‘The best borough in the country for cohesion!’: managing place and multiculture in local government

Abstract

In the interface between national and local levels of UK government, narratives of place are made to fit particular tropes of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ at multiculturalism. Thinking through ‘community cohesion’ policy in England between 2001 and 2010, this article shows how (reputations of) relative success at ‘living together with difference’ become a medium through which local government practitioners negotiate the space between national and local priorities, needs and ambitions, by examining how practitioners in English local authorities negotiate narratives of ‘failed multiculturalism’ associated with the places they work and, in doing so, how they re-inscribe or subvert local reputations and their ‘elsewheres’.     

Men's experience of their partners' postpartum psychiatric disorders: narratives from the internet

Objectives Postpartum psychiatric disorders (PPPD) can be serious and disabling, and may lead to long-term adverse consequences. Partners of women with PPPD are also affected by the illness, but their experiences are seldom described. The aim of this study was to explore men's experience of women with PPPD.Methods Eleven written narratives from the internet were used to analyse men's perceived experience of their partner's PPPDs. Data were analysed using content analysis.Results The men revealed a major disruption in their lives. They expressed fear, confusion and anger; they were also extremely concerned about their partners, and felt unable to help in overcoming the disorder. Most of the men described making sacrifices in order to hold the relationship and the family together. Although the disorder improved over time, they were left to face an uncertain future with a woman who seemed to be very different from the person they had known previously. Most of the men gained maturity and increased self-esteem, but for some the result was divorce, custody disputes and loneliness.Conclusions The men in this study experienced the woman's PPPD as a difficult time, when everything familiar was turned upside down. Health professionals should pay more attention to men's mental health in the postpartum period. Furthermore, information regarding the possibility of these disorders should be given to expectant couples in prenatal classes. Further research is needed to ascertain how and to what extent this should be included in the education.     

Once upon a time in the West? Stories of migration and modernity from Kerala, South India

This article explores how members of an ex-untouchable, 'backward' community of South India – the Izhavas of Kerala – represent and make sense of their entanglements within 'modernity'. Izhava narratives suggest ambivalence: while failure stories remain individualized, narrated in terms of bad luck or others' cheating, success stories are presented as exemplars of a twentieth-century global master narrative of progress. We note many correspondences between this ex-untouchable community's optimistic master narrative and another powerful and pervasive meta-narrative – the global story of modernity as development, promoted by state government, reform movements, and development theorists alike. Life-history narratives forcibly bring us – European interlocutors – into the same space as the tale-tellers, speak of encounters between Indians and Europeans, and urge us to recognize that we live in 'one world'. Malayalis stake claims for equal participation in modernity's projects even as they point out ways in which coevalness is denied. This prompts us to suggest that narratives of modernity in India and the UK should occupy the same analytical space, contrary to moves to theorize multiple modernities. With our Malayali respondents, we are participating in a confabulation/confabrication of a shared story which appears to be one about the nature of global capitalism. Modernity produces dream and disillusionment, promising progress to all while delivering to a few. In its seemingly endless capacity for self-regeneration and reinvention it is, as a phenomenon in global history, far from over. Even as theorists try to write it off as a moment past or a project failed, it still holds out its promises and provides a structuring framework for contemporary life-stories.     

"New beginnings": a case study in gay men's changing perceptions of quality of life during the course of HIV infection

This article reports results of an ethnographic study that sought to understand how a cohort of gay men living with HIV infection evaluated and worked to preserve or improve the quality of their lives. Themes of life story narratives are identified, each with an associated stylistic self-orientation to living with HIV infection. Changes in thematic content of a selected participant's life story narratives are discussed, demonstrating how events of his daily life are integrated into the narratives. Resultant concurrent shifting of themes and stylistic orientations is linked to his perception of improved quality of life.     

Webs of Legitimacy and Discredit: Narrative Capital and Politics of Ritual in a Timor-Leste Community

This article explores the interconnections among origin narratives, migration patterns and ritual authority in a Timor-Leste community. By recognising the dimension of rituals as sources of power, we analyse the different ways social actors negotiate their position in social space by either supporting or contesting the legitimacy of the ritual leaders. We suggest how, in a context with historical levels of high migration and immersed in rapid social change, precedence is not only challenged by modern ideals around individual rights and choices, but by the re-interpretation of mythical narratives and the access to ritual performance. The paper provides a discussion of the notion of narrative capital and shows how subordinated classes resulting from development policies from past state regimes articulate new forms of social mobility in the contemporary context of rural Timor-Leste.     

Inference or Enaction? The Impact of Genre on the Narrative Processing of Other Minds

Do narratives shape how humans process other minds or do they presuppose an existing theory of mind? This study experimentally investigated this problem by assessing subject responses to systematic alterations in the genre, levels of intentionality, and linguistic complexity of narratives. It showed that the interaction of genre and intentionality level are crucial in determining how narratives are cognitively processed. Specifically, genres that deployed evolutionarily familiar scenarios (relationship stories) were rated as being higher in quality when levels of intentionality were increased; conversely, stories that lacked evolutionary familiarity (espionage stories) were rated as being lower in quality with increases in intentionality level. Overall, the study showed that narrative is not solely either the origin or the product of our intuitions about other minds; instead, different genres will have different—even opposite—effects on how we understand the mind states of others.     

Estimating differential reproductive success from nests of related individuals, with application to a study of the mottled sculpin, Cottus bairdi

Understanding how variation in reproductive success is related to demography is a critical component in understanding the life history of an organism. Parentage analysis using molecular markers can be used to estimate the reproductive success of different groups of individuals in natural populations. Previous models have been developed for cases where offspring are random samples from the population but these models do not account for the presence of full- and half-sibs commonly found in large clutches of many organisms. Here we develop a model for comparing reproductive success among different groups of individuals that explicitly incorporates within-nest relatedness. Inference for the parameters of the model is done in a Bayesian framework, where we sample from the joint posterior of parental assignments and fertility parameters. We use computer simulations to determine how well our model recovers known parameters and investigate how various data collection scenarios (varying the number of nests or the number of offspring) affect the estimates. We then apply our model to compare reproductive success among different age groups of mottled sculpin, Cottus bairdi, from a natural population. We demonstrate that older adults are more likely to contribute to a nest and that females in the older age groups contribute more eggs to a nest than younger individuals.     

Nostalgia and Degeneration: The Moral Economy of Drinking in Navajo Society

This article focuses on how some members of Navajo society use narratives regarding alcohol and drinking to comment on cultural degeneration and the decay of the traditional Navajo moral economy. These narratives drinking are seldom solely about alcohol but refer to a host of distinct yet interrelated concerns involving moral values, individual and collective identities, underdevelopment, imagined histories, psychic conflict, and social contention. This article sheds light on how evaluations of alcohol and drinking problems, as encapsulated in narratives of degeneration, fit into the overall context of contemporary Navajo society. Narratives of degeneration juxtapose a degenerate present to a nostalgic past and in the process direct moral censure toward two primary groups in Navajo society, namely, young people and others who drink to excess, [drinking, Native Americans, Navajo, narrative, alcohol]     

Money,museums, and memory: cultural patronage by black voluntary associations

While the middle- and upper-class is typically cast as using museum patronage to support narratives that reinforce the position of dominant racial groups, this paper presents an alternative perspective. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, I conceptually and empirically elaborate how gifts by black middle- and upper-class voluntary organizations to African American museums are enabled by racial uplift ideology and directed at nurturing counter-narratives about African Americans. As patrons of memory they aim to reconstitute recollections of African Americans by challenging master narratives of national life where they are either absent or marginalized. Gifts to black museums also support the inclusion of their own organizations and members as protagonists in this counter-memory. By turning attention to cultural patronage among black middle- and upper-class voluntary organizations, this paper demonstrates how museum patronage among elites can unsettle, rather than reinforce, master racial narratives.     

Exposing Diversity: A Methodological Approach to the Use of Video Narratives in Interdisciplinary Practices

This article explores the potential of ethnographic video narratives for collaborative learning in an interdisciplinary context. Previous research describes the area between tacit knowing and explicit knowledge as an area of “muddy water” that creates a space for constructing new understandings and knowledge. In this regard, video narratives can be seen as a pathway to feelings and other sensations, and therefore to tacit commonsense notions about the nature of practices. The question is how the methodical use of video narratives contributes to new understandings of practice. The article outlines a study in which two video narratives were presented in interdisciplinary focus groups in a nursing-home setting. The multilayered complexity of the video narratives, combined with different professional approaches to elderly care, opens up for diverse, opposing and detailed understandings of practice in the dialogue about the narratives. This diversity raises new questions about the nature of practice and seems to fuel a collaborative learning process. In conclusion, the article suggests that future interventions using video narratives would benefit from firmer facilitation and categorization of this diversity in order to enhance the potential for collaborative learning.     

Spatially balanced sampling and ground‐level imagery for vegetation monitoring on reclaimed well pads

Land reclamation associated with natural gas development has become increasingly important to mitigate land surface disturbance in western North America. Since well pads occur on sites with multiple land use and ownership, the progress and outcomes of these efforts are of interest to multiple stakeholders including industry, practitioners and consultants, regulatory agents, private landowners, and the scientific community. Reclamation success criteria often vary within, and among, government agencies and across land ownership type. Typically, reclamation success of a well pad is judged by comparing vegetation cover from a single transect on the pad to a single transect in an adjacent reference site and data are collected by a large number of technicians with various field monitoring skills. We utilized “SamplePoint” image analysis software and a spatially balanced sampling design, called balanced acceptance sampling, to demonstrate how spatially explicit quantitative data can be used to determine if sites are meeting various reclamation success criteria and used chi‐square tests to show how sites in vegetation percent cover differ from a statistical standpoint. This method collects field data faster than traditional methods. We demonstrate how quantitative and spatially explicit data can be utilized by multiple stakeholders, how it can improve upon current reference site selection, how it can satisfy reclamation monitoring requirements for multiple regulatory agencies, how it may help improve future seed mix selection, and discuss how it may reduce costs for operations responsible for reclamation and how it may reduce observer bias.     

Interactions and trade-offs among physiological determinants of performance and reproductive success

How an animal performs in its natural environment ultimately plays a key role in its reproductive success. While a number of studies have investigated how selection acts on performance-related traits, far fewer studies have examined the mechanisms responsible for variation in performance. Among mechanisms, variable morphology has received the most attention. Although physiological traits have received less attention, they are intrinsically related to performance and ultimately to reproductive success. We present a framework whereby investigators can link some basic physiological functions with organismal performance and ultimately with reproductive success. We propose that performance and ultimately reproductive success are strongly influenced by hormones, immune functions, and energetics. We further argue that no physiological function can be considered in isolation and thus our model emphasizes interactions and trade-offs both within each physiological function as well as among them. Some of the most commonly studied trade-offs are between reproduction and immune functions, with energetics as one of the key common currencies for these trade-offs. From an evolutionary perspective, the largest gaps in our knowledge lie in how these interactions and trade-offs influence reproductive success. We believe that a full understanding of how hormones, immune functions, and energetics influence performance traits related to reproduction and, ultimately, lifetime reproductive success requires recognition of the complex relationships, interactions, and trade-offs among these processes.     

The politics of scorn in Syria and the agency of narrated involvement

Recent uprisings across the Arab world raise the question of how populations living under dictatorial regimes moved from apparent quiescence to active revolt. The question is particularly acute for Syria, where the Asad regime has ruled not simply through coercion, but also by enforcing a culture of everyday cynicism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Aleppo in 2008‐9, I argue that everyday Syrian narratives that lament or scorn the self are a way of radically identifying oneself with a contemptible situation, and inviting that fact to be witnessed and empathized with. I term the radical identification enacted in these narratives ‘involvement’. In order to understand why these narratives do not merely reproduce a cynical political culture in the same way that private mockery of the regime does, I propose a model of agency that develops the theme of authentic voice. I argue that the self‐scorning voice sounds authentically through the combined agency of the involved subject and the empathetic witness. By enacting involvement, narratives that scorn and lament the self defy the culture of political cynicism and prepare the ground for revolt.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

Embodied narratives of disaster: the expression of bodily experience in Aceh,Indonesia

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories ‘through’ their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the ‘narrated event’ and the ‘narrative event’, both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its ‘unmaking’.     

The value of culturedness: Bosnian and Hungarian migrants' experiences of belonging in Australia

In this paper we investigate how the values of respect and dignity inform the ways migrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary in Australia locate themselves in relation to local, national and transnational identities. Drawing upon ethnographic insights, we discuss how the concept of culturedness is implicated in these migrant claims for dignified belonging. Determinants of culturedness are informed by influential narratives of ‘East versus West’, ‘Balkan versus Europe’, the ‘New World (Australia) versus the Old World’ (Europe). Implicit within these discourses are attempts to demarcate civilisational distinctions. We argue that dignified belonging for people from these migrant communities in Australia involves negotiating identification with culturedness and positioning themselves on the right side of the civilised/primitive divide. This collaboration draws attention to the significance of ontological security through respect within the shared discourses and experiences of belonging for members of these two migrant groups in Australia.     

Taking the devil into your mouth: ritualized American weight-loss narratives of morality, pain, and betrayal

Abstract:This article examines narratives of the U.S. Christian weight-loss movement alongside secular U.S. weight-loss narratives and explores how these two movements express similar themes. In particular, I investigate shared themes of sin, the impurity of the body, the body as a temple for the self (a temple that can be defiled), salvation, and the need to prove that one is saved or at least trying to be saved. Through examining stories from individuals who have lost weight and popular dieting advice, I explore how a "spiritual hunger" that is essentially unrelated to physiology but that suggests personal pathology and responsibility is central to mainstream stories of weight loss.     

Narratives of Agency and Capability from Two Adolescent Girls in Post-conflict Liberia

Between 1989 and 2003, Liberia experienced a brutal civil war characterized by ethnic killings, sexual violence and the use of child soldiers. Five years after the war ended, half the population of Liberia was under 18 years old. Understanding the needs of these youth is thus essential to the recovery of the nation. This study focuses on the narratives of two female adolescents, selected from 75 in-depth individual interviews with post-conflict Liberian youth conducted in 2012. A narrative analysis approach was employed to examine each interview for multiple layers of meaning. The aim of the study was to elucidate factors that may enable post-conflict youth to reclaim a sense of agency and return to normal developmental tasks. The study explores the ways in which these youth navigate complicated power dynamics in the post-conflict setting and how gender impacts their experiences of their own agency and capability. The dynamics between the participants and the interviewer are explored to further illustrate how power dynamics manifest. These narratives support the involvement of youth in projects that help others as an avenue for promoting agency and resilience for themselves.     

Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Comparing Mental Illness Narratives of Haredi Male Patients and their Rabbis

By comparing versions of mental illness narratives – told by Haredi (Utraorthodox Jews) male patients of a mental health clinic in Israel and by their rabbis – this paper relates to two distinct, yet interrelated, theoretical questions: the place and agency of narrators, and the tension between experience and representation. A pair of narratives exemplifies a pattern in which the patients (Talmudic students) tell a narrative of a sudden breakdown related to a dramatic meeting with a non-human figure (often, a woman) or force. Their rabbis, by contrast, tell a narrative that emphasizes their students' mundane symptoms, ``abnormal' and ``immoral' behavior, and use a local adaptation of a Western psychological explanatory model. A dynamic of inclusion and exclusion emerges as students are seeking legitimization and avoidance of stigma, while their rabbis are silencing themes that challenge social and cultural orders. The different narratives are further interpreted in the context of the micropolitics of the interviews and of identity politics between the Haredim and secular Israelis. This social dynamics shows how differently placed social actors-narrators-interpreters construct differently contested and diverse cultural narratives of a seemingly shared reality.