Barriers to Doing Activism

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Emma Craddock
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
The Everyday

This chapter discusses the costs (financial, physical, psychological and emotional) associated with doing activism. While participants speak about activism in terms of the everyday and suggest that it is something anyone can do, they often do not acknowledge the privilege required to do activism. This chapter draws out the tensions present in the notion that everyone can and should do activism by exploring the barriers and exclusions that prevent individuals from participating politically. This includes the reality that those who are hardest hit by austerity often do not have the resources to protest against it. Therefore, while lived experiences of issues are deemed to be a key and authentic motivation for doing activism (a topic that is explored further in Chapter 6), it becomes clear that those who are most affected by austerity are less able to protest against it because of its effects. Despite women being disproportionately affected by austerity, this chapter reveals the continuing and heightening gendered barriers that exist in the specific context of austerity and a local anti-austerity activist culture that privileges questions of class over those of gender. It demonstrates how, in response, women are forming their own feminist resistance to austerity, and explores how this is empowering but problematic because it upholds austerity through the provision of unpaid care in the absence of public services.

scholarly journals The Everyday Life of Security: Capturing Space, Practice, and Affect

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonna Nyman
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Participatory Photography ◽  
High Politics ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Abstract Security shapes everyday life, but despite a growing literature on everyday security there is no consensus on the meaning of the “everyday.” At the same time, the research methods that dominate the field are designed to study elites and high politics. This paper does two things. First, it brings together and synthesizes the existing literature on everyday security to argue that we should think about the everyday life of security as constituted across three dimensions: space, practice, and affect. Thus, the paper adds conceptual clarity, demonstrating that the everyday life of security is multifaceted and exists in mundane spaces, routine practices, and affective/lived experiences. Second, it works through the methodological implications of a three-dimensional understanding of everyday security. In order to capture all three dimensions and the ways in which they interact, we need to explore different methods. The paper offers one such method, exploring the everyday life of security in contemporary China through a participatory photography project with six ordinary citizens in Beijing. The central contribution of the paper is capturing—conceptually and methodologically—all three dimensions, in order to develop our understanding of the everyday life of security.

scholarly journals Bringing the Arts to the Everyday Lived Experiences of Young Children

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-295
Author(s):  
Marni J. Binder
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Art Forms

The purpose of this arts-based education research was to explore the complex art forms in Bali, Indonesia, for a cross-cultural understanding of the everyday importance of the arts in the teaching and learning of young children. Five Balinese artists and one Javanese artist were interviewed to discuss their journeys as artists from a young age, their practicing art forms, and perceptions of the importance of the arts in their communities, cultural identity, and in the everyday lived experiences of children. While there is literature on the historical and complex art forms of Bali, giving context to the importance of time and place and hierarchies of the culture, little is documented on the interconnection between the arts as a paradigm that shapes culture and informs an understanding of the arts as important to teaching and learning. This research experience aimed to deepen the researcher’s understanding of how the arts are embodied and woven together in Balinese culture, and how this knowledge can be connected to the teaching and learning of children in the Canadian context.

Negotiating Underwater Space: The Sensorium, the Body and the Practice of Scuba-diving

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Merchant
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Scuba Diving ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Gravitational Pull ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
And Training ◽  
Shed Light

The desire to escape from land-based bodily constraints, to become enchanted by the spectacle of technicolour reefs, sunken ships and otherworldly creatures, is growing in popularity despite the expense and training required to explore the ocean depths. This dense water world, where a person’s resistance to gravitational pull results in differing feelings of weightlessness, where sound travels about five times faster yet more unevenly than in air, and where verbal communication is impractical such that visual cues are necessary, calls for a different ‘way of being’ to the everyday spaces of the home or the workplace. It is these different ways of being and feeling that I explore in this paper. To do this I present a sensual phenomenology that pays particular attention to the reorganization of the sensoria of a group of novice divers as they start to gain an awareness of the different perceptual means by which they move through and sense underwater space. The paper concludes by highlighting that phenomenological accounts of tourist space can shed light on the intricacies of tourists’ lived experiences, which in turn could prove useful in the structure and organization of tourist activities.

scholarly journals Everyday Diversity

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-150
Author(s):  
Christina Ho
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Immigrant Entrepreneurs ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Multicultural Policy ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Diversity Issues ◽  
Methodological Approaches

The Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal has been an important forum for discussing issues around cultural diversity. Articles on cultural diversity have been present in virtually every issue of the journal. These have ranged from conceptual pieces on cosmopolitanism, identity, dialogue, prejudice, pluralism, cultural and social capital and social inclusion, to articles embedded in empirical research on ethnic precincts and segregation in cities, experiences of religious minorities, immigrant entrepreneurs, and more. Over its five year history, the journal has also had themed editions on cultural diversity issues, including one on embracing diversity in sport, and another on the Chinese in Australian politics. The scope of this work has been wide, and authors have brought a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches to the journal. The purpose of this paper is to draw together some of the work that has been published around cultural diversity, particularly relating to everyday experiences of cosmopolitanism and racism. Focusing on everyday social relations has been an important part of recent scholarship on cultural diversity in Australia (e.g. Wise and Velayutham 2009). In contrast to research framed around multicultural policy or mediated representations of diversity, the scholarship of the ‘everyday’ aims to explore people’s lived experiences and daily interactions with others.

scholarly journals Gendered Violence: A Look at Northeast Women’s Writing as Literary Interventions

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-33
Author(s):  
Dr. Vizovono Elizabeth
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Northeast Region ◽  
The Social ◽  
Experiences Of Women

There are more than enough writings and debates on political conflict and violence in the Northeast region of India, but violence targeted at women specifically, has not received equal attention. This paper aims to initiate honest and serious critical examinations about sexual abuse and other forms of gendered violence that are inflicted on women in these communities, but which continues to remain like a taboo subject. Violence against women in Northeast has roots deep in cultural and colonial history. Set against this context, the paper is based on a framework of referencing literary studies and intersecting it with empirical evidence from other relevant studies. The literary works are all based on actual lived experiences of women. Hence these writings also intersect with and validate the social reality of our times. It also highlights how Northeast women writers have been voicing and questioning the silence and shame attached to this issue through their writings. The paper contends that these significant literary interventions into gendered violence are noteworthy and point to the need for understanding the experiences of tribal Northeast women from their specific context.

scholarly journals Shockwaves

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-41
Author(s):  
Sara Fregonese
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Experiential Effects ◽  
Urban Conflict

Urban conflict literature has attempted new comparisons between contested cities in conflict zones and cities with no armed conflict. This literature tends to use representational frameworks around defensive planning and normative government discourses. In this article, I propose to expand these frameworks and to engage with epistemologies of lived experience to produce new relational accounts linking “conflict cities” with “ordinary cities”. The article accounts for the lived, sensory and atmospheric in exploring the legacies of conflict on the everyday urban environments. It then reflects on the everyday and experiential effects of counterterrorism in ordinary cities. While this is designed to minimize threat, it also alters urban spatiality in a way reminiscent of urban conflict zones. It then explores the unequal impacts of counterterrorism across urban publics, and their experiential connections with practices of counterinsurgency. The article is structured around two ‘shockwaves’ entwining lived experiences across seemingly unrelatable urban settings.

scholarly journals Negotiating vulnerability: The experience of long-term social security recipients

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Security System ◽  
Marginal Benefit ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Critical Account

This article addresses the prominence of ‘vulnerability’ as a way of making sense of disadvantage and suffering in both social policy and social science. It examines the interplay of vulnerability as a material phenomenon and cultural script by foregrounding the experiences of the most marginal benefit claimants in Australia’s residual social security system. The article questions whether the everyday disruptions and challenges that unsettle yet settle-into life in poverty are intelligible within authorised idioms of vulnerability that govern access to support. By examining what people surviving on benefits are vulnerable to and how they are compelled to demonstrate their status as vulnerable, it contributes a critical account of lived experiences of vulnerability that holds both its discursive and phenomenological dimensions in view.

Making the invisible visible? Everyday lived experiences of ‘seeing’ and categorizing children’s well-being within a Danish kindergarten

Childhood ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Houmøller
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Number Of Children ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Invisible ◽  
Sense Of Urgency

This article explores how pedagogues assess and categorize children’s well-being in the everyday life of a kindergarten caring for a large number of children considered socially vulnerable. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article focuses on a newly implemented well-being assessment tool oriented towards making all children’s needs visible through the pedagogues’ regular colour-categorizations of their state of well-being. The article problematizes this ambition and proposes that some children are rendered invisible in the process of categorizing. It is argued that the categorizations are more reflective of the structural conditions of the kindergarten and a gauged sense of urgency.

scholarly journals The crisis of public sector trade unionism: Evidence from the Mid Staffordshire hospital crisis

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Carter ◽  
Roger Kline
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Material Force ◽  
General Argument ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
And Performance

This article contends that there is a growing, if uneven, crisis in public sector trade unionism masked by relatively high membership figures that obscure a weakening of trade unions in the workplace, leaving hollowed out organisation vulnerable to further legislative and employer-led onslaughts. The weakening is not inevitable but to overcome it requires a refocusing of organising efforts on the everyday concerns of members such as understaffing and the provision of better public services. Only with an engaged membership will national issues and wider campaigns have material force. Having outlined a general argument, the article takes as illustrative the nature and performance of trade unions, and particularly UNISON, during the Mid Staffordshire hospital crisis.

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