The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative autoethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.
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This article discusses the viability of a feminist constructivist approach of knowledge through the careful reading of the work of the feminist scholar and historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway. Haraway proposes an interpretation of objectivity in terms of "situated knowledges". Both the subject and the object of knowledge are endowed with the status of material-semiotic actors. By blurring the epistemological boundary between subject and object, Haraway's narratives about scientific discourse become populated with hybrid subjects/objects. The author argues that the ethics of these hybrid subjects consists of an uneasy mixture of a Nietzschean and a socialist-Christian ethic. The article concludes by setting out why Haraway's project constitutes an interesting effort to fuse postmodern insights and feminist commitments.
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Attending to the broader wellbeing debates, this study examines the interplay between forest-based tourism practices and sustainability. It does so by building on Max Weber’s notion of disenchantment of the world to explore how planetary wellbeing can be cultivated through the commercial practice of forest bathing. In positioning the study within the Serbian context, we build on feminist new materialist ideas to explore the ways in which broken ties between postmodern humans and forests as our primordial home can be reclaimed through this tourism practice. Using the empirical data collected during two forest tours, we take the relational approach in our analysis of the meanings the forest tour attendees ascribed to their experiences. In extending scholarly understandings of the notion of sustainability, we discuss the ways of achieving planetary wellbeing through forest bathing and the potential of more-than-human entanglements to re-enchant the world. To conclude, we discreetly illuminate one way of reconceiving the idea of enchantment and encourage rethinking our everyday and tourist practices in disenchanted Anthropocene.
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A Manifesto The group of some 17 participants interrupted the UDHR text in real time, infusing it with inclusive terminology, queering its binary language and expanding its gaze to other lifebeings, making it a manifesto for a new world. The newly formulated Universal Declaration of Human and More-Than-Human Rights and Responsibility for a New World would be the manifesto for an alliance of those who insisted on an end to capitalist practices and their destructive effects on the planet.
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Theoretical trends and schools of thought in the field of anthropology evolve rapidly. Anthropological literature must keep abreast, not only of these intellectual shifts, but also of pressing global, political, and social issues. Thus, this volume, like others before it, seeks to provide updates on the state of the science and the theoretical and methodological trends of the day. Yet, there is another, more important reason why such a volume is necessary now, ‘today’, of all days, and another reason why this will serve as more than just another update on the discipline. Today, we face some of the greatest environmental challenges in global history. Understanding the damage being done by communities, large and small, and the varied ethics and efforts contributing to its repair is of vital importance. For these reasons, environmental anthropology today is different and arguably more critical than ever before. This volume thus poses the question and raises the challenge: What can increasing the emphasis on the environment in environmental anthropology, along with the science of its problems and the theoretical and methodological tools of anthropological practice do to aid conservation efforts, policy initiatives, and our overall understanding of how to survive, culturally and physically, as citizens of the planet? This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "Environmental Anthropology Today" on 8/5/11 available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203806906 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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This special issue of Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power is an invitation to critically interrogate how our everyday technological, social, and embodied experience of organisation as a traveling concept (Bal 2002) and socio-material (Orlikowski 2007) production of reality, can generate new modes of organising and being and nonbeing organised. The articles in this special issue span across the humanities, social sciences, performing arts, and critical management studies, to trouble the concept of organisation by de-organising it and the manner in which it has traditionally been instrumentalised and put to use in modern-day organisational theory and practice. Somatechnics presents a thoroughly multi-disciplinary scholarship on the body, providing a space for research that critically engages with the ethico-political implications of a wide range of practices and techniques. The term ‘somatechnics’ indicates an approach to corporeality which considers it as always already bound up with a variety of technologies, techniques and technics, thus enabling an examination of the lived experiences engendered within a given context, and the effects that technologies, technés and techniques have on embodiment, subjectivity and sociality.
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Through a correspondence between two scholars, this paper explores and critiques various ways in which scholars working in ethnography and cultural analysis frame and construct their methodology and object of study. Through the close reading of theoretical accounts of methodology in ethnography and cultural analysis, we examine how these accounts construct the relationship between the scholar and her object of study.We read these scholarly practices as protocols, referring to the ways in which accounts of methodology may be understood as rules/guidelines by which scholars in these fields conduct research. Protocol etymologically refers to protos (first) and kolla (glue). Through the figure of the protocol, we delineate how scholars in ethnography and cultural analysis themselves become implicated in giving accounts of their research methodologies. Somatechnics presents a thoroughly multi-disciplinary scholarship on the body, providing a space for research that critically engages with the ethico-political implications of a wide range of practices and techniques. The term ‘somatechnics’ indicates an approach to corporeality which considers it as always already bound up with a variety of technologies, techniques and technics, thus enabling an examination of the lived experiences engendered within a given context, and the effects that technologies, technés and techniques have on embodiment, subjectivity and sociality.
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Background: Inequities in health have garnered international attention and are now addressed in Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3), which seeks to ‘promote well-being for all’. To attain this goal globally requires innovative approaches, one of which is twinning. According to the International Confederation of Midwives, twinning focusses on empowering professionals, who can subsequently be change-agents for their communities. However, twinning in healthcare is relatively new and because the definition and understanding of twinning lacks clarity, rigorous monitoring and evaluation are rare. A clear definition of twinning is essential for the development of a scientific base for this promising form of collaboration. Method: We conducted a Concept Analysis (CA) of twinning in healthcare using Morse’s method. A qualitative study of the broad literature was performed, including scientific papers, manuals, project reports, and websites. We identified relevant papers through a systematic search using scientific databases, backtracking of references, and experts in the field. Results: We found nineteen papers on twinning in healthcare. This included twelve peer reviewed research papers, four manuals on twinning, two project reports, and one website. Seven of these papers offered no definition of twinning. In the other twelve papers definitions varied. Our CA of the literature resulted in four main attributes of twinning in healthcare. First, and most frequently mentioned, was reciprocity. The other three attributes were that twinning: 2) entails the building of personal relationships, 3) is dynamic process, 4) is between two named organisations across different cultures. The literature also indicated that these four attributes, and especially reciprocity, can have an empowering effect on healthcare professionals. Conclusions: Based on these four attributes we developed the following operational definition: Twinning is a crosscultural, reciprocal process where two groups of people work together to achieve joint goals. A greater understanding and a mature definition of twinning results in clear expectations for participants and thus more effective twinning. This can be the starting point for new collaborations and for further international studies on the effect of twinning in healthcare.
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Background Psychological aspects of labor and birth have received little attention within maternity care service planning or clinical practice. The aim of this paper is to propose a model demonstrating how neurohormonal processes, in particular oxytocinergic mechanisms, not only control the physiological aspects of labor and birth, but also contribute to the subjective psychological experiences of birth. In addition, sensory information from the uterus as well as the external environment might influence these neurohormonal processes thereby influencing the progress of labor and the experience of birth. Methodology In this new model of childbirth, we integrated the findings from two previous systematic reviews, one on maternal plasma levels of oxytocin during physiological childbirth and one meta-synthesis of women´s subjective experiences of physiological childbirth. Findings The neurobiological processes induced by the release of endogenous oxytocin during birth influence maternal behaviour and feelings in connection with birth in order to facilitate birth. The psychological experiences during birth may promote an optimal transition to motherhood. The spontaneous altered state of consciousness, that some women experience, may well be a hallmark of physiological childbirth in humans. The data also highlights the crucial role of one-to-one support during labor and birth. The physiological importance of social support to reduce labor stress and pain necessitates a reconsideration of many aspects of modern maternity care. Conclusion By listening to women’s experiences and by observing women during childbirth, factors that contribute to an optimized process of labor, such as the mothers’ wellbeing and feelings of safety, may be identified. These observations support the integrative role of endogenous oxytocin in coordinating the neuroendocrine, psychological and physiological aspects of labor and birth, including oxytocin mediated. decrease of pain, fear and stress, support the need for midwifery one-to-one support in labour as well as the need for maternity care that optimizes the function of these neuroendocrine processes even when birth interventions are used. Women and their partners would benefit from understanding the crucial role that endogenous oxytocin plays in the psychological and neuroendocrinological process of labor.
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