States of play: Irish childhoods, race and belonging

This thesis explores the meaning-making practices of migrant and non-migrant children in relation to identities, race, belonging and childhood itself in their everyday lives and in the context of ‘normalizing’ discourses and spaces in Ireland. The relational, spatial and institutional contexts of children’s worlds are examined in the arenas of school, home, family, peer groups and consumer culture. The research develops a situated account of children’s complex subject positions, belongings and exclusions, as negotiated within discursive constructs, emerging in the ‘in-between’ spaces explored with other children and with adults. As a peripheral EU area both geographically and economically, Ireland has traditionally been a country of net emigration. This situation changed briefly in the late 1990s to early 2000s, sparking broad debate on Ireland’s perceived ‘new’ ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity arising from the arrival of migrant people both from within and beyond the EU as workers and as asylum seekers, and drawing attention to issues of race, identity, equality and integration in Irish society. Based in a West of Ireland town where migrant children and children of migrants comprise very small minorities in classroom settings, this research engages with a particular demographic of children who have started primary school since these changes have occurred. It seeks to represent the complexities of the processes which constitute children’s subjectivities, and which also produce and reproduce race and childhood itself in this context. The role of local, national and global spaces, relational networks and discursive currents as they are experienced and negotiated by children are explored, and the significance of embodied, sensory and affective processes are integrated into the analysis. Notions of the functions and rhetorics of play and playfulness (Sutton-Smith 1997) form a central thread that runs throughout the thesis, where play is both a feature of children’s cultural worlds and a site of resistance or ‘thinking otherwise’. The study seeks to examine how children actively participate in (re)producing definitions of both childhood and race arising in local, national and global spaces, demonstrating that while contestations of the boundaries of childhood discourses are contingently successful, race tends to be strongly reiterated, clinging to bodies and places and compromising belonging. In addition, it explores how children access belongings through agentic and imaginative practices with regard to peer and family relationships, particularly highlighting constructions of home, while also illustrating practices of excluding children positioned as unintelligible, including the role of silences in such situations. Finally, drawing on teachers’ understandings and on children’s playful micro-level negotiations of race, the study argues that assumptions of childhood innocence contribute to justifying depoliticised discourses of race in the early primary school years, and also tend to silence children’s own dialogues with this issue. Central throughout the thesis is an emphasis on the productive potentials of children’s marginal positioning in processes of transgressing definitional boundaries, including the generation of post-race conceptualisations that revealed the borders of race as performative and fluid. It suggests that interrupting exclusionary raced identities in Irish primary schools requires engagement with children’s world-making practices and the multiple resources that inform their lives.

Death and football: An analysis of men's talk about emotions

This study is concerned with men's talk about emotions and with how emotion discourses function in the construction and negotiation of masculine ways of doing emotions and of consonant masculine subject positions. A sample group of 16 men, who were recruited from two social contexts in England, participated in focus groups on 'men and emotions'. Group discussions were transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis. Participants drew upon a range of discursive resources in constructing masculine emotional behaviour and negotiating masculine subject positions. They constructed men as emotional beings, but only within specific, rule-governed contexts, and cited death, a football match and a nightclub scenario as prototypical contexts for the permissible/understandable expression of grief, joy and anger, respectively. However, in the nightclub scenario, the men distanced themselves from the expression of anger as violence, whilst maintaining a masculine subject position. These discursive practices are discussed in terms of the possibilities for effecting change in men's emotional lives.

Welcoming the World: Governing Hospitality in London's 2012 Olympic Bid

London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games presented a diverse, cosmopolitan city opening its arms and “welcoming the world.” This article explores the apparently benign gesture of hospitality contained in London’s official candidature files submitted in 2004 and asks how such a promise of inclusiveness is managed. We argue that London’s depiction of itself as hospitable to every kind of visitor relies on subtle techniques of governmentality in which the subject positions of “host” and “guest” are imagined and produced in ways that make them more governable. By this, we are not referring to acts of authority, coercion, or discipline that exclude subjects or render them docile bodies within a rigid panoptical city. Rather, we are referring to the delicate ways in which the official bid document imagines and produces the ideal subject positions of host and guest and in so doing enables, encourages, and incentivizes certain behaviors. This analysis of urban welcoming takes us beyond reductive oppositions of hospitality and hostility, inclusion and exclusion, self and other. It focuses instead on how London’s inclusive welcome produces a variety of host and guest positions (for example, the “Olympic Family,” volunteers, guest workers), segregates them within the city, and then “conducts their conduct” in the areas of planning, security, transport, accommodation, education, and training. By analyzing the techniques of governmentality at work in London’s 2004 bid document, this article foregrounds the enabling form of power driving the city’s inclusive welcome and exposes its inherent micropolitics.

This is Abuse… Or is it? Domestic abuse perpetrators’ responses to anti-domestic violence publicity

Social marketing has become a key component of policy initiatives aimed at reducing the incidence of domestic abuse. However, its efficacy remains debated, with most measures of effectiveness being somewhat crude. More subtle effects of social marketing, such as the boomerang effect whereby the message engenders the opposite effect to that intended, have been detected, suggesting a need for modes of analysis sensitive to the multiple ways in which viewers react to social opprobrium. This article attempts to deliver just this. It begins with a short history and critique of the concept of social marketing. It then proceeds to explore the utility of the more complex notion that viewers often identify with the subject positions thrown open by social marketing on a quite temporary basis, before reconfiguring them. Using the responses of domestic abuse perpetrators exposed to the UK Government’s This is Abuse campaign film, the article shows how contradictory identifications with both anti-violence messages and victim-blaming discourses are negotiated by those young men prone to perpetrating domestic abuse. The article concludes by exploring how effectiveness might be better conceptualised and assessed with regard to the impact of anti-violence social marketing that speaks to domestic abuse perpetrators.

The Midnight express phenomenon : a historical materialist approach to the reception of the film Midnight express /

This thesis examines the Midnight Express phenomenon focusing on the film's reception by audiences in Europe, North America, and Turkey between 1978-2003. Using and enhancing the "historical materialist approach" to film reception developed by Janet Staiger, the thesis considers the historical determinants of the film's nationally and culturally differential readings in different periods and of the transformations in those readings. The thesis argues that while Midnight Express was most likely read in the late 1970s as an attempt to reaffirm American social identity by projecting Turks as an instance of the negative Other, there has been an important shift in the reception of the film in the West during the 1990s due to the changes in the discursive contexts in which the film has been circulating. One does not observe any specific reference to Turkish prisons as a part of the issue of human rights violations in Turkey in the initial reception of the film by European and American critics, whereas these issues appear to be important constituents of a particular reception of the film in the West in the present. The thesis explains this shift by pointing to the constitution of a particular discourse on human rights violations in Turkey after 1980, and especially throughout the 1990s, which has become a part of the discursive repertoires of the Western audience. Therefore, the thesis argues that today, Midnight Express functions as a more legitimate political statement about Turkey in the eyes of some Western audiences than it had been in the 1970s. On the other hand, parallel to the increasing desire of Turkey to connect itself to the West, particularly to become a member of the European Union, one observes an immense increase in the belief in and defense against the negative effects of Midnight Express on Turkey's international representation since the 1990s. The historical and current discourses that audiences, both in Turkey and abroad, bring into play suggest that these audiences engage with Midnight Express by assuming or denying not only the subject positions constructed by the film text but also certain history-specific extra-filmic subject positions produced by other social and discursive formations.

On the health and wellbeing of single working women without children : an analysis of scientific and lay discourse

Cette thèse examine la façon dont on interprète la santé et le bien-être des travailleuses célibataires et sans enfant au sein de deux types de récits : ceux provenant d’études publiées dans des périodiques (récits scientifiques) et ceux provenant d’entrevues qualitatives avec des membres de ce groupe (récits profanes). Sur le plan démographique, leur nombre est significatif; elles représentent 28% des employées canadiennes. Par contre, leur santé/bien-être est peu visible dans les écrits de recherche. Dans les sciences sociales, plusieurs études portent sur l’expérience parfois éprouvante d’être un adulte célibataire vivant dans une culture orientée sur le couple et la famille. Elles mettent l’accent sur le stigma associé à ce statut. Certains suggèrent même que les pratiques de recherche peuvent contribuer à la perpétuation de représentations négatives à l’égard des célibataires. En ayant un profil qui pourrait être symbolique d’une déviation vis-à-vis des attentes normatives entourant la vie de couple ou de famille, les travailleuses célibataires et sans enfant semblent un point de repère utile pour évaluer cette dernière possibilité. S’attarder autant aux récits scientifiques que profanes permettrait d’explorer les tensions et convergences entre eux. Suivant cet objectif, un échantillon de 32 articles scientifiques et de 22 retranscriptions d’entrevues ont été analysés selon une approche d’analyse de discours guidée par les concepts de répertoire interprétatif (une façon cohérente d’aborder un sujet donné) et de position du sujet (une identité mise en évidence par une façon de parler ou d’écrire). Trois articles ont émergé de cette recherche. Suite à une analyse des thèmes communs utilisés dans l’interprétation de la santé/du bien-être du groupe en question, un répertoire interprétatif surnommé la famille comme référence a été identifié. Ce répertoire expliquerait notamment la tendance observée d’expliquer leur santé/bien-être en référant aux états et aux charactéristiques d’être parent ou partenaire. Cette pratique peut avoir l’effet de voiler leur vie privée ou de la construire comme étant relativement appauvrie. L’article 2 examine comment les membres de ce groupe construisent leur propre bien-être. Il identifie la notion d’équilibre entre plusieurs sphères de vie et une identité de femme dynamique comme éléments centraux aux récits sur leur bien-être. Ces derniers vont à l’encontre de la perception des célibataires ou des personnes sans enfant comme ayant des vies moins épanouies ou enrichies et qui ne sont pas touchées par des questions de conciliation travail-vie personnelle. Le troisième article rassemble les deux types de récits autour des sujets de l’emploi et du statut de célibataire en lien avec le bien-être. Il met en évidence de nombreuses similarités et divergences, et théorise la fonction de ces diverses constructions. En conclusion, j’avance qu’une perspective plus critique face au statut de couple ou familial et de ses aspects normatifs pourrait offrir à la recherche en santé publique un point de réflexivité à développer davantage.

La revisión de la relación jurídica tributaria (Tema Central)

Hasta mediados del pasado siglo, el estudio de la aplicación de la norma tributaria al caso concreto ha solido realizarse a partir del esquema de la relación jurídica tributaria. Pero con independencia del movimiento de revisión del concepto de relación jurídica obligacional que se ha producido en el ámbito del Derecho público, dentro del Derecho tributario no es posible agotar el estudio de la prestación tributaria a través de un análisis circunscrito al examen de la obligación tributaria y del derecho de crédito correspondiente. Si se desea llevar a término un examen profundo y articulado del fenómeno tributario, es necesario considerar las posiciones subjetivas activas y pasivas que derivan de la ley, pero en cuanto a las primeras, no en términos de derecho de crédito, sino como potestad de imposición, y respecto a las segundas, no limitándose a la obligación tributaria, sino extendiendo el análisis al conjunto de actos debidos previstos por la norma.

Managerialism and Public Housing Reform

This paper discusses market inspired changes to the delivery of public housing in Queensland, Australia during the late 1990s. These policy changes were implemented in an organisational environment dominated by managerialism. The theory and method of critical discourse analysis is used to examine how managerial subject positions were assimilated and/or creatively resisted by different actors within the public housing policy community. These themes are discussed using interview data with a range of policy actors, including policy managers, front-line housing staff and public housing tenants. The analysis suggests that policy actors who openly challenged the emerging policy and organisational direction were marginalised in changing power relations.

Women of the corporation:a sociolinguistic perspective of senior women’s leadership language in the UK

This paper reconceptualises a classic theory (Kanter 1993[1977]) on gender and leadership in order to provide fresh insights for both sociolinguistic and management thinking. Kanter claimed that there are four approved ‘role traps’ for women leaders in male-dominated organisations: Mother, Pet, Seductress and Iron Maiden, based on familiar historical archetypes of women in power. This paper reinterprets Kanter's construct of role traps in sociolinguistic terms as gendered, discursive resources that senior women utilise proactively to interact with their predominantly male colleagues. Based on a Research Council funded1 study of 14 senior leaders (seven female and seven male) each conducting at least one senior management meeting in the U.K., the paper finds that individual speakers can transform stereotyped subject positions into powerful discursive resources to accomplish the goals of leadership, albeit marked by gender.

An exploration of female leadership language:case studies of senior women in Bahrain

This is a multiple case study of the leadership language of three senior women working in a large corporation in Bahrain. The study’s main aim is to explore the linguistic practices the women leaders use with their colleagues and subordinates in corporate meetings. Adopting a Foucauldian (1972) notion of ‘discourses’ as social practices and a view of gender as socially constructed and discursively performed (Butler 1990), this research aims to unveil the competing discourses which may shape the leadership language of senior women in their communities of practice. The research is situated within the broader field of Sociolinguistics and the specific field of Language and Gender. To address the research aim, a case study approach incorporating multiple methods of qualitative data collection (observation, interviews, and shadowing) was utilised to gather information about the three women leaders and produce a rich description of their use of language in and out of meeting contexts. For analysis, principles of Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) were used to organise and sort the large amount of data. Also, Feminist Post- Structuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) was adopted to produce a multi-faceted analysis of the subjects, their language leadership, power relations, and competing discourses in the context. It was found that the three senior women enact leadership differently making variable use of a repertoire of conventionally masculine and feminine linguistic practices. However, they all appear to have limited language resources and even more limiting subject positions; and they all have to exercise considerable linguistic expertise to police and modify their language in order to avoid the ‘double bind’. Yet, the extent of this limitation and constraints depends on the community of practice with its prevailing discourses, which appear to have their roots in Islamic and cultural practices as well as some Western influences acquired throughout the company’s history. It is concluded that it may be particularly challenging for Middle Eastern women to achieve any degree of equality with men in the workplace because discourses of Gender difference lie at the core of Islamic teaching and ideology.

Feminist poststructural discourse analysis

Feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (FPDA) is an approach to analyzing spoken interactions that focuses on the ways in which speakers negotiate their subject positions within competing and interwoven discourses. This article identifies the theoretical background to FPDA, its key principles, its distinctiveness from other approaches such as critical discourse analysis, and outlines some of the main directions in current research.

Co-creation and co-destruction: : A practice-theory based study of interactive value formation

Drawing on an empirical study of public transport, this paper studies interactive value formation at the provider—customer interface, from a practice—theory perspective. In contrast to the bulk of previous research, it argues that interactive value formation is not only associated with value co-creation but also with value co-destruction. In addition, the paper also identifies five interaction value practices — informing, greeting, delivering, charging, and helping — and theorizes how interactive value formation takes place as well as how value is intersubjectively assessed by actors at the provider—customer interface. Furthermore, the paper also distinguishes between four types of interactive value formation praxis corresponding with four subject positions which practitioners step into when engaging in interactive value formation.

Negotiating a masculine bloc: Jonathan Franzen's The corrections

Contemporary research on masculinities has focused on demonstrating how these are multiple, hierarchical, collective as well as individual, complex and contingent. In this article, I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in the light of such recent theorizations. I propose to focus on the negotiation of what Demetriou has termed a masculine bloc, which is a space in which hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities coexist and, therefore, a strict duality between both categories is transcended. Next, I suggest focusing on the construction of masculinities as subject positions that are interwoven with different geographical levels. It is my contention that St. Jude, the fictional city for the Lamberts’ home in the Midwest, conforms the symbolic arena in which hegemonic masculinity is staged.

Processing coordinate subject-verb agreement in L1 and L2 Greek

The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular. We conducted two experiments, an acceptability judgment task with adult monolinguals as a pre-study (Experiment 1) and a self-paced reading task as the main study (Experiment 2) in order to obtain acceptance as well as processing data. Forty adult monolingual speakers of Greek participated in Experiment 1 and a hundred and forty one in Experiment 2. Seventy one children participated in Experiment 2: 30 Albanian-Greek sequential bilingual children and 41 Greek monolingual children aged 10–12 years. The adult data in Experiment 1 establish the difference in acceptability between singular VPs in SV and VS constructions reaffirming our hypothesis. Meanwhile, the adult data in Experiment 2 show that plural verbs accelerate processing regardless of subject position. The child online data show that sequential bilingual children have longer reading times (RTs) compared to the age-matched monolingual control group. However, both child groups follow a similar processing pattern in both pre-verbal and post-verbal constructions showing longer RTs immediately after a singular verb when the subject was pre-verbal indicating a grammaticality effect. In the post-verbal coordinate subject sentences, both child groups showed longer RTs on the first subject following the plural verb due to the temporary number mismatch between the verb and the first subject. This effect was resolved in monolingual children but was still present at the end of the sentence for bilingual children indicating difficulties to reanalyze and integrate information. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that (a) 10–12 year-old sequential bilingual children are sensitive to number agreement in SV coordinate constructions parsing sentences in the same way as monolingual children even though their vocabulary abilities are lower than that of age-matched monolingual peers and (b) bilinguals are slower in processing overall.