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Deterritorialized careers, ageing and the life course
Get PDFThe pursuit of a deterritorialised career profoundly influences how the life course unfolds. In this article, we examine how geographical mobility within global organizations influence the stages and transitions that make up the adult life course. Drawing on a British Academy funded study, we have analysed the biographies of corporate executives and UN-professionals at different stages of their careers and life course. The ways that these transnational actors interpret their past, present and future at different stages of the life course – early adulthood, middle-age and approaching retirement – sheds light on the relationship between deterritorialized work practices, ageing and significant life transitions. We argue that deterritorialized careers promote a compartmentalised approach to life whereby each ‘compartment’ – employment, relationships, family, and home – poses a distinct set of logistical problems to be solved and requires significant reflexive capabilities. Since the responsibility for reconciling these discrete compartments across time and space is individualised, ‘windows’ of heightened mobility create immediate and long-term challenges for transnational actors that can be cumulative rather than resolving over time. Thus, an initial decision to pursue a deterritorialized career can have repercussions that are not only immediate but shape successive stages and transitions of the life course
Prehistoric and Anglo-Saxon activity in the Upper Thames Valley: archaeological investigations at Lechlade Memorial Hall and Skate Park in 2017
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Meme - a novel & In search of digital gothic
Get PDFThis doctoral thesis comprises a novel, Meme, which I consider to be in the new genre of digital gothic, and a piece of contextualising research, In Search of Digital Gothic. Meme tells the story of Scarlett, a PhD student in Digital Anthropology who stumbles across the existence of an ancient folk tale that is so disturbing, frightening or dangerous that it has always been forbidden from being shared. Scarlett comes to believe that the tale was leaked onto the internet, and sets out to track it down. In doing so, she discovers it may have played a role in the death of her brother Nathan, whose suicide some years before has left her traumatised and unable to connect with the world around her.
In my contextualising research, I explain how I was drawn to the "digital gothic" as a way to express the sense that, beneath the perfect sheen of our twenty-first-century digitally mediated lives, there are troubling and ambiguous forces that border on the uncanny. The Gothic as a genre is a natural correlative or container for such ideas, and my project explores existing manifestations of the digital gothic in both prose fiction and multimedia works.
In Part II, "Infectious Media", I examine the behaviour of 'memes', and analyse their unsettling features as 'uncanny replicators' that display 'uncanny metalepsis'. I draw comparisons with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), arguing that Dracula is in essence -a meme; and with the ghost stories of M.R. James, in particular "The Mezzotint" (1904), where multimedia objects repeatedly breach their protective frames.
Part Ill, "Digital Masks, Digital Ghosts", explores 'presence' in the digital age, with a focus on the haunting possibilities inherent in social media and communications, anonymity and trolling. I use the recent cinematic subgenre of webcam horror (Unfriended, Cam, Host) to examine the notion of the digital ghost.
Finally, in Part IV, "Haunted Mazes", I discuss the manifestation of 'uncanny time' and 'interactivity' in the digital gothic, utilising the metaphor of the maze or labyrinth. I use the Jacques Derrida/Mark Fisher concept of 'hauntology' as a frame to examine these themes in the M. R. James ghost story "Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance" (1911), and Charlie Brooker's interactive television episode, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018).
Taken together, the novel and the contextual research offer an innovative creativecritical undertaking that nonetheless draws upon an existing tradition of literary work, and resonates meaningfully with the wider culture beyond it
Teaching art creatively
No full textThis book is packed with ideas and inspiration to enrich teachers' knowledge and understanding of art and design in the primary classroom. It synthesises the philosophical and practical elements of teaching; encouraging a move away from traditional didactic approaches to contemporary classroom pedagogies to develop children’s creative potential
Wait for her: a family memoir between Italy and Palestine. An analysis of literary strategies to negotiate personal and collective transnational identities
Get PDFThis thesis is formed by two parts: the memoir 'Wait for Her', and a theoretical exegesis. In order to understand the purview of this study the two parts should be read jointly. This research developed from an interest in understanding how the personal struggle to negotiate one's own transnational identity relates to a collective struggle for self-determination. 'Wait for Her' is an experimental memoir where I retrace the story of my parents and the life of my half-Italian, half-Palestinian family, from the 1960s to 2020. After the loss of my mother, I try to renegotiate my identity and understand what it means to grow up across cultures and under the influence of the Israel-Palestine context. My narrative mixes performative and embodied knowledge, memoir, fiction, and historical investigation in order to cast a new layered light on the events which have affected my family and shaped the relationships between Europe and the Middle East for the last fifty years.
Many works in recent years have explored the importance of specific literary strategies in postcolonial and transnational writing, but this thesis focuses specifically on the potential and pitfalls of non-fiction genres based on a narrative of the I - like memoirs, travel writing, life writing, autobiography - to offer a space for personal and political analysis.
The main objective of this thesis is to overcome these genres' major inadequacies: the inadequacy of a first-person non-fiction narrative when writing about an entire cultural group; the inadequacy of the narrative form to convey the fluidity of identities in formation and hybrid identities; and finally, the inadequacy of narrating collective historical trauma from a personal perspective.
The contextual essay is divided into two main chapters. In the first one, 'Themes and Methods', I explore the concept of performative. From it, I delineate those characteristics that allow me to put together the three sides of my research, namely an interest for daily embodied practices and how they influence our identities, the focus on Palestinian history, and the use of creative writing as my research methodology.
In the second chapter, 'Analysis of Techniques', I give a close reading of my book. I pin down four techniques - a metanarrative adoption of fiction and nonfiction, third-person narration compensating for first-person narration, the role of performative elements, and the use of multiple languages - that I believe not only answer my research questions, but can contribute to the field of writing, especially non-fiction writing- from memoirs to historiography- to avoid the objectification of complex personal and communal identities on the page
(Wo)men in the middle: the gendered role of supporting prisoners
Get PDFPrisons are, by their very nature, gendered institutions. Despite women making up a
small percentage of the prison population (House of Commons Library, 2020), those
supporting prisoners are generally women - especially mothers and partners (Booth
and Masson, 2021; Codd, 2008). In understanding women’s experiences of criminal
justice, it is prudent to consider the women who are punished by the system despite
not being incarcerated themselves. This chapter sheds light on these women’s
experiences. First, through a review of the growing international literature that
illustrates how the economic and relational implications as well as the health, stigma
and care for children of prisoners are overwhelmingly experienced by women in the
community attempting to keep their families together. Following this, a case study
showcasing the excellent work of one organisation, The Straight Path Resettlement
Project (SPR) in Leicester, England, discusses Ferzana Dakri’s experience of
working in the community with ‘BAME’ Muslim women who have imprisoned loved
ones. In viewing prison as sites of punishment, and appreciating how these pains
extend beyond those incarcerated, this chapter draws attention to the multiple ways
that women supporting prisoners are simultaneously harmed
Looking for causality in civilised tourism in China
No full textThe paper outlines the processes in carrying out a realist analysis of civilised tourism in China and the author’s thoughts on what kind(s) of causality that the critical realism paradigm can equipt realist researchers in their effort to find explanations for social phenomena under investigation. It also discusses the challenges in identifying the mechanisms, giving rise to issues around the complexity of causality
Traversing terrain and staying put: performing endurance
No full textThis chapter explores parallels between endurance events (such as long-distance running and charity fundraising challenges) and artistic modes of site-based performance that employ endurance methods, formats, and paradigms. The discussion considers how meanings of endurance are constructed and conveyed across both contexts and it questions how one realm informs the other, and what might be gained from exploring points of connection, overlaps, and divergence between the two. Endurance in this writing refers to a physical act in which the body is pushed to extremes over a designated, and often prolonged, period of time and is related to events in which the body is put to work in a particular manner. Endurance as a form of work emerges as a sub-theme throughout this discussion informed by the various practices of labour and repetition employed within public performances, physical endurance events, and everyday acts of perdurance. These discussions provoke closer inspection of particular approaches to body-environment relations in a range of contexts. The final section explores where performative acts retreat to in a global pandemic, leading to reflection on feats of endurance, perdurance, and performance acts in domestic spaces
Festival cultures: mapping new fields in the arts and social sciences
No full textThis book brings together interdisciplinary research from the fields of anthropology, sociology, archaeology, art, history and religious studies, showing the necessity of a transdisciplinary and diachronic approach to examine the last half-century of modern arts and performance festivals. The volume focuses on new theoretical and methodological approaches for the examination of festivals and festival cultures, both the Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and burner culture in Europe. The editors argue that festival cultures are becoming values-inflected global forms of travel, dwelling, festivity, communication, and social organisation that are transforming contemporary cultures and have significant political capital