“The Peripatetic Philosopher”: Unlocking the Trauma of Richard Jefferies

This article considered the juvenilia of Richard Jefferies in light of the traumatic experiences of his early childhood, which included the sudden loss of his elder sister and a move from the country to the city to live with his aunt and uncle. Using a psychobiographical approach the article considers the impact of the prejudice directed towards him from the local Swindon community during his mid-to-late teens, which spurred him forward in honing his skill as an observational writer. Consonant with this process was the discovery and expression of his authentic voice, which was tempered by the financial need to write for the local newspapers. The article illustrates how his treatment of an area of waste land near his boyhood home affords insight into his emotional wellbeing and his maturation as an author and thinker. Through the close reading of passages written between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, alongside excerpts from his mature works, the article identifies a new unexplored dimension to the author and his works at a formative time in his career.

Providing an Authentic Voice? Understanding Migrant Homelessness through Critical Poetic Inquiry

Ethical considerations in social research tend to focus on data collection rather than data interpretation and representation. The tendency of qualitative research to limit ethical concern to confidentiality and anonymity in the representation of data, combined with the academic convention of maintaining an objective distance from the object of study, creates tensions for the reflexive researcher. On the one hand, they must meet academic expectations to communicate findings with demonstrable reliability and validity. At the same time, there are deontological obligations—to protect study participants (and groups they represent) from harm, to honour their contributions accurately and to report with integrity. This article argues for the use of poetic ‘re-presentation’, both as a form of inquiry and unique mode of data representation and as a means of obtaining a deeper understanding of the experience of migration and homelessness. By integrating insights from Critical Race Methodology, the article deploys the concept of ‘counter-storytelling’ through poetic inquiry. The article concludes that this approach enables a nuanced, insightful approach, allowing the authentic voice of migrant groups negotiating the complexities of homelessness to be clearly articulated and heard.

Expressions of Authentic Voice: Urban High School Students’ Perceptions of Teaching as a Career Choice While Participating in a Pipeline Program for Aspiring Teachers of Color

Students of color do not pursue teaching careers as often as their white counterparts. Project Teacher Development (PTD) is a partnership between a large urban school district and a public regional university to recruit and prepare students of color as future educators. The goal of PTD is to identify, mentor, and inspire high school students to pursue careers in education using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as an interpretive framework. Results from this longitudinal qualitative study indicate increased awareness of teaching skills and expectations for college. Too often, programs in education expect future teachers of color to divorce themselves from their racial and ethnic identities. Participants in this study expressed authentic voice, which is essential to develop autonomy, relatedness, and competence—the foundational elements of SDT. While the challenges of recruiting and preparing teachers of color remain multifaceted, specialized pipeline programs that maximize success for marginalized students are essential.

Collective memory and the populist cause: The Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Turkey

This article focuses on how political actors appropriate the past by utilizing collective traumas for their populist cause. We demonstrate how the Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Turkey and the oppression of military interventions, for which it served as a backyard, became a tool for the AKP’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-Justice and Development Party) populist agenda. Through a particular narration of history embedded in the museum, the AKP aimed to forge an internal frontier within the society between an envisioned homogenous body of people on the one hand and the elite on the other. Situating itself as the people’s authentic voice against this elite, the AKP tried to further its popular appeal and legitimize its extension of power. What appeared as coming to terms with the past was instead the instrumentalization of the past for a singular political agenda, eager to remove the complexities and pluralism of the past for the sake of telling a politically useful story.

Voices in Hostile Sources: In The Matter of Nat Turner and the Historiography of Reading Rebellion

This engagement with Christopher Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner (2020) focuses on a key methodological issue faced by the author, namely how one reads and positions the “authentic voice” of a past subaltern subject, known to us only through a hostile written source. This challenge is well-known to social historians of the European middle ages, and this essay suggests various ways in which Tomlins’s monograph contributes to existing debate, regarding both method and how one culturally situates and interprets the voice(s) thus identified, particularly with regard to the politics of apocalypticism.

In Defence of an Unalienated Politic: a Critical Appraisal of the ‘No Outsiders’ Protests

The trope of the repressive Muslim, obstinately attached to their regressive world views, recalcitrant antagoniser of modernity, has become a thoroughly familiar drama. Redundant spectacles abound: events often highly mediatised, substantiated by conservativism and liberalism alike, deployed as justification for policing, surveillance and invasion. The 2019 protests against the ‘No Outsiders’ LGBT lessons held in Birmingham, England are one such spectacle. Foregoing the dominant portrayal of the protests as an event of Muslim homophobia, I instead examine the social processes that render the event exceptional in the British imaginary and the statecraft it subsequently enables. First, the protests’ production as a spectacular event is analysed through the historical conditions of Europe’s self-constitution through Islam-as-Threat. It is through liberalism’s amnesiac frame, one that erases its imperial and racist culpability, that the sexual exceptionalism that undergirds the spectacle of the protests can be understood. Second, reading the protests ‘sideways’, I argue, reveals how the displacement of homophobia onto Muslims continues liberalism’s tradition of situating its Others as oppositional to its purported gendered and sexual freedoms. In this context, sex education as deradicalisation of Muslim pupils becomes normalised, even as British liberalism disavows racism. Thirdly, the inclusion of queer Muslims as the authentic voice emerging from the cross-sections of queer and Muslim identity is critiqued as a ‘non-performativity’. Rather than offering a relational understanding of queer, Muslim and queer Muslim vulnerabilities, this inclusion elides an intersectional analysis of British homonationalism. I conclude by arguing for ‘an unalienated politics’ that is vigilant to co-optation, refusing to treat queerness as an exceptional site of injury. As such, how can we imagine the ‘queer’ in queer Muslim as a political position that refuses to capitulate to the hierarchisation of the human?

Mind The Gap Exploring The Experiences Of Diasporic Media Producers And Representations Of Cultural Diversity In Canada

Prime-time narrative is the most watched and influential genre of television. It creates a sense of belonging and contributes to identity formation. It also receives the largest amount of publicly mandated funding in the form of investment, subsidies, and tax incentives in Canada. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that despite legislation requiring equitable representation in all aspects of screen media, and over thirty years of many “special initiatives” and training and mentorship programs, little progress has been made in the area of equitable representation in narrative programming. This dissertation investigates the representation of diasporic people of colour in the screen-media industry in Canada. In particular, it studies how “authentic voices” from these communities are finding expression in the area of prime-time television narrative programming (scripted comedy and drama) and feature films, which ultimately find their largest audiences in broadcast screen platforms on television and increasingly via the Internet. The focus is on the legislative frameworks pertaining to the reflection of “diasporic communities of colour” in the production of screen media, specifically for prime-time broadcast in narrative, or what is referred to in the industry as “scripted programming,” as well as on the current realities faced by creators of screen media from diasporic communities of colour in telling their stories in this arena. Through a case study of the television series Little Mosque on the Prairie, it examines the issues that affect the expression of “authentic voice” from individuals who have had the opportunity to work in the area of narrative screen media in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s public broadcaster, which has as one of its key priorities the reflection of the cultural diversity of Canada. The issues involved in the production of feature films by diasporic people of colour is examined through a case study of the film Heaven on Earth, written and directed by Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta. Mehta’s film presents a unique situation in which the filmmaker, due to the previous international success of her film Water, was able to access the financial resources to produce the film in Canada and maintain her “authentic voice” without mediation in the production from external players. Part of this case study includes a documentary film featuring an interview with Deepa Mehta conducted in 2017 about her film Heaven on Earth.

Mind The Gap Exploring The Experiences Of Diasporic Media Producers And Representations Of Cultural Diversity In Canada

Prime-time narrative is the most watched and influential genre of television. It creates a sense of belonging and contributes to identity formation. It also receives the largest amount of publicly mandated funding in the form of investment, subsidies, and tax incentives in Canada. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that despite legislation requiring equitable representation in all aspects of screen media, and over thirty years of many “special initiatives” and training and mentorship programs, little progress has been made in the area of equitable representation in narrative programming. This dissertation investigates the representation of diasporic people of colour in the screen-media industry in Canada. In particular, it studies how “authentic voices” from these communities are finding expression in the area of prime-time television narrative programming (scripted comedy and drama) and feature films, which ultimately find their largest audiences in broadcast screen platforms on television and increasingly via the Internet. The focus is on the legislative frameworks pertaining to the reflection of “diasporic communities of colour” in the production of screen media, specifically for prime-time broadcast in narrative, or what is referred to in the industry as “scripted programming,” as well as on the current realities faced by creators of screen media from diasporic communities of colour in telling their stories in this arena. Through a case study of the television series Little Mosque on the Prairie, it examines the issues that affect the expression of “authentic voice” from individuals who have had the opportunity to work in the area of narrative screen media in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s public broadcaster, which has as one of its key priorities the reflection of the cultural diversity of Canada. The issues involved in the production of feature films by diasporic people of colour is examined through a case study of the film Heaven on Earth, written and directed by Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta. Mehta’s film presents a unique situation in which the filmmaker, due to the previous international success of her film Water, was able to access the financial resources to produce the film in Canada and maintain her “authentic voice” without mediation in the production from external players. Part of this case study includes a documentary film featuring an interview with Deepa Mehta conducted in 2017 about her film Heaven on Earth.

Seeing the invisible: brand authenticity and the cultural production of queer imagination

PurposeThe twofold aim of this theory-building article is to raise questions about the ability of queer cinema to transform market culture and ideologies around gender and sexuality. First, the authors examine how the very capitalization of queer signifiers may compromise the dominant order from within. Second, the authors address how brands possibly can draw on these signifiers to project authenticity.Design/methodology/approachThrough visual methods of film criticism and the semiotic analysis of three films (Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name and Portrait of a Lady on Fire), the authors outline some profound narrative tensions addressed by movie makers seeking to give an authentic voice to queer lives.FindingsBrands can tap into these narrative attempts at “seeing the invisible” to signify authenticity. False sublation, i.e. the “catch-22” of commodifying the queer imaginaries one seeks to represent, follows from a Marcusean analysis.Practical implicationsIn more practical terms, “seeing the invisible” is proposed as a cultural branding technique. To be felicitous, one has to circumvent three narrative traditions: pathologization, rationalization and trivialization.Originality/valueIn contrast to Marcuse's pessimist view emphasizing its affirmative aspects, the authors conclude that such commodification in the long term may have transformative effects on the dominant ideology. This is because even if something is banished to the realm of imagination, e.g. through aesthetic semblance, it can still be enacted in real life.

Types of Vocalizations in Self-Expression and Self-Inquiry

The author discusses vocalizations as using non-verbal voice sounds in self-expression and self-inquiry. The purpose of the study was to investigate the experience of self-expression and self-inquiry through vocalizations in the situations of valuing and evaluating. The researcher hypothesized that placing an individual in a safe place for self-expression on the conditions of valuing creates more authentic and genuine feelings, helping to reveal their authentic voice. On the contrary, placing a person under conditions of evaluating and impressiveness leads to a less authentic feeling and sounding. Two groups of participants were separated. The expressive group was created using the condition of valuing. The impressive group was created using the condition of evaluating. Participants in both groups used their voices to express themselves performing research tasks and then filled out the survey applications reflecting the sounder’s body, voice, feelings and listener’s feelings during the research. The application’s indicators were grouped into six factors: “Psychophysiological authenticity”, “Psychological authenticity”, “Satisfaction”, “Vocalization change”, “Perceived emotional involvement”, and “Perceived satisfaction”. The multilinear mixed effect regression models were built to investigate the influence of the research conditions on these factors and their dynamics. The t-test was used to compare the results between the groups. Significant differences were revealed with the factors “Psychophysiological authenticity”, “Psychological authenticity”, “Satisfaction”, and “Perceived satisfaction”. They were greater in the expressive group than they were in the impressive group. The indicators of “Perceived satisfaction” were growing.