HIV positive men as fathers: Accounts of displacement, ir/responsibility and paternal emergence

It is now apparent that socio-cultural constructions of masculinity variously impact men’s experiences of their HIV positive status, yet how being a father can feature in this mix remains under-researched. This study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews and Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis to explore the accounts of six self-identifying heterosexual fathers (four black African migrants, two white European) who had been living with HIV from five to 24 years. While the HIV-related literature calls for the need to subvert ‘traditional’ expressions of masculinity as a means of promoting HIV prevention and HIV health, we argue that the lived experience for HIV positive men as fathers is more socially, discursively and thus more psychologically nuanced. We illustrate this by highlighting ways in which HIV positive men as fathers are not simply making sense of themselves as a HIV positive man for whom the modern (new) man and father positions are useful strategies for adapting to HIV and combating associated stigma. Discourses of modern and patriarchal fatherhoods, a gender-specific discourse of irresponsibility, and the neoliberal conflation of heath and self-responsibility are also at work in the sense making frames that HIV positive men, who are also fathers, can variously deploy. Our analysis shows how this discursive mix can underpin possibilities of often conflicted meaning and identity when living as a man and father with HIV in the UK, and specifically how discourses of fatherhood and HIV ‘positive’ health can complicate these men’s expressions and inhabitations of masculinity.

Somatic pedagogies: Critiquing and resisting the affective discourse of the neoliberal state from an embodied anarchist perspective.

This paper takes as its context widespread feelings of anxiety within neoliberal society caused by a combination of material and discursive factors including precarious access to work and resources. It is argued that the state uses ‘discourses of affect’ to produce compliant subjects able to deal with (and unable to desire beyond) neoliberal precarity and anxiety. Critical education theorists have argued that discourses of ‘well-being’, emotional support and self-help have gained increasing purchase in mainstream education and in popular culture. These discourses are dangerous because they are individualized and depoliticized, and undermine collective political struggle. At the same time there has been a ‘turn to affect’ in critical academia, producing critical pedagogies that resist state affective discourse. I argue that these practices are essential for problematizing neoliberal discourse, yet existing literature tends to elide the role of the body in effective resistance, emphasising intellectual aspects of critique. The paper sketches an alternative, drawing on psychoanalytic and practiced pedagogies that aim to transgress the mind-body dualism and hierarchy, in particular Roberto Freire’s work on Somatherapy.

Professionalizing school governance: the disciplinary effects of school autonomy and inspection on the changing role of school governors

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools, in particular school governors – those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance.

(Un)covering ground: dance, space and mobility

Ballet and modern dance teachers often exhort students to ‘travel across the floor’ and ‘cover ground’. These instructions invoke metaphors of travel and mobility that capture an array of common assumptions about dance, space and movement. This essay examines the spatial and mobility discourses that these instructions simultaneously build upon and produce while exploring the seductiveness of technique’s promise of mastering space through the moving body. Threading auto-ethnography with critical theory and moving across different disciplinary fields and writing styles, I explore the ways in which these instructions leak outside the perimeter of the dance studio to feed into the narrative of a dancer’s extended physical, geographical and social mobility. Analysing the mobility and travel discourses of my dance training vis-à-vis poststructuralist theorizations of the subaltern power of the nomad and theories of space and place, I argue that this narrative becomes complicit in the construction of an idealized notion of artistic nomadism, which, in turn, aligns with current neoliberal logics organised around the production of mobile subjects.