1,721,098 research outputs found
Where the bloody hell are we? : multicultural manners in a world of hyperdiversity
No full textMany Australians, used to seeing images of ethnic violence in other parts of the world, were shell-shocked by the Cronulla riots, and in the following weeks public and private debates canvassed the causes of the conflict - youth, drunkenness, masculinity, mobile phones, disadvantage, alienation and, of course, perceived cultural conflict. In contrast to the Hazzard Report's criticism of the media, a poll of 45,000 readers conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald (2005b), listed the main sources of blame as racism, stupidity,
poor parenting/schooling, tribalism, xenophobia and alcohol. A common theme has been the failure of multiculturalism. As we shall see in this book, these events represent lines of fracture that test the limits of multiculturalism and nationalism in Australia
Pedagogies of civic belonging : finding one's way through social space
No full textWhat does it mean ‘to belong’? We too easily conceive belonging as a symbolic attachment to social categories of identity and community, drawing on elaborations of the idea of the ‘imagining’ of community at the expense of examining the practices and materialities that produce the grounds of that belonging (Noble 2002). A focus on the representational character of belonging leaves little room to explore the temporal and spatial processes of how we come to learn to belong. This chapter emerges out of a preoccupation with habits of ‘civic belonging’ in the domains of everyday life. It suggests that ‘civic belonging’ entails a set of questions not just around the ‘cultural’ dimensions of national citizenship (as others have also argued), but around the multiplicities of one’s belongings, the things they attach to, their degrees of intensity, the practices which produce belonging, the capacities they entail and, centrally, how one learns to inhabit and belong (or not) in shared social space. Drawing on a focused examination of my son’s movement in and through the local neighbourhood, it argues that such forms of belonging are embodied, iterative and interactive practices that accrue from infancy. These practices constitute a kind of ‘wayfinding’ through local social spaces, but it importantly argues that any social space involves a pedagogic ensemble of social actors, human and non-human, and pedagogic practices through which human conduct is shaped
Cultural diversity and the ethnoscapes of taste in Australia
No full textThis chapter explores the consequences of increasing ethnic diversity for practices of cultural consumption and the distribution of taste in Australia. Changing migration patterns and generational changes have produced a wider array of goods, sites and audiences, and an increasing transnational nature of practices and relations. This chapter shows that while migration has both produced ethnic-specific markets and reshaped ‘mainstream’ tastes in Australia, the data raises questions about the complex ways in which ethnicity and cultural consumption are interrelated in a globalised world. It argues that we need to think less about ethnicity as a neat dividing line of taste and more about the dynamic flows captured by the idea of the ‘ethnoscape’. The chapter considers the implications of the data for debates about emerging cosmopolitan forms of capital alongside the ongoing significance of national cultural capital. It argues for the need to disentangle a variety of processes in the composition and recomposition of cultural capital: diversification of markets, transnationalisation of consumption and the cosmopolitanisation of taste
Habits of Difference in High-Rise Living
No full textThis chapter interrogates the habits of everyday sociability amid the intersection of two pressing challenges of modern urban life: the growing incidence of high-rise living and its reconfiguration of neighbourhoods and neighbourly relations; and the complex diversity of cities premised on increasing migration and transnationalism. This linking emerges from a set of broader concerns around the ways forms of cohabitation shape the possibilities for intercultural ‘conviviality’ or the capacity to live together in a context of increasing ethnic difference, especially given that higher urban densities and higher rates of migration are seen to be causes of greater social fragmentation. Drawing on research in the urban centre of Parramatta, Sydney, and based on interviews with residents in areas of high-density and council staff, this chapter argues that such urban complexities complicate ideas of habit, suggesting that we need to focus more on the diverse logics of ‘environing conditions’ and the open-ended processes of habituation. It argues that while habitual capacities to engage with diversity are partly shaped by built form and social policy, they are largely mediated by the trajectories of people’s lives and the investments in ‘inhabiting habit’ that these trajectories allow them to make
The politics of consumption : positioning the nation
No full textIn Distinction, Bourdieu draws out the strong, but mediated, relations between politics and cultural tastes, and the issues through which they are expressed – the right to speak, moral order and class consciousness. While Bourdieu’s analysis was framed by an emphasis on French class politics, we adopt a broader sense of the political, focusing less on the political sphere than on the processes through which people position themselves in relation to the state and civil society. Discussions of consumption during the Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) interviews drew people to issues around national identity, social cohesion and globalisation, demonstrating the ways in which political subjectivities are mediated through cultural practices. These interviews illustrate the complex forms of position-taking that interviewees undertake and the political dispositions that they reflect. This chapter is particularly concerned with participants’ enunciation of the relations between their cultural preferences and ideas of national culture, the array of stances towards the nation that they voice, the challenges to a traditional politics of nation posed by the growing recognition of Indigenous and migrant cultures, and the threats and promises of globalisation
Pedagogies of incorporation : touch and the technology of writing
No full textMetaphors of tactility are often used to describe the considerable ease that skilled individuals display in the performance of certain actions; a pianist who has a deft ‘touch’ or a footballer with a ‘feel’ for the game. While such terms denote skill, they tend to mask the process the process of its acquisition, suggesting an intuitive ability rather than a technique perfected over time through practice. This is similarly the case with phenomenologies of the body that emphasise an almost seamless meshing of subject and object in the acquisition of skill. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, in discussing a typist’s touch, describes this as ‘knowledge in the hands’ but doesn’t fully explain how it gets there. While he considers this a ‘knowledge bred of familiarity’ and attests to the power of habit in the body ‘appropriating fresh instruments’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1999: 143-144), this implies a pedagogy whereby acquiring a skill is simply learnt as a matter of course. Such physical capacities, however, are not just learnt, they are also often taught. In the context of children learning to write and their production of text through the use of a pencil, this is an important distinction. Children do not simply acquire the capacity to write, they are taught to do so and the pedagogies that affect this process are instrumental to their embodied and sensuous competence
Conclusion : 'distinction' after Distinction
No full textIt has been 40 years since Distinction was published: the world has changed enormously over the intervening period, yet Bourdieu’s work continues to hold its place as a major contribution to social theory generally as well as to cultural sociology in particular. Many works since then have testified to Distinction’s continuing capacity to inspire rich empirical work that has been methodologically and theoretically innovative in refining Bourdieu’s approach to accommodate the changes that have taken place over that period
Disassembling and reassembling habits in a pandemic
No full textThis chapter considers the implications of research conducted in the midst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that monitored how responses to the virus by government agents and authorities engaged with the regulation of everyday habits. The research also explored how such interventions into daily habits were registered in the media, social media, public commentary and across a range of academic disciplines. Our discussion here focuses on three themes: managing the behaviour of crowds in view of the risks of ‘habits of contagion’ in urban contexts; the new infrastructures and atmospheres associated with requirements of social distancing, and reconfigurations of the spatial dynamics and articulations of habits, especially those within the home. In discussing these, the chapter also takes account of the different ways in which Foucault’s distinction between the systems developed for the management of leprosy and the plague, as well as his subsequent discussion of the biopolitical forms of government that were later developed for the management of smallpox, informed the governance of habits in response to COVID-19
Introduction : Engaging habits : theory and practice
No full textThis introduction to the Assembling and Governing Habits collection takes its initial bearings from the ways in which the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic crisis occasioned a wide range of governmental initiatives brought to bear on our daily habits. It then reviews how questions concerning the governance of habits has been implicated in a wide range of contemporary matters of concern, from climate change through to the management of waste disposal practices to the role of digital technologies in the algorithmic governance of everyday habits. These practical interests in habit are complemented by a discussion of the revived theoretical interest in habit and the varied literatures that this draws on: the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, assemblage theory and the perspective of mundane governance. The rationale governing the division of the collection into three parts focusing, respectively, on habit discourses, habit infrastructures and city habits, is reviewed. This provides as a setting for summaries of the chapters falling within each part of the book
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