‘But They Just Don't Respect Us’: young people's experiences of (dis)respected citizenship and the New Labour Respect Agenda

The New Labour Respect Agenda fuses anti-social behaviour policies, Third Way active citizenship, and a theory of community-based support and regulation. The Respect Agenda itself has a specific focus on, and direct implications for, children and young people, as well as for children living in vulnerable families. This paper argues that the theoretical basis for New Labour's ‘Respect’ is limited and ultimately flawed. Whilst New Labour policy demands respect from young people, young people's lived citizenship is too often experienced in terms of disrespect and even shame of the self. Young people respond to these feelings of disrespect by seeking out other ways through which respect can be acted out and negotiated. Respect, as conceptualised through the New Labour lens will criminalise vulnerable young people, thereby further stripping them of self-respect, inter-personal respect and societal respect. The paper concludes that respect should be an outcome of policy and a philosophy of a social justice led politics, rather than a conditionally led policy.     

Shame and the Embodiment of Boundaries

ABSTRACT Attention to the debilitating feelings of unease, discomfort and anxiety which are the concomitants of everyday encounters and negotiations of Kooris at the mainstream interface brings an appreciation for the lived experience of the colonised minority and throws into relief complex struggles over meaning, manners, personal values, social allegiance and cultural survival. This paper focuses on the habituation and strategic deployment of shame at the racial divide. Koori subjectivities, bodily dispositions and emotional registers are found to be informed both by traditional orientations and by the hegemonic ends of the dominant order.     

The fallen hero: masculinity,shame and farmer suicide in Australia

The drought-stricken Australian rural landscape, cultures of farming masculinity and an economy of value, moral worth and pride form a complex matrix of discourses that shape subjective dynamics that render suicide a possibility for distressed farmers. However, the centrality of a ‘mental health’ perspective and reified notions of ‘stoicism’ within this discursive field operate to exclude consideration of the ways in which cultural identity is linked to emotions. To illuminate and explore complex connections between subjectivity, moral worth and affect in relation to understanding farmer suicide, this article draws on theory and literature on agrarian discourses of masculine subjectivity and shame to analyze empirical data from interviews with farmers during times of environmental, social and economic crisis. The idealized notion of the farming man as ‘Aussie battler’ emerges from romantic agrarian mythology in which pride and self-worth are vested in traditional values of hard work, struggle and self-sacrifice. However, the structural context of agriculture, as it is shaped by the political economy of neoliberalism, threatens farm economic viability and is eroding the pride, self-worth and masculine identity of farmers. The article suggests that the notion of the ‘fallen hero’ captures a discursive shift of a masculinity ‘undone’, a regress from the powerful position of masculine subjectivity imbued with pride to one of shame that is of central importance to understanding how suicide emerges as a possibility for farmers.     

Honour,Shame and the Fourth Crusade

This article evaluates how far chivalric notions of honour and shame had become associated with crusading by the early thirteenth century. It stems from a wider investigation into how crusading helped to forge standards for knightly behaviour and influenced the development of chivalric ideals. The Fourth Crusade serves as a focused case study, and this article examines the significance of its controversial course and conclusion as well as how two lay authors, Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari, used ideas about honour and shame in their narratives. It takes a close look at terminology, exploring a variety of expressions for concepts of honour and shame, and highlights the contexts in which they were used: whether to describe military encounters, the pressure on social bonds, or leadership roles. It argues that by the turn of the thirteenth century, crusading played a significant rather than extraneous role in developing ideas about chivalric conduct and proper social behaviour.     

Beach body work: Australian women’s experiences

This article examines Australian women’s complex relationship with the beach through a focus on affect and on what bodies do. Interviews with ten participants of diverse backgrounds and of different ages reveal that women understand the beach as a mediated and surveilled space where their bodies are foregrounded. In this environment, there is an intersection of women’s knowledge of the popular constructions of the archetypal Australian beach body, real women’s bodies, and interviewees’ experiences of the beach as a place of shame and pride. As a means of managing this affective landscape participants detail a range of bodily strategies enacted prior to going to the beach and once at the beach. This bodily labour demonstrates that for Australian women the beach is a dynamic and complicated site of both leisure and labour.     

Ambivalence,pride and shame: conceptualisations of German nationhood

ABSTRACT. This article examines complex everyday expressions and understandings of nationhood in Germany, focusing on citizens' articulations of national pride and their relationship with the nation. Through an analysis of ninety semi‐structured interviews with ‘ordinary’ Germans conducted between 2000 and 2002, we argue that the prevailing, elite‐centred approach to studying nationhood has not adequately captured the complex relationships that individuals have to the nation. We examine how individuals actively process and interpret nationhood in ways that reveal ambivalence, confusion and contradictory emotions towards the nation. Such individual variation is not neatly captured by official, elite, public or institutional presentations of the nation. We argue for further research on everyday understandings of nationhood and on ordinary people's views on national pride and national identity.     

‘Like it,don’t like it,you have to like it’: children’s emotional responses to the absence of transnational migrant parents in Lombok,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences and emotions of children in rural East Lombok, Indonesia, who stay behind with relatives or neighbours while their parents leave the country for work. The article contributes to recent scholarship of children’s experiences of transnational migration in Southeast Asia by drawing out the complex emotions of children who stay behind. Based on research conducted in four ‘sending’ villages, the article describes children’s lived experiences of their parent’s transnational migration, and their intense feelings that whether they ‘like it or don’t like it’, they have no choice but to acquiesce to their parents’ long, often indeterminate absences. The research suggests that stay-behind children are entangled in community anxieties pervading the emotional economy of transnational migration, including the embodied emotion of shame (malu) which shapes children’s responses to parental absence. By focusing on children’s own views and experiences, we contribute to growing debates about the implications of migration for children’s rights and well-being in Southeast Asia.