scholarly journals Stiletto Socialism

Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-123
Author(s):  
Polona Sitar

This article explores how women interpreted everyday clothing practices and decoration of their body and how they positioned themselves in different social milieus during the period of socialist Slovenia (1945–1991). The new socialist middle class in Slovenia and Yugoslavia was defined by participation in a lifestyle, created and expressed through consumption and behaviors that turned everyday life into a symbolic display of taste and cultural distinction. This article shows the ways women engaged in self-expression and negotiated dressing up. It analyzes the self-emancipation of women as they challenged the boundaries of social hierarchies on the basis of self-transformations, pointing out the active role that women had in their self-positioning in social categories.

1992 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Davidson

AbstractSchizophrenia has historically been considered a severe psychiatric disorder with a chronic and progressive course; an assumption that has shaped both clinical research and public policy. Recent studies have suggested, however, that many people recover from this disorder to varying degrees, prompting new research approaches that focus on factors influencing improvement as well as pathology. An empirical-phenomenological approach appears especially promising as an avenue to investigating the active role the person may play in improvement. The dimensions of everyday life that are discussed as providing a conceptual framework for investigations of the active role of the person are intentionality, temporality, and meaning. Within this framework a four-step process of recovering and reconstructing the self in schizophrenia is then delineated, with concrete illustrations of each step drawn from interviews with one young woman with schizophrenia. The findings are taken to represent the kinds of valuable insights that may be garnered from an empirical-phenomenological approach to research built upon a recognition of the importance of the dimensions of intentionality, temporality, and meaning in the everyday life of those afflicied with severe mental illness. There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again. T. S. Eliot


Author(s):  
Pomme van de Weerd

Abstract This paper analyzes ethnic self-labeling among pupils of a secondary school in Venlo, the Netherlands. Pupils with migration backgrounds, born in the Netherlands, referred to themselves as ‘Moroccan’, ‘Turk’ or ‘foreigner’, and to others as ‘Dutch’. Ascription to these ethnic categories is often understood as an expression of national (un)belonging. Based on nine months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that ethnic labels functioned to manage everyday interpersonal social relations and did not necessarily express feelings of (un)belonging to the nation. Rather, pupils used ethnic labels to associate social personae with particular styles and behaviors and to construct local social hierarchies. The paper contributes to the investigation of ethnic labels as signs with locally contingent meanings, which nevertheless retain indexical links with wider discourses about social categories and belonging. It furthermore emphasizes the necessity of investigating the local meanings of ethnic categories.


Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia

This chapter analyzes how call center workers, who are mostly middle- and working-class youth, create narratives that are described as expressing modern forms of “individualized Indianness.” The chapter demonstrates how call center workers produce narratives of individualized Indianness by engaging in practices of mimicry, accent training, and consumption; by going to public spaces such as bars and pubs; and by having romantic relationships that are largely hidden from their families. The narratives examined in this chapter are created out of an asymmetrical context of power as young Indians work as “subjects” of a global economy who primarily serve “First World” customers. The interviews with Indian youth reflect how tradition and modernity, mimicry and authenticity, collude with each other to dialogically create new middle-class subjectivities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Clemenson ◽  
Antonella Maselli ◽  
Alexander J. Fiannaca ◽  
Amos Miller ◽  
Mar Gonzalez-Franco

AbstractGPS navigation is commonplace in everyday life. While it has the capacity to make our lives easier, it is often used to automate functions that were once exclusively performed by our brain. Staying mentally active is key to healthy brain aging. Therefore, is GPS navigation causing more harm than good? Here we demonstrate that traditional turn-by-turn navigation promotes passive spatial navigation and ultimately, poor spatial learning of the surrounding environment. We propose an alternative form of GPS navigation based on sensory augmentation, that has the potential to fundamentally alter the way we navigate with GPS. By implementing a 3D spatial audio system similar to an auditory compass, users are directed towards their destination without explicit directions. Rather than being led passively through verbal directions, users are encouraged to take an active role in their own spatial navigation, leading to more accurate cognitive maps of space. Technology will always play a significant role in everyday life; however, it is important that we actively engage with the world around us. By simply rethinking the way we interact with GPS navigation, we can engage users in their own spatial navigation, leading to a better spatial understanding of the explored environment.


This article advocates a new agenda for (media) tourism research that links questions of tourist experiences to the role and meaning of imagination in everyday life. Based on a small-scale, qualitative study among a group of seventeen respondents of diverse ages and backgrounds currently residing in the Netherlands, we offer an empirical exploration of the places that are of importance for people’s individual state of mind and investigate how these places relate to (potential) tourist experiences. The combination of in-depth interviews and random-cue self-reporting resulted in the following findings: 1) all our respondents regularly reside in an elaborate imaginary world, consisting of both fictional and non-fictional places; 2) this imaginary world is dominated by places which make the respondents feel nostalgic; 3) in this regard, the private home and houses from childhood are pivotal; 4) the ‘home’ is seen as topos of the self and contrasted with ‘away’; 5) the imagination of ‘away’ emerges from memories of previous tourist experiences, personal fantasies and, last but not least, influences from popular culture. We conclude that imagining and visiting other locations are part of a life-long project of ‘identity work’ in which personal identities are performed, confirmed and extended. By travelling, either physically or mentally, individuals anchor their identity - the entirety of ideas about who they are, where they come from and where they think they belong - in a broader, spatial framework.


2018 ◽  

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.


Author(s):  
Anita L. Cloete

The reflection on film will be situated within the framework of popular culture and livedreligion as recognised themes within the discipline of practical theology. It is argued that theperspective of viewers is of importance within the process of meaning-making. By focusing onthe experience and meaning-making through the act of film-watching the emphasis is not somuch on the message that the producer wishes to convey but rather on the experience that iscreated within the viewer. Experience is not viewed as only emotional, but rather that, at least,both the cognitive and emotional are key in the act of watching a film. It is therefore arguedthat this experience that is seldom reflected on by viewers could serve as a fruitful platform formeaning-making by the viewer. In a context where there seems to be a decline in institutionalisedforms of religion, it is important to investigate emerging forms of religion. Furthermore, theturn to the self also makes people’s experiences and practices in everyday life valuableresources for theological reflection. This reflection could provide a theoretical framework forespecially empirical research on how film as specific form of media serves as a religiousresource and plays a role in the construction of meaning and religious identity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Wening Udasmoro

In literature, questions of the self and the other are frequently presented. The identity politics that gained prominence after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 has occupied considerable space in this debate throughout the globe, including in France. One example of a novel dealing with the self and other is Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (2015). This article attempts to explore the processes of selfing and othering in this work. The politics of identity that seems to present Muslims and Islam as the other and French as the self is also extended to other identities and aspects involved in the novel. This article attempts to show, first, how the French author Houellebecq positions the self and other in Soumission; second, the type of self and other the novel focuses on; and third, how its selfing and othering processes reveal the gender hierarchy and social categorization of French society. It finds that the novel presents a hierarchy in its narrative through which characters are positioned based on their gender and sexual orientation, as well as their age and ethnic heritage.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Daniel Eddy

The ArgumentIn 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society.


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