Search Results (20)

Pregnancy termination, also referred to as abortion, is a contentious subject in many countries. Uganda’s culture requires young people to remain celibate; they therefore suffer from restricted access to any sexual and reproductive health information, products, and services, including contraceptives. Girls who are pregnant in Uganda are oppressed in various ways, including being expelled from school. Since abortion is illegal under Ugandan law, those abortions that take place are assumed to have a high risk of being unsafe. Most previous studies in the African context have thus focused on the phenomenon of unsafe abortion. Adolescent abortion is characterized by a rhetoric of pathology that frames girls as victims of deadly unsafe abortion practices. This paper aims to critique the view that pregnant adolescent girls are merely vulnerable victims who passively accept the denial of SRH services, including abortion. We analyzed the life histories of 14 girls in Uganda who had undergone pregnancy termination. Our findings showed that adolescent girls are not passive victims of the structural barriers to abortion. They use their agency to obtain knowledge, make decisions, successfully terminate pregnancy, and conceal the information as needed. It is therefore important for policymakers to acknowledge the agency of adolescent girls in regard to pregnancy termination and how this recognition could be of benefit in terms of devising appropriate supports for them. Full article

The climate crisis is an urgent issue that requires immediate and significant international action and is tightly connected to several other global problems such as biodiversity loss, economic inequality, and countercurrents to democracy. Therefore, enabling the construction of an agentive role in relation to the crisis is a crucial task for education. According to the national core curriculum, Finnish social studies teaching should aim for active democratic citizenship. The article analyses the linguistic construction of agency in relation to climate issues in social studies textbooks from a discursive perspective, examining the rhetoric of positioning and addressing the reader as an active agent. The article draws an overall image of agency regarding the climate in textbooks and examines its implications. Four categories of orienting to the crisis and constructing agency in relation to it are identified: (1) constructing agency against the crisis; (2) stating the unsustainable nature of the current system; (3) enlisting ways of making an impact in general; and (4) representing the absence of crisis. Based on the findings, this article suggests that textbooks do not fully utilise their status as a forum for imaging our capacity to act to stop the climate crisis and, therefore, fall short of the goals set in the curriculum. Full article

The Women’s March on 21 January 2017, opened a new social and political landscape for Muslim women to engage in Islamic liberatory activism. I locate Muslim women’s participation in the marches following the 2017 ‘Muslim travel ban policy’ as a site for discovering the link between the politics of resistance and the utility of Islam as a source for liberation. I argue that Muslim women living in minority and post-secular contexts resort to faith as a source of agentival liberation to address the political rhetoric of anti-Islamic sentiments and policies. The outcome of this research demonstrates (1) how Muslim women activists challenge the Western narratives of being oppressed and explore the ways they want to represent themselves; (2) how Islam serves as a catalyst for theological resistance and how this enhances the role of Muslim women as moral and spiritual agents in transforming their political and social conditions; (3) how the Islamic liberation in the US context historically intersects with Black churches’ resistance toward White racism; and (4) how Muslim women’s agency as spiritual beings is linked to the promotion of justice in the Western liberatory movements. Overall, the article shows how Muslim women resort to their spiritual journey and use such narratives to confront unjust political rhetoric and policies. Full article

Deciding what to make of secular, religious, and spiritual speculations about AI and digital technologies can be overwhelming, and focusing on the extreme utopic or dystopic outcomes may be obscuring the larger facts. Is this technology a beautiful blessing or a damning curse? What can paying close attention to these technologies and the discourse surrounding them show? How founded are our anxieties? By following the apocalyptic throughline in this rhetoric across fields in recent years, this essay seeks to consider the effect of apocalyptic thought on recent developments in tech, and consider how this worldview orients our future. The deterministically utopic, dystopic, and apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding these technologies obscures their function and efficacy, giving agency to what is functionally still just a tool, the use for which depends on its designers and users. Full article

The biblical account of Salome has been marked throughout history by two main themes: on the one hand, the princess’s dance in front of the main rulers of Galilee, and on the other hand, the request for the head of John the Baptist to King Herod, instigated by his mother Herodias. The reading of this passage has been strongly marked by the different patriarchal exegetical approaches, which have modulated the reception of both female characters being traceable through the visual and literary arts, to the point of taking on the concept of femme fatale. Really, in both moments Salome is the executor of the actions, not as a result of her capacity for agency, but due to her influenceable character. Through a critical–historical analysis of the biblical passage, Herodias and Salome emerge with characteristics quite different from what 19th-century Art History inherited. The methodology of feminist rhetorical criticism allows for an approach to the visual re-imaginings of this biblical passage that have shaped the iconography of these two figures. The field of visual arts, particularly the production of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, will be the great receptacle for the genesis of the fatality and assimilation of these female biblical figures. Full article

The transfer of learning is arguably the most enduring goal of education. The history of science reveals that although numerous theories have been transferred from the natural sciences to the socio-political realm, educational practitioners have often deemed such transfers romantic and rhetorical. We conducted an experiment that randomly assigned a sample of 292 college freshmen in China to two groups to learn different thermodynamic theories: entropy or self-organization theory. We examined whether the two groups may arrive at different implications about social (and government) control without explicit instructions. We found that participants who learned the theory of entropy were more likely to believe the social system would become chaotic over time without external control; thus, they preferred tightened social control. Whereas participants who learned self-organisation theory were more likely to believe that order may form from within a social system; therefore, they downplay external control and prefer stronger individual agency. Follow-up interviews showed that the participants’ narratives about social control were largely consistent with the thermodynamic concepts they had learned. Our findings have critical implications for the recent trend in STEM education that promotes the teaching of cross-cutting concepts—seeking patterns from interdisciplinary ideas—that may implicitly prime students to borrow physical science theories to formulate personal social hypotheses and engage in moral–civic–political discourse. Full article

This essay focuses on Lola Ridge’s long poem “The Ghetto” in relation to the gendered imagery and visual construction of the modern laborer emerging across early twentieth-century print media. Perpetuating gendered notions of the modern worker as predominately masculine, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual representations of the laborer typically feature manly, virile figures, often in resistance to capitalism and inevitably eliding the industrial woman laborer. Ridge’s “The Ghetto” alternatively locates modern labor in the female industrial worker. The essay considers the poem’s splicing of collective and individual portraits of immigrant working women, developing a visual rhetoric that asserts women’s agency amidst modernity’s changing forms of work, insisting upon their visibility as workers, activists, and feminists. Consideration of several visual print genres includes women’s labor publications; social and industrial documentary photography; and periodical illustrations from The Masses. In visually representing women workers, these sources of visual media contextualize Ridge’s approach in “The Ghetto” and social attitudes toward gender and labor persisting in the century’s early years. Full article

The paper aims to offer an opportunity to consider intersectionality in the context of digital media. On the basis of empirical research, this paper analyzes the way in which gender, sexuality, color, and religion intersect in online spaces to produce new norms and forms of discrimination, as well as space for agency and for the articulation of different voices. In particular, in adopting an intersectional feminist perspective, this paper explores how Muslim girls produce counter-narratives and new spaces for subjectivation at the intersection of gender, religion, and racialization by actively appropriating digital media. Specifically, the paper analyzes French Muslim girls’ relationships with digital media in relation to political life, in the context of growing Islamophobia and the instrumentalization of women’s bodies by populist discourses on religion. On the basis of online and offline observations and explorative interviews carried out in Paris, this paper shows that the girls developed a number of individual and collective strategies involving both online and offline spaces to cope with racist and anti-Islamic rhetoric and practices in a context which they perceived to be characterized by contemporary processes of racialization and everyday discrimination against Muslim people. Full article

Sustainable and Responsible Design (SRD) harnesses design’s potential to address eco-social problems and in doing so challenge the status quo of design education by reframing the social and ecological consequences, boundaries and agencies of design. This critical and transdisciplinary approach frays the edges of traditional design disciplines with embedded and reflexive modes of learning. We describe characteristics of SRD education and present theories of learning to empower students in this complex terrain. The learning associated with SRD education is ecologically engaged, participative, critical, expansive and designerly. We recount case studies of our own experiences advancing sustainable and responsible undergraduate design education in the UK. We identify path constraints such as disciplinary fragility, appropriation, and power dynamics in the design school. The push for a revision of priorities generates tensions where there is often greenwashing rhetoric of sustainability and inclusivity. We describe strategies and tactics to address these tensions. We highlight the agency we have as educators and designers and argue that design education can only meaningfully participate in response to the challenges presented by climate change, other types of ecocide, and social problems when educators make substantive commitments to supporting sustainability literacies and design approaches that serve the interests of diverse stakeholders. Full article

Victorian artists were remarkably literate; they wrote autobiographies, diaries, and essays and befriended writers and journalists. Writing had become a way to present themselves on the open market and to generate a public image as individuals and collectively within the new professionalism emerging in the century. Letter writing was purposed to solidify and improve artists’ social capital, and their comments were always embedded in social relationships and practices. Thus, artists’ letters reveal much about the artworld structure; its players; and its overlapping spheres of social, economic, and professional identities. Their letters combined frankness with rhetorical pleading and contained their own press releases, studio invitations, and responses to criticism and were often intended for public consumption if used in critics’ reviews. Through letters, artists and critics revealed their reciprocal authority and agency and did not simply reflect the artworld but shaped that world. In their letters, economic gains were sublimated by artists’ desire for fame, Royal Academy acceptance, and a place in art history, then an emerging university discipline, seeking symbolic investments in their reputations and demonstrating that the market is cultural, not just economic. In their letters artists made clear that commodification does not destroy or pollute subjectivity. Full article

In W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, he argued that the problem of the 20th century in the United States was the problem of the color line. Given that de facto and explicit racial discrimination persist, anti-immigrant rhetoric is intensifying, and legal status has become more salient, we argue Du Boisian theory remains relevant for understanding social and political cleavages in the 21st century United States. The intersection of race, ethnicity, and legal status or “racialized legal status” represents a new variation of Du Bois’ “color line,” due to how these statuses generate cumulative disadvantages and exclusion for citizens and immigrants of color, particularly the undocumented. We begin with a review of Du Bois’ double consciousness theory, highlighting the marginalization of African Americans. Next, we apply double consciousness to the 21st century U.S. context to empirically demonstrate parallels between 20th century African Americans and the marginalization faced today by people of color. We close with a discussion about how double consciousness enhances our understanding of citizenship and has also generated agency for people of color fighting for socio-political inclusion in the contemporary United States. Full article

The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as Cheryll Glenn dubs her, scholarship attempts to account for the ways in which Julian’s theology circumvented the religious authority of male clerics. Some speculate that Julian’s authority arises from a sophisticated construction of audience (Wright). Others situate Julian in established traditions and structures of the Church, suggesting that she revised a mode of Augustinian mysticism (Chandler), or positing that her intelligence and Biblical knowledge indicate that she received religious training (Colledge and Walsh). Drawing from theories on space and gender performativity, this essay argues that Julian’s gendered body is the generative site of her authority. Bodies are articulated by spatial logics of power (Shome). Material environments discipline bodies and, in a kind of feedback loop, gendered performance (re)produces power in time and space. Spaces, though, are always becoming and never fixed (Chavez). An examination of how Julian reorients hierarchies and relations among power, space, and her body provides a hermeneutic for recognizing how gender is structured by our own material cultures and provides possibilities for developing practices that revise relations and create new agencies. Full article

Invoking a dialogue between two scholars, authors Jane Hoogestraat and Hillery Glasby discuss the exigence for, construction of, and differentiation between LGBT and queer ethos. Drawing from Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and the construction of a gay identity, the text explores connections between queer theory, LGBT(Q) ethos, and queer futurity, ultimately arguing for a more nuanced and critical understanding of the undecidability and performativity of LGBT and queer ethos. In framing LGBT and queer ethos as being at the same time a self and socially constructed and mediated—legitimate and illegitimate—ethos can be understood not only as a site for rhetorical agency, but also as an orientation and a form of activism. Finally, the text offers a case study of Adrienne Rich’s “Yom Kippur,” which is a poem that offers a queer (and) Jewish perspective on identity—from an individual and community level—exhibiting both an LGBT and queer ethos. Full article

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period. Full article

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) is discussed as a promising approach in land-use science and spatial research to address complex multifaceted “real-world problems” and to design strategies and solutions for sustainable development. TDR has become a widespread research approach in sustainability science and is increasingly promoted by research programmes and agencies (e.g., Future Earth and Horizon 2020). Against this backdrop, TDR can be considered a (social) innovation in the academic system, which is currently in the midst of an up-scaling diffusion process from a rather small TDR-advocating expert community to a broader science-practice community. We argue that this up-scaling phase also places TDR in a critical state as the concept potentially risks a type of “rhetorical mainstreaming”. The objectives of this study were to analyse how the challenging approach of TDR is currently adopted and implemented in the field of land-use research and to identify potential influencing factors. We studied 13 transdisciplinary research projects from Germany by performing qualitative interviews with coordinators, document analysis and participatory observation during meetings over a period of five years. Results show that the adoption level of the TDR concept varied widely among the studied projects, as did the adoption of the TDR indicators used in our analysis. In many of the investigated projects, we identified a clear lack of conceptual knowledge of TDR. In addition, we found that current academic structures limit the ability of researchers to thoroughly adapt to the requirements of TDR. We conclude that further communication and educational efforts that promote TDR are required. In addition, we advocate for the development of suitable funding instruments that support sustained research structures. Full article