Suchergebnisse

This case is drawn from reflection upon ethnographic research conducted during 12 months in Shanghai. When this project commenced, I was initially concerned with residents' attitudes toward living in a socially accelerated environment. Later, however, I became intrigued with, and preoccupied by, texts circulating in the city which ostensibly insinuated supernatural characters into prominent downtown locations. In this case, I present an alternate account of the processes involved in constructing data from "field" to "page." This case, which is different from those more systematic versions subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals, explores the opportunities and challenges associated with ethnography--as both process and product. Specifically, I first elaborate upon how the field has already been constructed and is not, therefore, "waiting to be discovered." Then, I reflect upon the multifaceted, and often conflicting, material fieldwork produces. Finally, I explore how the "field" is no longer, if indeed it ever was, discrete and separate--both geographically and emotionally--from "real" life. Although intended to be exploratory rather than authoritative, and edifying rather than systematic, this case concludes by arguing that reflexivity, namely, critical reflection upon, and acknowledgement of, the biases affecting such matters as how researchers imagine and construct the field, should be recognized during all stages of ethnography, including the texts produced consequent to fieldwork. However, reflexivity should not be performed as an end in itself. Instead, reflexivity should facilitate insights into links between knowledge claims, personal experiences, and the sociocultural and discursive contexts in which ethnography is produced.

1. Introduction : moving on from images of Red Guards, the tank man and little emperors -- 2. Experiencing neighbourhoods -- 3. Ambivalence and tactics for coping with the tensions of metropolitan life -- 4. Bricolaic national and international orientations -- 5. Intergenerational dynamics -- 6. Ambivalence toward secondary education and the bitterness of the gaokao -- 7. Engagements with traditional media -- 8. The Internet in everyday life -- 9. Online carnival.

"This book examines the condition of being a young person in China and the way in which changes in various dimensions of urban life have affected Chinese youths' quest to understand themselves."--Publisher's description

Abstract
This article critically reads a Personal Independence Payment Claim Form. All agents implicated in this form (e.g. the Department of Work and Pensions, assessors, an Office Manager and health professionals) are contemplated although of central concern is the positioning of claimants—or the persons filling in the form on their behalf—and social workers, and the constructions of social work practice resulting from such positioning. This article investigates discourse in the form itself, the discourse claimants are obliged to supplement and the discursive formations this text registers/generates. To read this form, I distinguish between overt, declarative and manifest content and the covert, descriptive, latent, perhaps unintentional but violent content, accessing the latter through a symptomatic reading, which draws upon my interpretation of principles associated with deconstruction, critical discourse analysis, decentering and positioning. Conceiving of PIP-related practice as possessing the dynamic qualities of an 'episode', this article argues that although the text provides help with costs, a corollary or side-effect, is that claimants and social workers are made to inhabit problematic positions within discourse/practice. Textual analysis may, nevertheless, unsettle, and re/position and de/re/construct relations, thereby decentering institutionalised ways of being.

This article is primarily concerned with how government webpages in Hong Kong claiming to embrace social inclusion and provide services and support for persons with disabilities construct issues relating to disability. These texts are not read in isolation. Instead, they are considered in conjunction with discourse produced in several United Nations documents, especially the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Hong Kong is a signatory. These documents appear to both proffer and retract social inclusion in ways that complicate, if not undermine entirely, their purportedly inclusionary intentions. This article also reflects upon commentary produced by university students at a public university in Hong Kong responding to government discourse. Such focus upon 'non-disabled' readers reveals how texts do more than merely mediate pre-existing messages. Instead, they constitute a "social location and organizer for the accomplishment of meaning", thereby counting as "a form of social action" (Titchkosky, 2007, p. 27). Through the texts they conspire to make about disability, authors and readers become complicit in the production, maintenance, and reinforcement of non-disabled (or abled)/disabled identities and dis/ableist ideology in ways that implicate the entire population in exclusionary processes.

This article is primarily concerned with how government webpages in Hong Kong claiming to embrace social inclusion and provide services and support for persons with disabilities construct issues relating to disability. These texts are not read in isolation. Instead, they are considered in conjunction with discourse produced in several United Nations documents, especially the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Hong Kong is a signatory. These documents appear to both proffer and retract social inclusion in ways that complicate, if not undermine entirely, their purportedly inclusionary intentions. This article also reflects upon commentary produced by university students at a public university in Hong Kong responding to government discourse. Such focus upon "non-disabled" readers reveals how texts do more than merely mediate pre-existing messages. Instead, they constitute a "social location and organizer for the accomplishment of meaning", thereby counting as "a form of social action" (Titchkosky, 2007, p. 27). Through the texts they conspire to make about disability, authors and readers become complicit in the production, maintenance, and reinforcement of non-disabled (or abled)/disabled identities and dis/ableist ideology in ways that implicate the entire population in exclusionary processes.

Based upon ethnographic data gathered in Shanghai, this paper explores residents' experiences of, and responses to, living within an environment, which displays features of what Rosa terms 'social acceleration'. After exploring anxieties induced in residents who feel sedentary – relative to others – and their attempts to cope with this, this paper focuses upon how residents' attitudes towards social acceleration become refracted in imaginative forms, especially texts currently circulating within Shanghai, which insinuate ostensibly supernatural characters into certain prominent locations in the city. As these texts critique 'progress' and register residents' anxieties regarding social acceleration so they smooth over disquiet and unease thereby encouraging not only discourses of development but also the patterns, pace and tempo of social acceleration. The final part of this paper explores the costs of 'slowdown', arguing these are sufficient to compel residents not only to re-engage with, and therefore perpetuate, socially accelerating forms but perhaps even to intensify them, hence the deployment of the term 're-acceleration' in the title of this paper.

This essay examines the ways in which students view their experiences in secondary education, focusing specifically on their feelings toward the gaokao (the National College Entrance Examination). In this essay, I acknowledge students' anxiety, frustration, fear, trepidation and depression that emerged as a consequence of the pressure and expectation placed upon them. Nonetheless, I argue that generally negative assessments are complicated by more positive recollections of secondary education, resulting in considerable ambivalence. Central to this ambivalence are notions of eating and speaking bitterness (chiku and suku). Speaking the bitterness of contemporary education is involved in identity formation, particularly those identities sustained and performed between students and teachers and between children and parents. Through such eating and speaking of bitterness, young Chinese attempt to define their place in contemporary Chinese society. (China J/GIGA)