Design as Symbolic Violence. Design for Social Justice.

Design embeds ideas in communication and artefacts in subtle and psychologically powerful ways. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term ‘symbolic violence’ to describe how powerful ideologies, priorities, values and even sensibilities are constructed and reproduced through cultural institutions, processes and practices. Through symbolic violence, individuals learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive. Symbolic violence normalises structural violence and enables real violence to take place, often preceding it and later justifying it. Feminist, class, race and indigenous scholars and activists describe how oppressions (how patriarchy, racism, colonialism, etc.) exist within institutions and structures, and also within cultural practices that embed ideologies into everyday life. The theory of symbolic violence sheds light on how design can function to naturalise oppressions and then obfuscate power relations around this process. Through symbolic violence, design can function as an enabler for the exploitation of certain groups of people and the environment they (and ultimately ‘we’) depend on to live. Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, tools and processes that result in structural and other types of violence (including ecocide). Breaking symbolic violence involves discovering how it works and building capacities to challenge and transform dysfunctional ideologies, structures and institutions. This conversation will give participants an opportunity to discuss, critique and/or develop the theory of design as symbolic violence as a basis for the development of design strategies for social justice.

Exploring the relationship between women’s empowerment and the internet in China: potentials and constraints

This thesis reports on an exploratory study of the relationship between the Internet and women’s empowerment in China. The theoretical framework of the study combines feminist theorisations of power – the core concept of empowerment – with insights from sociological perspectives on power and gender, as well as collective action theory. This allows for the conceptualisation of women’s empowerment as a dynamic process that is shaped by a set of communicative practices. Focusing on female Chinese bloggers and women’s groups of different organisational types, this study aims to explore the respective ways in which these two types of women actors use the Internet with a view to examining whether, and the extent to which it enables them to generate a sense of empowerment. The empirical data mainly derives from interviews with female bloggers and with staff members from different women’s groups, as well as from a features analysis and social network analysis of the sampled blogs and official websites of studied groups. Overall, the findings suggest that the opportunities offered by the Internet for women’s empowerment through awareness-raising, social interactions, and the organising of collective action, are limited. For female bloggers, their activities do not translate the new communicative practices afforded by the Internet into concrete action to bring about changes in their everyday life. On the contrary, blogs become an alternative platform to discipline their behaviours and to reinforce patriarchal gendered norms. Moreover, the research finds that the promise of empowerment is further undermined by the pervasive commercialisation of the Internet and state control. For women’s groups, contextual factors prevent them from fully realising the potential of the Internet for increasing their organisational visibility, promoting public awareness about gender issues, building a sense of the collective, campaigning, or networking. The major barriers in these processes are state control, a lack of resources, online censorship, and at times, competition from commercial sites. In this respect, the Internet does not play a significant role in forming a collective to challenge existing unjust power relations.

Moral Masculinities: Ethical Self-fashionings of Professional Chinese Men in London

Through qualitative interviews and examination of textual sources, this essay investigates the gendered, class and cultural subjectivities of transnational, highly-educated Chinese men living and working in London. Narrative analysis of the interviews of two participants suggests that they exhibit hybrid “bricolage masculinities,” which incorporate elements from Western educational and corporate cultures, and also appropriate concepts and practices from the Confucian tradition of moral self-cultivation. A discussion of contemporary texts that support the revival of Confucian masculinities illuminates the discursive context in which the participants’ ethical self-fashionings take place. The study argues that the cosmopolitan yet culturally embedded masculinities of the participants are suggestive of how professional Chinese men, as they step onto the world stage, seek to insert themselves more advantageously into local and global power relations of gender, class and nation.

‘Learning to be Zen’: Women travellers and the imperative to happy

This paper follows the emotional management of lone, independent women travellers as they move through tourist spaces, based on my doctoral research Embodiment and Emotion in the experiences of independent women tourists (2012). Specifically, this paper will focus on ‘gendering happiness’ by arguing that women travellers are significantly compelled to feel and display characteristics of happiness, humour and ‘learning to be Zen’ in order to be successful travellers. The imperative to become, and remain, happy and humorous in the face of embodied, emotional and gendered constraints is a key feature of women’s reflections of their travelling experiences, mirroring the recent emergence of literature into happiness and positive thinking within feminist theory (Ehrenreich 2010, Ahmed 2010). Negotiating ‘bad’ emotions provides a powerful insight into the perceptions of women travellers; to remain happy can mask problematic power relations and other forms of resistance. This is not to say that emotional negotiation is not partly a form of effective resistance, rather, I wish to make room for the freedom to be unhappy and angry in travelling space without feeling failure for not achieving a successful travelling identity.

Occupied childhoods: discourses and politics of childhood and their place in Palestinian and Pan-­Arab screen content for children

This thesis explores changing discourses of childhood and the ways in which power relations intersect with socio-cultural norms to shape screen-based media for Palestinian children. Situated within the interdisciplinary study of childhood, the research is an institutional and textual analysis that includes discursive and micro-level analysis of the socio-political circumstances within which children consume media in present-day Palestine. The thesis takes a social constructionist view, arguing that ‘childhood’ is not a fixed universal concept and that discourses of childhood are produced at specific historical moments as an effect of power. The study has a three-part research agenda. The first section uses secondary literature to explore theories and philosophies relating to definitions of childhood in Arab societies. The second employs participant observation and semi-structured interviews to understand the history and politics of children’s media in the West Bank. The final part of the research activity focuses on the impact that definitions of childhood and the politics of children’s media have on broadcasting outcomes through an analysis of (a) discourses on children’s media that circulate in Palestinian society, and (b) local and pan-Arab cultural texts consumed by Palestinian children. The analysis demonstrates that complex ideological and political factors are at play, which has led to the marginalisation, politicisation and internationalisation of local production for children. Due to the lack of alternatives, local producers often rely on international funding, and are hence forced to negotiate competing definitions of childhood, which while fitting with an international agenda of normalising the Israeli occupation, conflict culturally and politically with local conceptions of childhood and hopes for the Palestinian nation. While the Palestinian community appreciates the positive potential of local production, discourses and strategies around children’s media show that Palestinian children are constructed as vulnerable, incomplete and in constant need of guidance. Pan-Arab content presents a slightly less didactic approach and in certain cases presents childhood as a dynamic space of empowerment. However, by constructing children as ‘consumercitizens’, it alienates Arab (and Palestinian) children from disadvantaged backgrounds,as the preferred audience is middle-class children living in oil-rich countries of the Gulf.