1,721,086 research outputs found
Truth, purification and power: Foucault's genealogy of purity and impurity in and after The Will to Know lectures
No full textFoucault’s 1970–71 lectures at the Collège de France, The Will to Know, highlight the significance of themes of purity and impurity in Western thought. Reflecting on these themes coincided with the emergence of Foucault’s theory of power. This article presents the first analysis of Foucault’s investigation of purity and impurity in The Will to Know lectures, identifying the distinctive theory Foucault offers of purity as a discursive apparatus addressing correspondence between the subject and the truth through the image of relative integrity or mixture. It then traces Foucault’s subsequent reflections on these themes in his later writings on disciplinary power. The implications of Foucault’s position are considered; the article will close by putting Foucault’s ideas in dialogue with those of Kristeva, and in considering the role that purity and impurity may play in resistance
sj-docx-1-aut-10.1177_13623613221121413 – Supplemental material for ‘Instruments are good at eliciting information; scores are very dangerous’: The perspectives of clinical professionals regarding neurodevelopmental assessment
No full textSupplemental material, sj-docx-1-aut-10.1177_13623613221121413 for ‘Instruments are good at eliciting information; scores are very dangerous’: The perspectives of clinical professionals regarding neurodevelopmental assessment by Barry Coughlan, Matt Woolgar, Emma JL Weisblatt and Robbie Duschinsky in Autism</p
'Life is about choices, but external factors often affect outcomes': social work students' reasoning about the origins of social problems
Full text linkIt has been suggested that the emerging generation of social workers tend to be motivated primarily by a perception of the individual as the locus of 'social problems', ignoring the structural factors that shape and constrain the conditions of agency. Questionnaire research with 150 students on an undergraduate Social Work degree programme in the north-east of England investigated student perceptions of the origins and causes of social problems. It was found that student discourse appeared to operate within a context shaped by neoliberal assumptions regarding the nature and causes of social problems. Within that frame, however, students contested the idea that social problems are simply a result of poor individual choices and recognised the impact of inequalities on opportunities and outcomes. Findings showed that students' awareness of these issues increased as they moved through the social work programme. This provides grounds for optimism about the potential of social work education to nurture the development of a more radical discourse for social work practice among social work students
The 2010 UK Home Office ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ Review: a discursive policy analysis
Full text linkThis paper offers a discursive policy analysis of the 2010 UK Home Office Sexualisation of Young People Review, authored by Linda Papadopoulos (2010a). It will scrutinise the narrative presented by the text of the danger posed by cultural representations to healthy development, and trace the way that the text links this danger to catastrophic outcomes: child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. Examining this narrative, the article will propose that the UK Review deploys spatial metaphors to naturalise a gendered account of childhood, sexuality and danger, evoking the creeping influence of a corrupting culture on a girl's most private self. The article will also demonstrate that this spatial narrative underpins the epistemological structure of the text – its separation of the primary from the secondary, the real from the artificial
The politics of purity: When, actually, is dirt matter out of place?
No full textIn Purity and Danger, Douglas theorizes purity and impurity in terms of the instantiation and disruption of a shared symbolic order. Purity/impurity discourses act, according to Purity and Danger, as a homeostatic system which ensures the preservation of this social whole, generally encoding that which threatens social equilibrium as impurity. There have been calls for new social theory on this 'under-theorized' topic. Presenting such further reflections, I argue that Douglas' account is less a full explanation than a regularity. Representations of purity are only secondarily symbols of the social order. Rather, purity/impurity discourses are only associated with 'matter out of place' when phenomena are assessed for their relative deviation from an imputed state of 'self-identity': qualitative homogeneity and correspondence with their essence. Purity and impurity do more than judge self-identity, however. They can play a fundamental role in its performative construction; they are well adapted for smuggling assumptions into our discourses regarding the essence of particular phenomena and forms of subjectivity, simplifying a complex world into a stark contrast between the dangerous and the innocent, the valuable and the valueless, the necessary and the contingent, the originary and the prosthetic, the real and the apparent, and the unitary and the fragmented. © The Author(s) 2013
DISORGANIZATION, FEAR AND ATTACHMENT: WORKING TOWARDS CLARIFICATION
Full text linkIn 1990, M. Main and J. Solomon introduced the procedures for coding a new “disorganized” infant attachment classification for the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure (M.D.S. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978). This classification has received a high degree of interest, both from researchers and from child welfare and clinical practitioners. Disorganized attachment has primarily been understood through the lens of E. Hesse and M. Main's concept of “fright without solution,” taken to mean that an infant experiences a conflict between a desire to approach and flee from a frightening parent when confronted by the Strange Situation. Yet, looking back, it can be observed that the way Hesse and Main's texts were formulated and read has generated confusion; there have been repeated calls in recent years for renewed theory and clarification about the relationship between disorganization and fear. Responding to these calls, this article revisits the texts that introduced the idea of fright without solution, clarifying their claims through articulating more precisely the different meanings of the term fear. This clarified account will then be applied to consideration of pathways to infant disorganized behaviors
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