1,720,974 research outputs found
Critical realist discourse analysis, motherhood, and gender: a systematic methodological approach to analysis
No full textObjects of virtue:‘Moral Grandstanding’ and the capitalisation of ethics under neoliberal commodity fetishism
Get PDFThis article critiques conspicuous displays of morality within public discourse, recently framed as ‘moral grandstanding’, from the perspective of an intersubjective Critical Realist theory of ethics. Drawing on Honneth’s recognition theory as the basis of a ‘qualified explanatory critique’, I argue that these practices are not mere aberrations within moral discourse, but a necessary consequence of the neoliberal imperative to turn all aspects of the self into market assets. Neoliberal commodity fetishism also and especially involves the commodification of moral character as a means of economic competition, as exemplified in recent discussions of ‘ethical capital’. This objectification categorically precludes intersubjectivity as the basis of ethical life, and produces a cognitive structure resembling narcissistic pathology, characterised by the pervasive objectification of self and other. Critical Realists should therefore reject moral grandstanding not only for its detrimental effects on public discourse, but because in subordinating morality to the market, it is fundamentally anti-ethical
The Ethics of Space
Get PDFAcross the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space, formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements thus become less than fully human, as they struggle to find a place where they can symbolically and physically exist. The Ethics of Space is an unprecedented account from an anthropologist who accidentally found herself homeless, studying what happens when homeless people organize to occupy abandoned properties. Set against the backdrop of economic crisis, austerity, and a disintegrating British state, Steph Grohmann describes a flourishing squatter community in the city of Bristol, and its eventual outlawing by this state. Contrary to a mainstream discourse that seeks to divide squatters into the ‘deserving’ homeless and ‘undeserving’ activists, Grohmann shows that squatters may in fact be homeless people who, choose to challenge property and the State
‘Love is tricky to capture at this level’:Social care values, performance measurement, and the emergence of ‘ethical capital’
Get PDFProfessional ethics and values in social care have frequently been described as a site of active resistance against the incursion of neoliberal managerialism in social services. More recently, however, this view has been challenged by an emerging discourse that explicitly treats organisational values as measurable capital assets, exemplified in a growing literature around the concept of ‘ethical capital’. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study on ethics and values within the social care sector in the UK, this article argues that, in practice, the notion of treating values as quantifiable and measurable capital is a consequence of the necessity for organisations to capitalise every part of themselves in order to survive in an increasingly competitive funding market. However, instrumentalising professional ethics in the interest of market competition threatens to undermine its critical potential and to make any part of it that resists subsumption under market logic unintelligible within bureaucratic regimes of performance management
The Ethics of Space
Get PDFAcross the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space, formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements thus become less than fully human, as they struggle to find a place where they can symbolically and physically exist. The Ethics of Space is an unprecedented account from an anthropologist who accidentally found herself homeless, studying what happens when homeless people organize to occupy abandoned properties. Set against the backdrop of economic crisis, austerity, and a disintegrating British state, Steph Grohmann describes a flourishing squatter community in the city of Bristol, and its eventual outlawing by this state. Contrary to a mainstream discourse that seeks to divide squatters into the ‘deserving’ homeless and ‘undeserving’ activists, Grohmann shows that squatters may in fact be homeless people who, choose to challenge property and the State
The Ethics of Space: Homelessness, Squatting and the Spatial Self
Get PDFThis thesis discusses the interconnection between spatial practices and the construction of moral personhood, based on the example of homelessness and squatting activism in ‘Austerity Britain’. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with persons who have no fixed address in the West of England, I explore the connections between spatiality, embodied cognition and the moral construction of self and other.
Because bodies are spatial objects, embodied cognition is necessarily spatial – ‘human beings are spatial beings’. Moral personhood is therefore also and especially spatially constructed, most importantly through metaphors of ‘inside’ vs. ‘outside’. Drawing on cognitive anthropology and psychoanalysis, I identify two distinct models of the self informed by spatial metaphors, which I refer to as the ‘territorial self’ and the ‘spatial self’. These cognitive models, and the types of relations between self and other they imply, come to inform the construction of distinct spatial configurations which can be observed from a small scale – for example an individual ‘home’ – to a large scale, e.g. the territorial nation state. The territorial self corresponds to a ‘moral space’ characterised by notions of securisation, defensible boundaries and a dual mode of exclusion and internment that produces (racialised and gendered) ‘spatial others’. The spatial self, on the other hand, implies an ethical stance that takes seriously the spatial component of embodiment, and thus the vulnerability of the self to the absence of shelter, understood as the minimum amount of safe space – within and without the body – that embodied persons need in order to physically, cognitively and socially function.
On this basis, I argue that homelessness can be understood as the result of multi-layered social processes based in a pervasive logic of territoriality. ‘The homeless person’ is characterised by a lack of territorial entitlement that translates into a loss of moral personhood, often referred to in the literature as ‘social death’. I conclude that squatting, as a political and ethical practice, aims not only at the removal of an immediate material lack, but also and especially at the re-construction of moral personhood through a practical ethics of recognising and responding to the vulnerability inherent in embodiment
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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