Dressing for freedom and justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sha’Mira Covington ◽  
Katalin Medvedev

Clothing communicates our attitudes and positions in the world, particularly when a dress is used as a vehicle for protest. This article has two goals. First, it analyses the history of protest dress of Black American resistance movements. Second, it scrutinizes the public perception of these movements by reviewing white media images of Black bodies participating in the resistance. The media shapes our world as well as public perceptions. It is linked to social change, thus, investigating various media images allows us to explore the cultural systems in which we live and the complexity of different means of communication and human interactions. Two theoretical frameworks have driven the research process. Social semiotics was employed to explain meaning-making as a social process and critical race theory to investigate the ways in which racialized bodies are perceived in white media. The latter was chosen because of its usefulness for examining society’s categorizations of race, law, power and culture. Through the lens of these two theoretical frameworks, it becomes evident that the dress of Black American protestors has historically communicated various discourses at the same time.

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Jamie Utt

Ethnic Studies undermines and challenges the racism inherent in dominant education systems by centering identities and epistemologies of people of Color. While much focus has been paid to the damage done to students of Color by White teachers and the White standard curriculum, this paper addresses the intellectual and material benefit White students disproportionately gain from this curriculum. Through a mixed-methods empirical study examining social studies textbooks and standards from Texas and California, the author argues that the standard White canon acts as a form of White/Western studies that directly privileges White students. Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, Pierre Bourdieu cultural reproduction, and Tara Yosso’s community cultural wealth provide theoretical frameworks in calling for a broader implementation of Ethnic Studies programs and pedagogies while calling for reform of traditional curriculum and standards that act as couriers of dominant capital for White students.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110021
Author(s):  
Esperança Bielsa

This article argues for a non-reductive approach to translation as a basic social process that shapes both the world that sociologists study and the sociological endeavour itself. It starts by referring to accounts from the sociology of translation and translation studies, which have problematized simplistic views of processes of cultural globalization. From this point of view, translation can offer an approach to contemporary interconnectedness that escapes from both methodological nationalism and what can be designated as the monolingual vision, providing substantive perspectives on the proliferation of contact zones or borderlands in a diversity of domains. The article centrally argues for a sociological perspective that examines not just the circulation of meaning but translation as a process of linguistic transformation that is necessarily embodied in words. Only if this more material aspect of translation is attended to can the nature of translation as an ordinary social process be fully grasped and its intervention in meaning-making activities explored. This has far-ranging implications for any reflexive account of the production of sociological works and interpretations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Todd Bridgman ◽  
Annie De’ath

This article explores the contribution a social constructionist paradigm can make to the study of career, through a small-scale empirical study of recent graduates employed in New Zealand’s state sector. A social constructionist lens denies the possibility of an individualised, generalised understanding of ‘career’, highlighting instead its local, contingent character as the product of social interaction. Our respondents’ collective construction of career was heavily shaped by a range of context-specific interactions and influences, such as the perception of a distinctive national identity, as well as by their young age and state sector location. It was also shaped by the research process, with us as researchers implicated in these meaning-making processes. Social constructionism shines a light on aspects of the field that are underplayed by mainstream, scientific approaches to the study of career, and therefore has valuable implications for practitioners, as well as scholars.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela G. Cuellar ◽  
Vanessa Segundo ◽  
Yvonne Muñoz

Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) play a critical role in advancing postsecondary access and success for Latinx students. Scholarship has begun to examine how HSIs influence Latinx student experiences and outcomes, yet much remains to be explored. In an effort to inform future research of Latinx students at HSIs, we argue that student experiences and outcomes should be based on notions of empowerment given the historically marginalized status of this group. We propose a model to guide assessment on Latinx empowerment at HSIs, which builds on the Inputs-Environments-Outcomes (IEO) model (Astin & antonio, 2012) and integrates critical theoretical frameworks, namely critical race theory and community cultural wealth. In proposing an adapted IEO model assessing Latinx empowerment, we encourage scholars and practitioners to expand notions of what constitutes success and excellence at HSIs in terms of how they educate and empower Latinx students.


Author(s):  
Isabel Corona Marzol

The 'Family' stage -the lines devoted to the surviving members of the deceased's family- is a 'constant element' (Hasan 1985) in obituaries. The present study is built up around the structural analysis of genres as developed by Bhatia (1993, 2004), Hasan (1985), Martin (1985, 1992), and Swales (1990). The purpose of this study is to bring a social explanation or understanding to bear on the textual description of the 'Family' stage from a corpus of obituaries published in more than two hundred American and British newspapers collected over a period of three years. The research process has developed two more steps. First, following Huckin's (2004) notion of content analysis, quantitative and qualitative modes have been applied, trying to identify the content which is not manifest. Secondly, the identification of 'textual silences' (Huckin 2002) is followed by an exploratory ethnographic analysis (Scollon 1998) on two case studies. This multi-staged analysis is aimed at a more comprehensive account of the obituary genre as a social process (Kress 1993). It shall be argued that the 'Family' stage encapsulates one of the most controversial topics of our time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-139
Author(s):  
Magdalena Wojciechowska

The aim of this paper is to shed light on how various interactional and interpretational contexts arising from specific researcher—research participants relationship established in the course of doing ethnographic study on sensitive, and thus often enough resistant to immediate cognition, phenomenon, namely, lesbian parenting in Poland, as well as different ways of embracing these, may factor into the research process. Drawing on specific dilemmas I encountered while doing the study at hand—from engaging a hard-to-reach population that, in a sense, wished to be reached, and the consequences thereof; through being pushed out of the comfort zone as the women under study, in the wake of becoming acquainted with the analysis I offered, “switched” from narrating their “in-orderto motives” to reflecting on the “because motives” behind their actions; to contextualizing emotions arising as my response to experiencing the issues they face (on a daily basis), to name a few—my goal here is to discuss how different ways of collecting and analyzing data—in the context of developing rapport with the women under study—have had an impact on conceptualizing and (re)framing the data at hand.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-165
Author(s):  
Mandy M. Archibald ◽  
Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie

Integration—or the meaningful bringing together of different data sets, sampling strategies, research designs, analytic procedures, inferences, or the like—is considered by many to be the hallmark characteristic of mixed methods research. Poetry, with its innate capacity for leveraging human creativity, and like arts-based research more generally, which can provide holistic and complexity-based perspectives through various approaches to data collection, analysis, and representation, can offer something of interest to dialogue on integration in mixed methods research. Therefore, in this editorial, we discuss and promote the use of poetry in mixed methods research. We contend that the complexities and mean-making parallelisms between poetry and mixed methods research render them relevant partners in a quest to complete the hermeneutic circle whose origin represents experiences, phenomena, information, and/or the like. We advance the notion that including poetic representation facilitates the mixed methods research process as a dynamic, iterative, interactive, synergistic, integrative, holistic, embodied, creative, artistic, and transformational meaning-making process that opens up a new epistemological, theoretical, and methodological space. We refer to this as the fourth space, where the quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, and poetic research traditions intersect to enable different and deeper levels of meaning making to occur. We end our editorial with a poetic representation driven by a word count analysis of our editorial and that synthesizes our thoughts regarding the intersection of poetry and mixed methods research within this fourth space—a representation that we have entitled, “Dear Article.”


Author(s):  
Rachel E. Hile

In Chapter 1, I offered a contemporary theory of how indirect satire works, focusing on the social process of meaning-making required by this type of satirical work with reference to other recent theoretical works that emphasize the social functions of satire. To conclude, I would like to reverse my chronology to consider the theories and values underlying indirect forms of satire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In developing this argument, we cannot take satirical poets at their word regarding their intentions or methods because of the repeated assertions during this time period—many of which I have quoted in this book—advising the reader against reading allegorically and claiming that only general criticisms are intended....


Author(s):  
Kya Rose Roumimper ◽  
Audrey Faye Falk

This chapter explores the experiences of graduate students of color and examines the support systems in place to promote their success in the academy. The authors provide an overview of the relevant literature and pertinent theoretical frameworks, including critical race theory and self-determination theory, as they relate to the experiences of graduate students of color. Furthermore, the chapter describes the initiation and early development of a Graduate Students of Color Association at Merrimack College, a private, Catholic college in New England. The chapter include both benefits and challenges of participating in and sustaining the group, while offering recommendations for future practice and research. It may be of particular interest to graduate students of color; faculty, staff, and administration in graduate education; and researchers focused on graduate degree attainment among individuals of color.


Author(s):  
Ngoc Tai Huynh ◽  
Angela Thomas ◽  
Vinh Thi To

In contemporary Western cultures, picturebooks are a mainstream means for young children to first attend to print and start learning to read. The use of children's picturebooks has been reported as supporting intercultural awareness in children. Multiliteracies researchers suggest that other theoretical frameworks should be applied in addition to the semiotic approach of interpreting picturebooks, especially picturebooks from non-Western cultures. This chapter theorizes how Eastern philosophical concepts influence the meaning-making potential of illustrations in Eastern picturebooks. To do this, the authors first discuss the cultural constraints when applying a contemporary semiotic framework in analyzing non-Western images. The authors introduce a framework developed based on philosophical concepts that have influenced East-Asian art forms, particularly that of painting, to understand the Eastern artistic traditions. The chapter demonstrates how to apply this framework for interpretation of non-Western images to working with multicultural picturebooks.


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