Responding to stigmatization: How to resist and overcome the stigma of unemployment

Organization research on stigma has mostly focused on the stigmatized, limiting the scope for exploring what is possible and lacking recognition of the structural conditions and unequal power relations that create and sustain stigma. Consequently, it overlooks how actors can organize to resist and potentially overcome stigmatization altogether. Addressing this question empirically, we studied the long-term unemployed in Spain using a longitudinal qualitative research design. We develop a typology of responses to stigmatization—getting stuck, getting by, getting out, getting back at, and getting organized— that advances our understanding of stigma in several ways. First, our typology captures stigma as a multilevel phenomenon. Second, it makes explicit that stigma can only be understood in relation to its socio-historical contexts and unequal relations of power. Third, it captures how resisting stigma needs to be a collective enterprise and advances the importance of organizing to both challenge stigmatization and explore alternatives.

The rising tide of information as problem of encyclopedias

While using the encyclopedia concept as a guide, it has been shown the way in which the increasingly rapid growth of knowledge, created by the worldwide communication, leads to entirely new problems. The science as a collective enterprise is splitting off from the individuals and leveling down their education. There doesnt exist a single scientist, being acquainted with the whole knowledge accumulated in the discipline. The knowledge quantity rate proves that there are problems while carrying out the knowledge overview and systematization. As a result, traditional encyclopedias are becoming increasingly outdated. This process may be understood by the means of Georg Simmels thesis on the alienation of objective and subjective culture. The present article presents some brief reactions to this problem.

Everyday aesthetics and world-making

The project of world-making is carried out not only by professional world-makers, such as designers, architects, and manufacturers. We are all participants in this project through various decisions and judgments we make in our everyday life. Aesthetics has a surprisingly significant role to play in this regard, though not sufficiently recognized by ourselves or aestheticians. This paper first illustrates how our seemingly innocuous and trivial everyday aesthetic considerations have serious consequences which determine the quality of life and the state of the world, for better or worse. This power of the aesthetic should be harnessed to direct our cumulative and collective enterprise toward better world-making. Against objections to introducing a normative dimension to everyday aesthetics, I argue for the necessity of doing so and draw an analogy between everyday aesthetics and art-centered aesthetics which has dominated modern Western aesthetics discourse.

Komplexita, rituál, víra a „bytí spolu“: Zdroje nejistoty a techniky jejího zvládání, případ taneční improvizace

In this article I analyse the handling of uncertainty in dance improvisation performance. I focus on the sources of uncertainty together with techniques used to manage it. I also show that magic practices are integrated among these techniques and that all the described techniques are pragmatic and reasonable, though they do not provide guaranteed effects. This leads to an analysis of the possible role of belief in ritual practice. The efficiency of ritualist magic in handling uncertainty is ascribed to its ability to create an intimately supportive atmosphere of mutual reliability. Belief regarding the causal efficiency of magic is then shown as an issue emerging only in controversies over the nature of collective enterprise as a way of othering. The complexity of dance and life in general makes uncertainty inevitable. Hence, all theoretical knowledge in terms of consequences of action is provisional. The text then recommends rejecting the knowledge-belief dichotomy and reshaping belief to analytically comprise knowledge as intertwined with uncertainty.

Into the Archipelago

This chapter reads the twelve issues of the journal Archipelago, which was first published in 2007. Launched from the unlikely port of the Bodleian Library, it carried a complement of writers and artists whose coastal work was not thought previously to be part of a collective enterprise. Under Andrew McNeillie, the writer, editor, and provocateur, the twelve issues of Archipelago created a tilted framework through which to interpret the cultural history of the formerly, and temporarily, British Isles. This much is evident from the journal’s cover, which features an illustration of Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, and the very tip of France from the far north-west perspective of a gannet’s plunge. This is a composite vision, geographic, ecological, and prophetic, a manifesto sketched in the unfamiliar outlines of an archipelago whose borders the journal navigates in a journey that proceeds in sequences of association.

First Aid for Writers

This chapter reflects on the aesthetic commitments of the welfare state through the lens of the Arts Council Literature Department, which emerged belatedly in the mid-1960s. Focusing on the influential scheme of literary ‘first aid’ grants introduced by the poet Cecil Day-Lewis in 1966, it discusses the relatively idealist terms in which the Arts Council envisioned the obligations of writers to a wider public. The third section centres on three emblematic beneficiaries of state funding between 1966 and 1981, the avant-gardists B.S. Johnson and Dambudzo Marechera, who both tended to strain against the ideals of invested institutions, and the Caribbean Artists Movement, which encompassed a more socially inclusive, though no less contested, idea of literature as a collective enterprise.

‘Trashe baguaige and many od endes’

For elites, material culture told their dynastic story and was also used to construct, or re-construct, it. Women’s place in this remains complex. They were much more likely to own and control objects like jewels, clothes, and furniture than they were land or property. They were also involved in the production, design, and purchase of these objects, and there are definably female patterns of exchange throughout society. However, the use of material culture is often considered as a collective enterprise within families like the Howards. Though many scholars maintain that a woman’s primary role was to support their husband’s family, material evidence for the Howards shows that they were able to use objects to transmit their complex accumulation of familial identities. In doing so, they also used material culture to enhance their social standing, to secure political alliance, and to cement ties of familial affection and friendship, thereby revealing an intense level of direct agency.