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Train Tracks and Tailored Learning: Is this the end of the line for government funded community education?
No full textThe number of people participating in state funded ‘community learning’ has diminished over the last decade from a figure of 657,200 in 2013/14 to just 274, 090 in 2022/2023. Although there are many different interpretations of what community learning is, this article’s key concern is for learning being offered ‘in’ and ‘for’ local communities. From next year, at least from a UK government funding perspective, ‘Community Learning’ will be no more in England. From August 2024 the new term of ‘Tailored Learning’ will be adopted instead, despite having scant provenance within adult learning. Such a name change suggests a neo-liberal political ideology and strengthens the current argument that adult learning which is paid for by the state should be for employment purposes, or a steppingstone to employment only. Will the new term act as a marker of increased focus on meeting individual needs, or will learning be increasingly tailored to meet employer needs? It can of course be argued that ‘Tailored Learning’ will seek to achieve both ends but, even if this is the case, the pendulum may well have swung even further towards state-funded adult learning being the facilitator of a relationship between the individual and employers. With an election looming, ‘Tailored Learning’ could either be a short-lived or a long-term change. On the surface, a change of name and re-categorisation of purposes does not mean that adult learning cannot continue to take place ‘in’ and ‘for’ communities. However, it does take adult learning further along the tracks of ‘efficiency’ and ‘utility’ and is therefore worthy of continued critical debate
Mapping Microbial Selves: Field Notes from a Dirty Parenting Project
No full textMicrobes exist everywhere on, in and around us. They are both ubiquitous and largely invisible, at least until they make their presence, or absence, felt. Recent years have seen a heightened sensitivity to microbial threats in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to antibiotics. At the same time, there is also a growing interest in the microbiome as a source of ‘wild immunology’. From this viewpoint, the human body is comprised of, embedded within, and dependent on its exposure to an ecosystem of microbes, and the absence of such exposure is linked to the development of auto-immune conditions such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Inspired by an emerging body of work in the humanities and social sciences which looks to engage with so-called lay knowledge and understandings of microbial forms (including bacteria, viruses, and fungi) and processes (such as contagion or digestion), this Field Note explores the piloting of ‘body mapping’ as a research method to engage with families to explore their collective understanding of their children’s microbiome
Pandemic Life-lines: A Multimodal Autoethnography of COVID-19 Illness, Isolation, and Shared Immunities
No full textAs a crosscutting concept in biology, anthropology, and philosophy, immunity has been a critical ‘site’ of debate on the relations between self and other, organism and environment, risk and responsibility, the corporeal and the political. In this Research Article, I trace how these relations and everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic relied on a web of coordinated—and sometimes unexpected—lines of communication, restriction, and solidarity. Using an experimental approach that combines multimodal autoethnography and multiscalar relational analysis, I present a first-person account of travelling during, testing for, and falling ill and isolating with COVID-19 in late 2021. I explore how pandemic life-lines, including public health measures, vaccinations, devices, and helplines, as well as mundane gestures of care and ecologies of support, acted together as shared immunities. In this exploration, I propose to reconceptualise ‘immunity’ as a process network rather than a defence apparatus, shedding light on how these life-lines may influence differential trajectories of disease and healing. To conclude, I discuss how my conceptual and methodological approach contributes to a social ecological understanding of immunity, that goes beyond the biopolitical, in times of pandemic and in the future
Mana Wāhine: Decolonising Feminism and Patriarchy in Aotearoa
No full textAotearoa/New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in 1893, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was widely celebrated for her response to Covid-19 (Roy, 2020), and the country, despite having experienced a swing towards the right in the 2023 general election (Corlett 2023), is generally seen as one of the most progressive (McDonald, 2020). But does the situation of Māori women paint a different picture? It is important to look at numerous additional difficulties Māori women face compared to Pākehā women. Statistics show that Māori women are significantly overrepresented in prisons (Adair, 2023) and are much more likely to be unemployed than all other demographics (Reilly, 2019). According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a leading Māori scholar on Mana Wāhine theory (1992), Māori women face a double jeopardy of oppression for being both a woman and Māori. To understand their situation, it is essential to examine what role colonialism plays in this oppression. In this essay, I explore how colonialism has shaped the struggles Māori women face, and how they respond to it through Māori feminisms, – more specifically, through the concept of Mana Wāhine . I start by describing how colonialism is a gendered process that brought patriarchy to Aotearoa, and how this colonial encounter shaped interactions between white and Māori feminists, an encounter that is marked by misconstructions of distinct realities that are assumed to be the same. I move on to Indigenous feminism in Aotearoa by categorising Mana Wāhine as a decolonising Māori form of feminist theory and tying it into transnational efforts before finishing with a conclusion. I find that the colonial encounter lastingly shaped the situation of Māori women in Aotearoa by introducing Western binaries, gender norms and patriarchy. Furthermore, the lens of colonisation distorted Māori culture to present it as sexist. The only way out of thisdouble bind for Māori women is therefore an approach that takes their oppression as both women and Māori into account.
Myth of the \u27muse\u27: a History of the Gender Roles Conceptualised in Art
No full textThe muse has been historically defined as a source of divine inspiration to the artist, a passive and voiceless object art is made in reflection to but not about. The dynamic is almost always gendered with the female counterpart of the muse being frequently left silent. She takes on a sexualised role, posing nude, as often the relationship between muse and artist extends to romantic one. An erotised and romanticised version of womanhood litters nude paintings of the past, highlighting how the role frequently stripped women of their identity as they were portrayed through the eyes of the male artist. However, there are artists who have challenged these assumptions. Tracing the life of artist Lee Miller and the work of Shigeyuki Kihara reveals how the binaries between the roles of artist and muse are not as rigid as previously thought but are influenced by societal constructs limiting how we perceive and use the role of the muse.
Contesting the Prescriptibility of Emotion through Affective Encounters in Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012)
Get PDFThis paper explores how Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) dramatises the subversive potentialities of affective encounters as an antidote to the isolating, profit-minded forms of posthumanisation prescribed by modern psychiatry. It argues that the play poignantly unveils how the convergence of the psychopharmaceutical industry with advanced capitalism and neoliberal ideology shape popular discourse around mental illnesses and the necessity of medically induced (self-)regulation of emotion. It also investigates how Prebble mingles crisis with hope in the piece by portraying the autonomy and unpredictability of affective bodily responses, which evade being translated into bio-data and destabilise biopsychiatry’s totalizing view of emotions as utterly controllable through the brain. My analysis utilises Rosi Braidotti’s theorisation of the posthuman subject as both susceptible to exploitation and control and as the site of resistance and ongoing transformation, as presented in her work The Posthuman (2013). It also employs Stefan Herbechter’s theories, as expressed in his book Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), on how biotechnological developments, advanced capitalism and ideology converge, facilitating new forms of self-governmentality. Finally, it refers to Brian Massumi’s conceptualisation of affect, prevalent in his work “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) as an intense autonomic bodily response which resists processes of control and manipulation. Ultimately, I argue that The Effect highlights the transformative potential of affective encounters and interconnectedness, functioning as resistance to modern psychiatry’s isolating prescription of emotional self-governance through self-medication
Where have all the arrows gone? A cross-cultural comparison of Lowland Maya and Central Ohio arrow use
Get PDFArrow points are an abundant lithic resource, but exactly how abundant? Recent systematic surveys of the Mayan Lowlands and central Ohio permit a new cross-cultural comparison of arrow use, and factors that may lead to their differing accumulations in the archaeological record. Somewhat surprisingly, Mayan arrow use, at least in terms of recorded frequencies in the archaeological record, is less than that of Central Ohio Late Prehistoric populations. Central Ohio has a much smaller population density than the Yucatan peninsula, so the dearth of arrow points in the latter context is unexpected. There are many factors that may explain the paucity of arrow points in Mayan contexts, when compared to the relatively dense arrow assemblages in Ohio sites. These many factors warrant further research and analysis in both Ohio and Mayan lithic arrow studies. This research presents the results of a preliminary comparative analysis. Several factors likely explain the difference between Ohio and maya arrow frequencies. Given that most arrows in Ohio are found as isolated finds, the most likely explanation is a difference in survey coverage between Ohio and the Mayan Lowlands. The other contributing factors include the relatively short use-life of Ohio arrow points, and the lack of weapon diversity in Ohio. Both factors result in higher usage of arrows, and a higher rate of deposit when compared to the Mayan Lowlands. With the increase in digital archives and records, large-scale comparative studies such as this have the potential to change our collective understanding of warfare, conflict, and tool use by past peoples
Theatre of the Oppressed and its Times: A talk by Julian Boal
No full textI’m always impressed by someone who can stand up and speak coherently without notes. It’s an underrated art form, and one that Julian Boal performs with conviction and authenticity, all the while in a second language. He is promoting his new book, Theatre of the Oppressed and its Times (2023), at an event jointly hosted by Active Enquiry Theatre Company and the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House. I arrive at Boal’s talk intrigued by what it’s like to be the son of a revolutionary theatre practitioner, probably the most famous theatre maker ever. 
Mother of All Labour: Vulnerability and Immunity in Times of Ebola
No full textWonkifong Ebola treatment unit was unique at the time of the outbreak that hit the Guinea in 2014. Contrary to other infrastructures run by Western workers, Wonkifong mainly employed personnel from Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cuba. Even so, the unit constituted a racialised landscape where proximity to white agencies granted privileges to certain groups of racialised people while excluding others. In a humanitarian infrastructure aimed at empowering knowledge of epidemics in the Global South, Black children were quarantined without their parents and left mostly unattended. After many months, former patients were hired as nannies to remedy the infrastructure’s blind spot. These women were employed to care for the children thanks to their immunity to the virus. Building on the concept of a ‘politics of life’ and exploring how these women were exploited as ‘medical superbodies’, my article sheds light on how the humanitarian infrastructure produced a gendered labour that mirrors other economies exploiting female Black bodies such as the colony or the plantation. Relying on an ethnography of practices of care and mobility within the unit, this piece underlines how the postcolonial segregation at play during the outbreak operated not strictly in terms of skin colour, but in terms of gender and closeness to white power.
UK Khat Prohibition and the Making of a Harmful Drug
No full textThis article delves into the complex dynamics of khat (Catha edulis) prohibition in the UK, with a particular focus on a Somali community in north-west London. Despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs finding no substantial evidence of khat causing societal or medical harms and recommending public health interventions instead of prohibition, the UK Home Office classified khat as a Class C drug in June 2014. This decision raises critical questions about what constitutes a harmful drug. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the peak of prohibition discourse in 2013–14, the article explores how notions of harm operate across moral, political, and epistemological registers as people grapple with framing khat’s drug status and the effects of its use. It illustrates how prohibition discourse not only amplified perceptions of khat’s harmfulness but also sidelined the more nuanced concerns of Somali community members over persistent socioeconomic integration issues, mental health, and social marginalisation. Thus, the harm of khat may not lie in its potency as a psychoactive substance but as an object of prohibition that overshadows interventions to address the adverse conditions associated with its use among certain individuals