Changing the Subject

Source criticism has been a pivotal method of historical research, routinely evoked as the necessary (if not sufficient) foundation of professional history in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. This article explores the epistemological context of source criticism, outlining a continuous if versatile focus on subjective agency as a motivating and formative problem of historical methods in Scandinavia throughout the 20th century. Towards the turn of the millennium, however, theories about discursive formation of identities and about entangled agencies of humans and non-humans have configured the nature of subjects, past reality, and historical knowledge differently. In a state of methodological multiplicity, rather than being foundational, source criticism has become one among other methods.     

Fluid lives: subjectivities,gender and water in rural Bangladesh

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh on arsenic contamination of drinking water, the article looks at the ways that gender relations are influenced by not just direct resource use/control/access and the implications of different types of waters, but also by the ideological constructs of masculinity/femininity, which can work in iterative ways to influence how people relate to different kinds of water. Conflicts and struggles over water inflect gendered identities and sense of self, where both men and women participate in reproducing and challenging prevailing norms and practices. As a result, multiple social and ecological factors interact in complex and interlinked ways to complicate gender–water relations, whereby socio-spatial subjectivities are re/produced in water management and end up reinforcing existing inequities. The article demonstrates that gender–water relations are not just intersected by social axes, as generally argued by feminist scholars, but also by ecological change and spatial relations vis-à-vis water, where simultaneously socialized, ecologized, spatialized and embodied subjectivities are produced and negotiated in everyday practices.     

Resisting mothers,making gender: teenage girls in the United States and the articulation of femininity

Much of the feminist literature on teenage girls in the west has tended to polarize around the issues of girls' gendered agency and victimization. In contrast, this article explores the ambiguous relationship between gender resistance and compliance. I argue that while girls clearly articulate their own agency, they do so through a reliance on gendered and heterosexual norms, identities, and categories. The article draws on examples from my research with girls in South Carolina, USA, in particular girls' narratives about their mothers. I suggest that girls situate their gendered practices and evaluate femininity in part via evaluations of their mothers' gender, sexual and nurturing practices. Mothers often stand in as representatives of normative and traditional femininity for the girls; yet girls do not realize that they reproduce, rather than resist, aspects of femininity, even as they criticize generational differences and their mothers' versions of feminine and gendered behaviors.     

Homemaking in New Zealand: thinking through the mutually constitutive relationship between domestic material objects,heterosexuality and home

This article explores the homemaking practices of heterosexual couples who live in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, it examines the role of domestic material objects in the mutual production of heterosexuality and home. The article draws on data collected from joint and individual semi-structured interviews and self-directed photography with 14 heterosexual couples living in monogamous co-residential relationships. It offers an analysis of the ways in which heterosexual couples use ordinary household objects to constitute, consolidate and sometimes undermine their gendered and sexed subjectivities and interpersonal relationships. A focus on domestic material objects offers an opportunity for challenging normative assumptions about the relationship between heterosexuality and domestic space.     

Re/negotiating “suspicion”: exploring the construction of self in Irish migrants' memories of the 1996 Manchester bomb

On 15 June 1996 the Provisional IRA exploded a 3000 lb bomb in the city of Manchester, home to a large Irish community. This article uses oral history to explore the distinct ways in which two male Irish migrants, both of whom settled in the Manchester area during the post-war period, recall and negotiate their experiences of the bomb and its aftermath. Focusing on how memory production is shaped though interactions between different cultural forms and interior psychic processes, the article uses memories of the bomb to explore how the culture of suspicion generated around Irishness in Britain during “The Troubles” could be productive of distinct forms of Irish migrant subjectivity.     

Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive Spaces of Possibility

Abstract: In this article I reflect on introducing critical pedagogy into social justice teaching in an elite UK university as part of the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project. I de‐essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire. This enables an adaption of critical pedagogy from its original context of popular politics to the individualised elite setting of our project. Our pedagogical objectives become the opening of spaces of possibility which decentre the dominant regime of truth of the neoliberal university and enable imagining and becoming “other”. This involves disrupting normal patterns of classroom performativity in terms of student as consumer and lecturer as producer of commodities, transgressing dualisms between mind/body, intellectual/emotional and teacher/student. Our pedagogical praxis is therefore inherently political as by radically disturbing commodified subjectivities we foster processes that lead to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions.     

“We Have Supped So Deep in Horrors”: Understanding Colonialist Emotionality and British Responses to Female Circumcision in Northern Sudan

When the British colonized Sudan, they were horrified by the practice of female circumcision. Unable to comprehend the meanings of this ritual to adherents, they interpreted it as irrational, immoral and uncivilized. British officials conducted a propaganda campaign against the practice, induced clerics to condemn it as un‐Islamic and passed a stringent, albeit ineffective, law forbidding infibulation in 1946. In the process, they turned female circumcision into a site of contest over Sudanese autonomy. Analyzing colonialists’ responses as embodied states of knowing enacted in repressive measures illuminates the collision of culturally constructed emotions in this colonial context.     

Neoliberalism in (Regional) Theory and Practice: the Stronger Communities Action Fund in New Zealand

Neoliberalism is a term most often used by those working in the field of political economy, including human geographers, to refer to the new political preference for market mechanisms as a way of ensuring social and economic wellbeing. To date, however, analysts of neoliberalism have focused on the decline of the national economy, and on the erosion of universalist conceptions of social welfarism. Much less attention has been paid to the complex and contested processes through which new spaces, socialities and subjectivities are being constituted. Through a case study of the Stronger Communities Action Fund, this paper examines these new spaces, socialities and subjectivities of social policy, including the shift towards heterogeneous conceptions of community, the rise of community based expertise, and the centring of ‘etho‐politics’. It concludes that neoliberalism is a more contradictory phenomenon than is often recognised. If analysts continue to portray neoliberalism as a monolithic project, and to emphasize what has been lost, rather than examining the complex trajectories of the new, they are much less likely to be sensitive to the different political possibilities offered in the current context.     

‘Her – she,this woman,me’: the representation of subjectivity in Tom Murphy's Alice Trilogy

In this essay, I will discuss Murphy's exploration of the (un)bearable nature of an existence characterised by loss, and by longing, in his recent play sequence Alice Trilogy (2005). Positing the explicitly dualised characterisation in the first and third of these plays as a reflection of, and natural progression from, earlier dramaturgic representations of duality, I will examine Murphy's overt rendering of subjectivity, in Alice Trilogy, focusing upon the ways in which such theatrical duality explicates the silences which pervade the Purgatorial affective no-man's-land – or ‘in-betweenness’ – of mind, body, and soul.     

Positionality,subjectivity, and race in transnational and transcultural geographical research

This article investigates the complexities of negotiating subject positions in transnational and transcultural research by focusing on the gendering of race and racialization. As more people claim to be of mixed ‘racial’ descent and Western researchers grow more diverse, it is increasingly important that this diversity is reflected within geographical research; however, much of the existing research on subjectivity and its role in the research process has focused either on ‘white’ researchers in Global South contexts or on researchers working in their ‘home’ country or community. Less visible are accounts from those who challenge conceptions of ‘white’ Western researcher or whose racial identity can be conceived as hybrid. Moreover, there is a tendency to conceptualize race/racialization and their effects on subjectivity and positionality in relatively narrow terms. This article draws attention to the changing subjectivities of a racialized gendered body as it moves into different contexts. I examine how conceptualizations of race and discourses of racialization constitute researcher subjectivity, and how different understandings of ‘race’ mediate relationships between researcher and research participants (and others). To understand the spatial (re)configurations of (race) subjectivities and how this affects researcher positionality, I offer an autoethnography of a bi/multiracial Western woman of New Zealand Māori/Pākehā descent interpellated as ‘insufficient Other’ in her home context of Aotearoa New Zealand, then reconstituted as white and ‘sufficient Self’ in the Philippines by her research participants and Filipino ‘family’ and friends.