The Ontological Crisis of Schooling: Situating Migrant Childhoods and Educational Exclusion

This article emphasises the discord between ‘mobile childhoods’ and ‘immobile schools’ as the fundamental problematic of educational inclusion of migrant children in India. Formal schooling system predicated upon static ideals of age, grade, learning, curriculum and language, fails to accommodate the lived realities of migrant children. By drawing upon field work narratives with migrant children in Bangalore, I show that migrant children’s educational exclusion cannot be understood in terms of their mobility alone, instead it needs to be problematised in the context of dominant spatio-temporal ideals of childhood and schooling.

As mulheres do império: uma leitura de Ana de Amsterdam / Women’s Empire: A Reading of Ana de Amsterdam

Resumo: Enquadrado no bojo da produção identificada como “literatura dos retornados”, o interesse principal de Ana de Amsterdam (2016a), de Ana Cássia Rebelo, não recai nas imagens traumáticas do retorno ou na violência praticada entre colonizadores e colonizados, como é recorrente no gênero. De forma até sintomática, as lembranças de África são esporádicas na menina de cinco anos que deixou Moçambique junto à família. Em seu lugar, a exuberância de uma Índia portuguesa sonhada e projetada por ela ocupam as lacunas de um presente insatisfatório, dividido entre a criação dos três filhos de um casamento em crise e o emprego burocrático desempenhado numa Lisboa pouco atrativa. Em ambos, tanto na Goa portuguesa como no trajeto para o trabalho, despontam narrativas de mulheres que constituem a síntese entre o diário íntimo de Ana e a escrita testemunhal da diáspora. Numa primeira parte do estudo, recupera-se a gênese do romance no formato do blog assinado pela autora, evidenciando a “escrita do eu”, nos moldes dos estudos de autobiografias, diários e afins. O segundo momento volta-se para a escrita testemunhal no lastro da narrativa pós-colonial e também da pós-memória. Em comum, os dois planos tratam da perspectiva feminina, seja na batalha contemporânea da cosmopolita Lisboa, seja nos desdobramentos silenciados do pós-colonialismo, em meio às histórias duplicadas de outras tantas Anas.Palavras-chave: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diário íntimo; literatura de testemunho; blogs.Abstract: Framed in the center of the production identified as “literature of the returnees”, the main focus of Ana de Amsterdam (2016a) by Ana Cássia Rebelo, does not lie in the traumatic images of the return or in the violence practiced between colonizers and colonized, as it is usually the case in this genre. Somehow, even symptomatically, African memories are sporadic in the five-year-old girl who left Mozambique with her family. Instead, the exuberance of a Portuguese India, dreamed and projected by her, occupies the gaps of an unsatisfactory present, dividing herself to raise three children of a marriage in crisis and work in the bureaucratic employment situated in an unattractive Lisbon. In both, Portuguese Goa and on the way to work, narratives of women emerge and represent the synthesis between Ana’s private diary and the testimonial writing of the diaspora. In a first part of the study, the genesis of the novel is recovered in the form of a blog signed by the author, emphasizing the “writing of the self”, in the molds of autobiographies, journals and etc. The second moment turns to the testimonial writing in the basis of the postcolonial narrative and also of the post-memory. In common, the two plans deal with the feminine perspective, whether in the contemporary battle of cosmopolitan Lisbon or in the silenced developments of postcolonialism, in the middle of the duplicate stories of so many Anas.Keywords: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diary; testimonial literature; blogs.

Making sense of work: finding meaning in work narratives

This study examined how individuals make sense of their work narratives – autobiographical stories about their work lives – and the implications for individual well-being. A mixed methods approach was used to investigate relationships between meaning making, pathways to meaningfulness, job characteristics, job involvement, and psychological well-being. Survey responses and narrative themes from life story interviews were collected from 119 adults. A narrative coding scheme was developed to identify pathways to meaningful work. Results show that people made sense of their work lives most often by constructing themes about personal agency. The findings support prior research suggesting that socioeconomic factors, access to resources, and working conditions increase the likelihood of finding and benefiting from meaningful work. For individuals wishing to find meaning in their work, job design characteristics (e.g., decision authority, skill discretion), and developing a sense of agency can be levers for fostering meaning and well-being.

News as Narratives

In recent years, academics and pundits have taken great interest in the role of storytelling in journalism. The spread of rumors, misinformation, and disinformation in public discourse has intensified, as has the need to decipher the ways in which stories—fake or factual—work. Narratives play a key role in this process. Since time immemorial, stories have been structured in similar styles and around common themes to captivate audiences around the world. Scholars of the arts have for millennia debated what characterizes prototypical and universal stories. They have emphasized narrative elements, such as the organization of events into causal accounts, the choice of narrative perspective, the description of events as intentional actions, the casting of actors into character roles, and the fitting of those roles to types of story plots involving heroes and villains in conflict. News as a form of storytelling also follows conventional structures and organizing principles. As a result, narratives have also played a role in how journalism scholars and practitioners alike understand the particular genre of public communication that is news. The discussion of news as narratives can be approached from at least three perspectives: one emphasizes narratives as a set of conventions for telling any story; another approaches narratives as a particular genre of news reporting—that is, narrative journalism; and a third sees narratives as the core myths that circulate in our society through news, among other forms of communication. Increasingly, scholars also take an interest in how narrative elements affect the ways in which audiences perceive and engage with news.

IMAGES AT WORK: NARRATIVES IN WORDS AND PICTURES

Images are not innocent. Even though they arise from us, and often are made by us, they face and challenge us as if they lived a life of their own. Once they have appeared or have been produced, they acquire separate existence and indisputable reality of independent beings, which populate and shape our outer and inner world. As sensitive or imagined bodies they enter in resonance with our own sentient and imagining body. Human body is indeed the “locus of images” incessantly moving and acting on the ever-changing scene of our memory and imagination (i.e. of our own ‘fluctuating’ Self): thereby images are responsible for what we are as well as for what we wish (or dream) to be. Images are not innocent because they are neither inert nor lifeless. We are never safe in the presence of images: they can be alluring or frightening, reassuring or threatening, familiar or disquieting, lifesaving or harmful; they can impede or elicit action. Such irreducible ontological problematic, yet unmistakably empathic, nature of our relationship with images, is, in this essay, surveyed in the light of the reflections of Aby Warburg and Italo Calvino. Warburg’s theory of Pathosformeln and Calvino’s account of the role of visual images in his own verbal narratives, then provide the theoretical horizon for interpreting the narration by images sculpted by the medieval architect Biduinus on the façade of the XII century church of Saint Casciano of Cascina, near Pisa, and thereby unfolding the symbolical, iconological and metaphysical implications of its powerfully empathic imagery.

Panic! Humanity's Cis-Heteronormative Fear of the Transgender Android

Androids occupy a position of fascination within US pop culture and science fiction television, yet they rarely acknowledge their own experiences of gender. Reading Wendy the entertainment android from Syfy Channel's Dark Matter (2015–2017) as trans*, this article analyzes the material, cultural, and imagined bodies of the android through an intersectional lens of gender, sex, and race. At times, the article slips between different versions of the transgender android, wading through their cinematic representation, theoretical conceptualization, socio-cultural construction, and material reality, striving always to relate these overlapping categories to the android's trans* and technological body. First, the article delves into gender, race, and David Huebert's ‘species panic’, arguing that the triply othered transgender android would inspire a triple panic with direct ramifications for trans* bodies, especially trans women of color. The article then addresses the role of the multilayered cinematic, scientific, raced, cis-heteronormative gaze in the biopolitical ordering of life. Using Susan Stryker's theorization of passing and micha cárdenas's practice of the shift, the article then views sexual encounters as creating both the potential for and then panic of transgender otherness. This potential and potentially real panic then directly impacts the bodies of trans women of color and transgender androids through a reliance on sex work narratives and the commodification of sex.