In the 1988 film The Accused, a young woman named Sarah Tobias is gang raped on a pinball machine by three men while a crowded bar watches. The rapists cut a deal with the…
Abstract
In the 1988 film The Accused, a young woman named Sarah Tobias is gang raped on a pinball machine by three men while a crowded bar watches. The rapists cut a deal with the prosecutor. Sarah's outrage at the deal convinces the assistant district attorney to prosecute members of the crowd that cheered on and encouraged the rape. This film shows how Sarah Tobias, a woman with little means and less experience, intuits that according to the law rape victims are incredible witnesses to their own victimization. The film goes on to critique what the “right” kind of witness would be. The Accused, therefore, is also about the relationship between witnessing and testimony, between seeing and the representation of that which was seen. It is about the power and responsibility of being a witness in law – one who sees and credibly attests to the truth of their vision – as it is also about what it means to bear witness to film – what can we know from watching movies.
Glass House is a play about the relationship between two young women Phumla and Linda. According to Dike the play was specifically written to show the clashing of two cultures and…
Abstract
Glass House is a play about the relationship between two young women Phumla and Linda. According to Dike the play was specifically written to show the clashing of two cultures and how white people could not understand the pain of black people. Glass House provides testimony as to how women suffered physical and mental violence whilst in detention, and this play clearly highlights how, for women, becoming part of the struggle meant surviving the acts of aggression and detention by the security forces. In Glass House Dike exposes the agony and survival techniques of women who have had to endure periods in detention desperately struggling to cope in adverse conditions and, on their release from detention, having to contend with the suspicions of their community thinking that they were informers spying for the government.
This paper uses former Black girl students' experiential knowledge as a lens to examine Black students' experiences with formal and informal curriculum; it looks to the 1970s…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper uses former Black girl students' experiential knowledge as a lens to examine Black students' experiences with formal and informal curriculum; it looks to the 1970s during Waco Independent School District's desegregation implementation process.
Design/methodology/approach
Guided by critical race theory, I used historical and oral history methods to address the question: In newly desegregated schools, what does Black females' experiential knowledge of the academic and social curriculum reveal about Black students' experiences within school desegregation implementation process? Specifically, I drew on oral history interviews with former Black girl students, local newspapers, school board minutes, legal correspondence, memoranda, yearbooks, and brochures.
Findings
Black girls' holistic perspectives, which characterized Black students' experiences more generally, indicate Waco Independent School District's implementation of school desegregation promoted a tacit curriculum of Black intellectual ineptitude.
Originality
My main contribution is the concept of tacit curriculum, which I identified through the lens of former Black girl students, whose experiences spoke to Black students' experiences more widely. It also offers Black females' firsthand perspectives of the school desegregation implementation process in Texas, a perspective, a process, and a place heretofore underexamined in history of education scholarship.
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Yong Lock Ong, Susan Benbow, Sarah Black and Jane Garner
The Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry, Royal College of Psychiatrists, has been involving users and carers in its work since 2002. The model that has been developed involves regular…
Abstract
The Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry, Royal College of Psychiatrists, has been involving users and carers in its work since 2002. The model that has been developed involves regular meetings of a consumer group, which was set up in partnership with the Alzheimer's Society and Age Concern, and which meets with the officers of the faculty. This development is in line with a number of recent policy initiatives and has had considerable influence on the work of the faculty.
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Susan Benbow, Paul Kingston, Sabyasachi Bhaumik, Sarah Black, Satheesh Gangadharan and Suzanne Hardy
The Royal College of Psychiatrists set up an interface group to look at the interface between old age psychiatry and learning disability and, as part of its work, the group…
Abstract
The Royal College of Psychiatrists set up an interface group to look at the interface between old age psychiatry and learning disability and, as part of its work, the group commissioned a survey of learning disability and old age psychiatrists to investigate their experience of working across the boundary between the two specialities. This paper is based on the report produced. It summarises the findings of the survey and sets out eight recommendations to further the work. There was no clarity on how services should be provided to older people with a learning disability who develop a mental health problem in later life but the need for collaboration between the two specialities is compelling.
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Katie Warner, Saskia Keville, Jemma Hockley and Amanda Ludlow
This research indicates females with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have a diverse clinical presentation compared to males. Furthermore, females with ASD are often diagnosed…
Abstract
Purpose
This research indicates females with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have a diverse clinical presentation compared to males. Furthermore, females with ASD are often diagnosed later and typically experience greater levels of mental health difficulties. Evidence suggests that clinic-based verbal interventions for ASD have limited efficacy; therefore, alternative therapies, such as equine-assisted therapies (EATs), are gaining recognition. The purpose of this study was to directly explore the experiences of females with an ASD who have undertaken EAT.
Design/methodology/approach
Five female participants with a diagnosis of ASD were recruited from two equine therapy centres. Participants were aged between 15 and 30 years and undertook semi-structured interviews, which were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.
Findings
Three superordinate themes emerged: the difficult experience of the social world, the process of EAT and the emotional impact of horses.
Originality/value
Directly exploring the experiences of females with ASD highlights benefits from engaging therapeutically with horses, building confidence and independence to transferring this into more effective social communication with other people. Offering emotion-focused therapeutic complementary interventions for females with ASD should be forefronted to help remediate the impact of difficult and sometimes traumatic earlier experiences in the social world. This requires increased funding for EAT, combined with larger-scale research projects to evaluate this.
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Charley Brooks and Daisy Martin
Guided by an interest in how K-12 history teachers think about teaching race and related concepts in their courses, this paper explores the impact of a workshop put on by a…
Abstract
Purpose
Guided by an interest in how K-12 history teachers think about teaching race and related concepts in their courses, this paper explores the impact of a workshop put on by a history and civics professional learning organization that explicitly focused on historicizing race, racism and whiteness as a method for furthering teachers' understandings and commitments to antiracist teaching.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies to make sense of the idea of history teaching as a racial project. Using surveys and a focus group discussion as data.
Findings
The authors found that, after the workshop, teachers reported increased comfort and interest in teaching more about race and racism, while fewer stated explicit commitments and plans to teach about whiteness. The authors also found that teachers' definitions of whiteness were largely framed as habits of mind and individual practices and situated within an educational sphere. Additionally teachers initially grappled with systemic interpretations of whiteness, yet ended up landing on identity as the starting point for critical history instruction.
Originality/value
These findings prompt the authors to discuss the continued challenges of linking whiteness with antiracist history teaching and also grapple with the affordances and pitfalls of identity as a starting point for race work.
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Jennifer L. Nelson and Amanda E. Lewis
In this paper we build upon previous research that examines how workers in devalued occupations transform structural conditions that threaten their dignity into resources with…
Abstract
In this paper we build upon previous research that examines how workers in devalued occupations transform structural conditions that threaten their dignity into resources with which to protect themselves. Through in-depth interviews and fieldwork with early childhood educators (ECE), we examine the work experiences of teachers in four distinct work contexts: daycare centers and within elementary schools, each in either the public or private sector. We find that these different school organizational contexts shape what kinds of identity challenges early childhood teachers experience. Different organizational contexts not only subject teachers to different threats to their work-related identity but also have different potential identity resources embedded within them that teachers can use on their own behalf. Thus, while all the early childhood educators in our sample struggle with being employed within a devalued occupation, the identity strategies they have developed to protect their self-worth vary across employment contexts. We show that the strategies these interactive service workers use to solve identity-related problems of dignity at work involve the creative conversion of constraints they face at work into resources that help them achieve valued work identities.
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The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily engage with happy feelings and harmony.
Design/methodology/approach
The author gives a close reading of four black women's interview-based narratives to engage with the ways in which they refuse to conform to organisational scripts of happiness. The author makes a case for using both critical discourse-based and affective readings of everyday experience which social science readings cannot readily account for.
Findings
Non-conformity has a number of local effects including negotiating the present from a position of alternative histories of struggle and cultural values, and holding different and conflicting realities and subject positions. Moreover, a reading of these women's accounts suggests that affect is both personal and social and can manifest in multiple, embodied, transformative, and potentially destructive ways. The author comes to new ways of understanding organisations and resistance when the author uses affect as an investigative lens.
Research limitations/implications
By virtue of the close reading necessitated by the nature of the study, the sample of this research is small. While the intention is not generality, the findings of the research have to be understood in context and applied within different settings with caution. The implications of this research are that there remains an urgent need for critical-orientated research which centers affect in order to counter the growing positive psychologies which relegate asymmetries to the margins.
Social implications
In South Africa where black women constitute the numerical majority, there is an urgent need to understand and reverse their status as a minority in management and social life. This research goes some way in explicating this process.
Originality/value
While there is well-developed body of feminist research which seeks to study black women in South Africa, there is a dearth of research into black women in the workplace. This paper therefore presents an original look at black female managers by applying international theoretical tools to a context that is under theorised. This research presents new methodological and theoretical tools and analysis to the South African workplace.