Where pain = no gain : perspectives on sport, exercise and health, c. 1850-1920

A common perspective today is that sportspeople must train and compete to a level of exertion beyond the ‘pain threshold’ if they are to succeed; a view that has given rise to the popular expression ‘No Pain, No Gain’. Indeed, a common aphorism is that the health and quality of life of individuals and of the wider population is positively correlated with the frequency and vigour of physical exercise. In the period when modern sports were taking on their present characteristics (approximately 1850-1920), the prevailing opinions about the health and well-being effects of exercise were far more cautious, however. While the benefits of moderate exercise for physical and mental well-being went without question, too great an exertion was considered to be as risky as too little, causing ‘strain’ with the potential to inflict lasting and potentially fatal damage, including mental and physical complaints as diverse as neuralgia and ‘athletes’ heart’. The supposedly more strenuous sports, such as football, athletics and rowing, and the training required for them came under particular scrutiny in medical and popular discourses. This paper, an exercise in historical sociology, examines these discourses to demonstrate how advice about the risks on health of participating in sports and of too little or too much exercise more generally, was informed by prevailing physiological models and the interpretation of these within the medical profession and the wider population. The data sources include medical journals and texts, and sports training manuals from the period under investigation.

Paying attention to texts : literacy, culture and curriculum

In his paper in English in Australia in 2002, Bill Green called for a literacy project of our own, and for the need to think again, and think newly about the place of literary literacy within contemporary curriculum. But what does literary literacy mean in curriculum that recognises a wide diversity of texts and literacies? If literature and close attention to the aesthetic and imaginative dimensions remain important, what kinds of texts should we value, and how should we attend to them? This article considers how such matters might be taken up with multimodal texts of different kinds.

Econstruction : the nature/culture opposition in texts about whales and whaling

A perceived opposition between 'culture' and 'nature', presented as a dominant, biased and antagonistic relationship, is engrained in the language of Western culture. This opposition is reflected in, and adversely influences, our treatment of the ecosphere. I argue that through the study of literature, we can deconstruct this opposition and that such an ‘ecocritical’ operation is imperative if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe. I examine the way language influences our relationship with the world and trace the historical conception of ‘nature’ and its influence on the English language. The whale is, for many people, an important symbol of the natural world, and human interaction with these animals is an indication of our attitudes to the natural world in general. By focusing on whale texts (including older narratives, whaling books, novels and other whale-related texts), I explore the portrayal of whales and the natural world. Lastly, I suggest that Schopenhaurean thought, which has affinities in Moby-Dick, offers a cogent approach to ecocritically reading literature.

Career in writing : Judah Waten and the cultural politics of a literary career

This thesis examines the literary career of Judah Waten (1911-1985) in order to focus on a series of issues in Australian cultural history and theory. The concept of the career is theorised as a means of bringing together the textual and institutional dimensions of writing and being a writer in a specific cultural economy. The guiding question of the argument which re-emerges in different ways in each chapter is: in what ways was it possible to write and to be a writer in a given time and place? Waten's career as a Russian-born, Jewish, Australian nationalist, communist and realist writer across the middle years of this century is, for the purposes of the argument, at once usefully exemplary and usefully marginal in relation to the literary establishment. His texts provide the central focus for individual chapters; at the same time each chapter considers a specific historical moment and a specific set of issues for Australian cultural history, and is to this extent self-contained. Recent work in narrative theory, literary sociology and Australian literary and cultural studies is brought together to revise accepted readings of Waten's texts and career, and to address significant absences or problems in Australian cultural history. The sequence of issues shaping Waten's career in writing is argued in terms of the following conjunctions of theoretical and historical categories: proletarianism, modernity and theories of the avant-garde; the "e;migrant"e; writer and minority literatures; realism, political purpose and narrative self-situation; communism, nationalism and literary practice in the cold war; utopianism and the "e;literary witness"e; narrative of the Soviet Union; assimilationism, multicultural theory and the "e;non-Anglo-Celtic"e; writer; theories of autobiographical writing, and autobiography in Waten's career. The purpose of the thesis is not to discover a single key to Waten's writing across the oeuvre but rather to plot the specific occasions of this writing in the context of the structure of a career and the cultural institutions within which it was formed.

Remaking the body : explorations in the sociology of embodiment

As embodied social agents our lives are preoccupied with the production and reproduction of bodies. Making, unmaking and remaking our embodiment are ongoing activities. Eating, exercise, washing, grooming, dressing, for example, are activities in which the body engages in routine tasks of bodily management. Such activities can be seen as everyday rehabilitation. The study explores the impact of major physical impairment on embodiment, and on the processes involved in re-embodiment after catastrophic injury or disease. The experiences of the people in this study dramatically highlight the continuous, but largely taken for granted processes involved in our embodiment. Four analytical strands are interwoven throughout the study. The first strand relates to the frailty and vulnerability of the human body, characteristics which are epitomised by the bodies of the informants in this study. The second strand engages with key aspects of the context in which re-embodiment takes place, namely a context replete with crisis, danger, fear, uncertainty and risk. The third strand projects into the future in considering the ongoing project of self. The fourth strand addresses the institutional and social impediments which may confine vulnerable bodies and limit the exploration of more expansive bodies. The study is situated within the general theoretical approach of the sociology of the body. While recognizing the powerful impact of social discourse in the production of bodies, the study focuses on the critical role of embodiment in the reconstitution of self. The people in this study have experienced profound bodily change, but although this damage has disrupted, it has not annihilated their embodied selves. The people still possess and occupy their bodies. It is the obduracy of embodiment which directs the processes involved in remaking the body.

Inclusive schooling : contexts, texts and politics

The title ‘Inclusive schooling: contexts, texts and politics’, names a thesis which critically analyses the development of inclusive schooling in the small Australian Island state of Tasmania between 1996 and 1998. The ‘Inclusion of Students with Disabilities’ policy, introduced in 1995 by the Tasmanian Department of Education, Community and Cultural Development, provides an opportunity to understand the cultural context and politics of change in schooling over this period. The qualitative methodology deployed here is informed by poststructuralism and captures the everyday experiences of university teaching as a research site. The teacher/researcher as the visible maker of the research use metaphors of fibre and textile practice, techniques of textual juxtaposition and her positioned subjectivity as a female academic to tell a 'big story'. The researcher develops a 'double method' as a possible model for Inclusive research practice and educational policy analysis. Using a critical ethnographic method, derived from the work of Carspecken (1996), 'data stories' (Lather & Smithies 1997, p.34) are produced from the narratives of five key informants – a parent, two teachers, a policy-maker and the researcher. Assembled as the data of the thesis the multi-voiced texts provide an account of the sociocultural, professional and systemic context of Inclusive schooling over a three-year period. In the analysis these data are interpreted from a feminist poststructural standpoint. A deconstructuive reading of the data stories interprets the discourse of inclusive schooling emphasising the dominant foundation of the special education knowledge tradition. The idea of author function (after Foucault 1975, 1984b and Grundy and Hatton 1995) is used to interpret the 'texts' of the key Informants as discursive constructions. The researcher theorises inclusive schooling as an entangled, multiple and contradictory discourse, embedded in the social, cultural and material contexts, rather than a singular unitary Idea of the progress within the special education knowledge tradition. The study contributes a fine-grained analysis of the constructed knowledge of inclusive schooling in one locality. The thesis advocates continuing engagement with questions of epistemology and social transformation in inclusive schooling, rather than persisting with technical rationality and the status quo. The researcher takes the position that the opportunities to theorise inclusive schooling lie within the multiple and disparate constructed texts of the micro world of everyday practice and the macro understanding of understandings of contemporary social justice. The poststructuralist writing/reading questions traditionalist theorising in the special education field. Central to the negotiations of power and truth inclusive schooling research and practice is a communicative theory that transforms populist conceptions of inclusion.

Bringing Bourdieu to policy sociology : codification, misrecognition and exchange value in the UK context

The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu’s tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self-held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about the ways in which field theory might be applied to explain the abrupt public policy shift effected by the Thatcher government and the adjustments made to it by the Blair government. I suggest that a Bourdieuian approach shows policy working as a means of codification, as a doxa of misrecognition and as currency exchange within and across fields. I conclude with some thoughts about the difficulties of explicating interactions between fields.