(Un)veiling desire: re-defining relationships between gendered adult education subjects and adult education programmes

My underlying argument, in this paper, is that conceptualisations of power as a commodity, through which the 'disempowered-as-illiterate' subject moves towards becoming an 'empowered-as-literate' subject, forces constructs of identities into a powerful/powerless dichotomy which does not always do justice to diverse experiences. The claimed 'empowering' intentions of adult education programme and policy practice may, in reality, contribute to the dominance of restrictive disciplining and regulatory discursive practices. Moving away from emancipatory trajectories of adult education programmes that allege only liberation from domination, through 'literacy', can promise freedom points to another position of hope. Drawing on Foucauldian analysis, I explore sites of resistance as possibilities of transforming 'structures of understanding' at different levels. Officially validated and recognised transformations, in adult education programme as well as policy understandings, of the 'illiterate' subject may also hope to include choices in postures of autonomy (see Spivak 1996) made by programme participants in other 'fields' of socio-cultural practice linked to their material realities. Subsequently, 'empowerment' of the 'illiterate Indian village woman' cannot solely be imagined as a product of laws, policies and institutional discursive practices (see, for example, Gouws 2005; Rai 2003 on gender mainstreaming and Mosse 2005 on aid policy and practice). The 'illiterate Indian village woman' represented as a site of resistance, throughout this paper, displaces homogeneous representations of the 'illiterate' which situate her in the role of 'dependent' or 'victim', as failed attempts to rob her of her historical and political agency (Mohanty 1996). Through narrating other 'images' of refusal in my ethnographic vignettes, I hope to recognise different individuals' sense of agency, at all levels, as embedded in and evolving through forms of collective action that activate differences in order to develop possibilities and sustain hope for transforming historically rooted discursive practices of inequality. I provide ethnographic accounts of resisting 'literacy' programme participants, based in different villages in Bihar (Northern India), as accounts of resistance impacted on by notions of norms, translating and interpreting Others, networks and empowerment.

Heritage

This article examines the concepts, definitions, policies, and practices of heritage in a contemporary context. Within recent years, there have been significant shifts in our understandings and applications of heritage concepts and policies in the modern world. ‘Heritage’ emerged as a buzz word in international policy arenas in the 1980s and early 1990s, and has since weathered the vagaries of turbulent definitional and governance–nomenclature storms, as traditional debates about ‘what it is and what it is not’ reverberate around academia and state agencies alike. Policy and funding structures for heritage are determined by the classifications used to define them in various countries. Typically, reference is made to ‘built heritage’, ‘natural heritage’, and ‘intangible heritage’, loosely reflecting buildings, landscapes, and culture. Aspects of heritage are used by the cultural and tourism industries to add economic value, through heritage tourism sites, museums, and other activities. The cultural tourism product is often anchored around notions of heritage, and in postmodern, post-tourist societies, boundaries between culture, (travel) space, and identities are increasingly blurred. Issues of authenticity become important in the representation of heritage, and questions are asked about the validity of nostalgia versus realism. The role of heritage is examined in the context of identity formulation at individual and nation-state levels, and the political aspects of this are also discussed. Finally, heritage conservation is assessed through an examination of UNESCO’s World Heritage Site listing and protection strategy. In a changing world, new constructs of heritage, identity, authenticity, and representation will continue to emerge as meanings are constantly renegotiated over time and space.

Rats, floods and flowers: London's Gothicized nature

AUTHOR's OVERVIEW This chapter attempts a definition of London eco-gothic, beginning with an ecocritical reading of the ubiquitous London rat. Following Dracula, popular London gothic has been overrun, from the blunt horror-schlock of James Herbert’s 1970s Rats series to China Miéville’s King Rat. Maud Ellman’s elegant discussion of the modernist rat as a protean figure associated with a ‘panoply of fears and fetishes’, underlines how the rat has always featured in anti-urban discourse: as part of racist representations of immigration; as an expression of fear of disease and poverty; or through a quasi-supernatural anxiety about their indestructible and illimitable nature which makes them a staple feature of post-apocalyptic landscapes. Even so, the London rat is a rather more mundane manifestation of urban eco-gothic than the ‘city wilderness’ metaphors common to representations of New York or Los Angles as identified by eco-critic Andrew White. London’s gothic noses its way out through cracks in the pavements, grows from seeds in suburban gardens or accumulates through the steady drip of rainwater. However, I will suggest, in texts such as Maggie Gee’s The Flood and P. D. James’ Children of Men, London eco-gothic becomes less local and familiar as it responds to global environmental crisis with more dramatic tales of minatorial nature.