Doméstico no Âmbito das Constituições Federais Brasileiras de 1824 a 1988

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-11
Author(s):  
Nilsen Aparecida Vieira Marcondes
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Domestic Animal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Continuous Development ◽  
Exotic Animals ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Federal Constitution ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

Objetiva-se discutir neste breve intróito retrospectivo de revisão de normatizações constitucionais pátrias a tutela do animal doméstico. Esta síntese reflexiva sobre a tutela do animal doméstico brasileiro no âmbito constitucional se apresenta quanto à forma de abordagem do assunto, como qualitativo, no que tange a modalidade investigativa como básico, do ponto de vista de seus objetivos, como descritivo, com relação aos procedimentos técnicos, qualifica-se como documental e bibliográfico. Conclui-se que os delineamentos, os limites, bem como os avanços na conquista da tutela animal e consequentemente do animal doméstico demonstram o quanto o reconhecimento de tal questão é socialmente construído. Além disso, a expansão, a solidificação e o desenvolvimento contínuo também da vida humana e da sociedade implicam necessariamente na preservação e na ampliação de acesso um direito fundamental nominalmente reconhecido pela Constituição Federal de 1988 como direito ao ambiente ecologicamente equilibrado no qual se insere evidentemente a fauna, ou seja, os animais domésticos, domesticados, silvestres e exóticos. Palavras-chave: Animal Doméstico. Tutela. Constituições Federais. Brasil.  AbstractThe objective of this brief retrospective introjective review of constitutional norms is to discuss the protection of domestic animals. This reflexive synthesis about the protection of the Brazilian domestic animal in the constitutional scope presents itself as to the way of approaching the subject, as qualitative, in what refers to the research modality as basic, from the point of view of its objectives, as descriptive, with respect to the procedures technicians, qualifies as documentary and bibliographical. It is concluded that the delineations, the limits, as well as the advances in the conquest of the animal guardianship and consequently of the domestic animal demonstrate how much the recognition of such question is socially constructed. In addition, the expansion, solidification and continuous development of human life and society necessarily imply the preservation and expansion of access to a fundamental right nominally recognized by the Federal Constitution of 1988 as a right to an environmentally balanced environment in which the animal, domesticated, wild and exotic animals. Keywords: Domestic Animals. Guardianship. Federal Constitutions. Brasil.

Feminist philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elinor Mason
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Way

Feminist philosophy is philosophy that is aimed at understanding and challenging the oppression of women. Feminist philosophy examines issues that are traditionally found in practical ethics and political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language. In fact, feminist concerns can appear in almost all areas of traditional philosophy. Feminist philosophy is thus not a kind of philosophy; rather, it is unified by its focus on issues of concern to feminists. Feminist philosophers question the structures and institutions that regulate our lives. When Mary Wollstonecraft was writing in 1792, the institutions excluded and subordinated women explicitly. Wollstonecraft, as the title of her book (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) makes clear, was extending the enlightenment idea that men have basic human rights, to women. Wollstonecraft argued that women should not be seen as importantly different from men: there may be differences due to different upbringing, but, Wollstonecraft argues, there is no reason to think men and women differ in important ways, and women should be given the same education and opportunities as men. What seemed radical in 1792 may not seem radical now. Yet gender inequality persists. Thus philosophers must look beyond the formal rules and laws to the underlying structures that cause and perpetuate oppression. The feminist philosopher is always asking, ‘is there some element of this practice that depends on gender in some way?’ Feminist philosophers examine and critique the way we structure our families and reproduction, the cultural practices we engage in, such as prostitution and pornography, the way we think, and speak and value each other as knowers and thinkers. In order to examine these issues the feminist philosopher may need an improved conceptual toolbox: we need to understand such complex concepts as intersectionality, false consciousness, and of course, gender itself. Is gender biologically determined – is it something natural and immutable, or is it socially constructed? As Simone de Beauvoir puts it, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Feminist philosophers tend to argue that gender is all (or mostly) socially constructed, that it is something we invent rather than discover. Gender is nonetheless an important part of our world, and feminist philosophy aims to understand how it works.

Fake Martyrs and True Heroes. Competitive Narratives and Hierarchized Masculinities in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

2019 ◽  
pp. 1097184X1987409
Author(s):  
Perrine Lachenal
Keyword(s):  
State Institutions ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Moral Category ◽  
Governmental Power ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Official Recognition ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Revolution

Treating the category “martyr” as socially constructed and contested along gendered and political lines, this paper examines how heroes and martyrs have been produced and deployed in post-revolutionary Tunisia. It begins by examining governmental attempts, launched soon after the revolution, to monopolize and institutionally define who could benefit from official recognition as a martyr. The differences in the definition of “martyrdom” between official institutions and families of the deceased are unpacked, arguing that “martyr” is a moral category, the boundaries of which are often drawn in terms of differing masculinities. The paper goes on to demonstrate how the category of “martyrs of the nation” has progressively overshadowed the category of “martyrs of the revolution” in official memorial practices, as the commemoration of the revolution has progressively focused on its uniformed victims, leaving out the civilian ones. One of the interesting features of this shift is that it demonstrates the malleability of the way the category “violence” is understood and deployed. The paper thus shows how neither state officials nor the families of deceased officers, activists, or bystanders accepted that it was sufficient simply to have died during the upheaval in order to be recognized as a martyr. All applied additional moral and political criteria in order to determine who deserved to be labelled as a martyr. At stake in these debates were contrasting representations of masculinity, in particular between triumphant, militaristic masculinities and fragile and damaged masculinities. As the figure of the uniformed “hero” has become increasingly consolidated and hegemonic in post-revolutionary Tunisia, the term “martyr” itself has been increasingly appropriated by state institutions and official memorial practices that serve to reaffirm order and governmental power.

Contesting Orphans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie B. Ramey
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Local People ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
Poor Families ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
Child Care Institutions ◽  
The Way

This concluding chapter demonstrates how James Caldwell's experience highlights the way in which orphanages served as “community institutions,” serving the needs of the local people who used them. But institutional child care was contested terrain. Both the United Presbyterian Orphan's Home (UPOH) and the HCC illustrate how many different stakeholders negotiated the development of child care institutions, each with sometimes competing agendas and expectations. Similarly, the managers displayed motives of social control, wishing to not only assist poor children, but to reform poor families themselves. These managing women were the most powerful stakeholders in the orphanages, but they were never alone; their control of the institutions was mediated by constant interaction with working-class families, reformers, staff, and the broader community.

scholarly journals POLICING, ‘SCIENCE’, AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF PHOTO-FIT

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1007-1031
Author(s):  
PAUL LAWRENCE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The World ◽  
Proven Efficacy ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
Facial Identification ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.

Reconsidering Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Louis Gates, Jr
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Way

Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western, sociopolitical concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment). This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social science and medical literature: some of the modern sciences employ racial and ethnic categories. As such, race has a physical, as opposed to a purely social, dimension. The book argues that in order to more fully understand what we mean by race, social scientists need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. To be sure, the long shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism have cast a pall over the effort to understand this complicated relationship between social science and race. But while the text rejects pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at race, it makes the claim that it is time to reassess the Western-based, social construction paradigm. The chapters in this book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race: one between theories that see race as fixed or malleable; a second between the idea that race is a universal but modern Western concept and the idea that it has a deeper and more complicated cultural history; and a third between sociopolitical and biological/biomedical concepts of race. Arguing that race is not merely socially constructed, the chapters offer a collection of views on the way that social scientists must reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.

The Raj and the Paradoxes of Wildlife Conservation

2018 ◽  
pp. 262-324
Author(s):  
Vijaya Ramadas Mandala
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Native People ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Conservation Attitudes ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 examines the environmental and wildlife conservation issues with reference to hunting in colonial India. Addressing the issues of forestry, environment, and empire in relation to Indian wildlife, it is possible to evaluate the ways in which the British contested, constructed, and tailored wildlife conservation attitudes to meet the needs of smooth governance, while maintaining the imperial sport of hunting. Against this backdrop, the chapter explains how the issue of conservation remained in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. While explaining these intricacies, this study suggests that the British ruled tigers, elephants, and the native people through their inconsistencies rather than from a unified Orientalist ideology. In this, the reader would learn how the British attitudes and the policies implemented were situational and pragmatic. More importantly, it points to a story that signifies the ability of the powerful to change attitudes and shift behaviours according to the circumstances. Thus in colonial India, tigers were seen as the symbolic enemies of civilization, noxious creatures that were in the way of economic development and tragic symbols of a decimated nature, all at the same time, whereas elephants were left alone because of their usefulness. Extermination and preservation of species thus went hand-in-hand so that colonial interests rather than animal welfare could be promoted.

scholarly journals Recreating Men’s Relationship with Nature: Toward a Profeminist Environmentalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Pease
Keyword(s):  
Parallel Development ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Feminist Environmentalism ◽  
Profeminist Men ◽  
The Way

While feminist and profeminist scholars are increasingly in agreement with the thesis that hegemonic and destructive forms of masculinity are the source of current environmental crises, there is less agreement on how to address this issue or on the way forward for ecologically conscious and profeminist men. Some forms of ecofeminism essentialize women as being closer to nature than men, while arguing that men are closer to culture. There seems little capacity for men to change in this view. In a parallel development, some ecomasculinity theorists argue that the problem is not with the nature of masculinity per se but with the separation of men’s natural maleness from forms of masculinity that suppress their infinite capacity to care. It will be argued that such latter approaches espouse either an ecofeminine or ecomasculinist perspective rather than a social ecofeminist view. This article will explore the implications of the social ecofeminist critique (or what some writers refer to as feminist environmentalism) for understanding socially constructed masculinism, and what men can do about it, in the context of the social divisions between men across the world.

scholarly journals The Dilemma of Motherhood and Domesticity in Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn

Twejer ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 957-986
Author(s):  
Hawzhen R. Ahmed ◽  
◽  
Meram Salim Shekh Mohamad
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Social Life ◽  
New Era ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Limited Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Domestic Lives ◽  
The Way

This paper is a study of feminist theatre as a rejection of masculine superiority in theatre and social life. It examines a modern play that depicts the role of women as mothers and the conflicts defining the status of motherhood. It investigates thematic trends and objectives of feminist theatre, a theatre that started with the birth of second-wave feminism. It analyzes the reflection of women’s social and political lives as represented by this theatre. To meet that end, it examines Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn (2013) that depicts issues of unsettled identities, women empowerment, and the dilemma of motherhood. The study explores the way this Play represents an imaginary space where women can play a revolutionary role by questioning their domesticity and careers. The Play is written by a feminist playwright, has an all-woman cast, and is produced by a woman director. Rapture, Blister, Burn, meanwhile, portrays the possible ways whereby the new era showcases an acceptable resolution for the unsolved dilemma of domesticity and motherhood. This paper correspondingly interrogates the theatrical depictions of the women characters, who come up with limited life choices and are trapped in the socially constructed dilemmas of domestic lives and the way they combat the social restrictions.

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