Bearing the weight of the world Exploring Maternal Embodiment

Bearing the weight of the world Exploring Maternal Embodiment
Author: Alys Einion
Publisher: Demeter Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1772582018

The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.

Bearing the Weight of the World

Bearing the Weight of the World
Author: Alys Einion
Publisher:
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2018
Genre: FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
ISBN: 9781772582031

The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied mother. The materiality of maternity and its centrality to family and social life remains too often viewed as a 'fringe' subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, the maternal body has been subject to 'expert' advice, guidance, censure, and control. Those of us maternal bodies are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechanistic functions and our lived experience disregarded. From art to medical surveillance, from genetics to radioactivity, goddess to breastfeeding, poetry to Indigenous community, dance to body size, the critical eye of the academic and the lived experience of the mother bring into being in this work a body of understanding, of expression, of knowledge and the power and authority of the lived experience, through and about the embodied mother. This critical-creative work encompasses new insights, new research, and redeveloped perspectives which combine the personal with the pervasive and point to new meaning-making in critical motherhood studies via the medium of the...

Mothers, Mothering, and COVID-19

Mothers, Mothering, and COVID-19
Author: Fiona J Green
Publisher: Demeter Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2021-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1772583448

There has been little public discussion on the devastating impact of Covid-19 on mothers, or a public acknowledgement that mothering is frontline work in this pandemic. This collection of 45 chapters and with 70 contributors is the first to explore the impact of the pandemic on mothers' care and wage labour in the context of employment, schooling, communities, families, and the relationships of parents and children. With a global perspective and from the standpoint of single, partnered, queer, racialized, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, disabled, and birthing mothers, the volume examines the increasing complexity and demands of childcare, domestic labour, elder care, and home schooling under the pandemic protocols; the intricacies and difficulties of performing wage labour at home; the impact of the pandemic on mothers' employment; and the strategies mothers have used to manage the competing demands of care and wage labour under COVID-19. By way of creative art, poetry, photography, and creative writing along with scholarly research, the collection seeks to make visible what has been invisibilized and render audible what has been silenced: the care and crisis of motherwork through and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A World Scientific Encyclopedia Of Business Storytelling, Set 1: Corporate And Business Strategies Of Business Storytelling (A 5-volume Set)

A World Scientific Encyclopedia Of Business Storytelling, Set 1: Corporate And Business Strategies Of Business Storytelling (A 5-volume Set)
Author:
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 1398
Release: 2023-08-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9811279926

This set of multi-reference works is meant to be read together as the five volumes interlace one another like the laces of a shoe in the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh. Who will wear the shoes is a question long debated in art history and philosophy. If we take these five volumes from different points of view on the theory and practice of business storytelling then we have a crisscrossing, a new and impressive dialogue for the reader. This set is presented as a new way to lace up the laces of business storytelling.Volume 1 aims to recount narratives in a variety of ways so that the precepts of entrepreneurial storytelling can be made accessible to a variety of audiences — academic, practitioner, student, and community member. Entrepreneurship has a long history and tradition but there are disputed ways of doing business storytelling in entrepreneurship that the next four volumes articulate.Volume 2 provides insights into stories fostering the idea of business (and not necessarily business itself). It focuses specifically on history — contributing to the current debates within management and organizational history around the idea of 'the historic turn'. It reflects on the idea of business and beyond; could there be more to history and business storytelling than what has previously been accepted in the field? This book sets out to explore a diverse array of alternative modes and multiple ways of storying organizations. The editors intentionally sought to involve an international network of authors with diverse storytelling accounts of history as a way of helping build out this new storytelling paradigm in a diverse and inclusive ethic. As a result, this volume showcases a broad spectrum of critical storytelling from geographically diverse authors working in universities, small businesses, and public service throughout Brazil, Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. To reflect these dynamics, and for the stories in this volume to fit together, chapters were organized into three themes: stories of processing history, tales of history-as-method, and narratives of history through a business opportunity.Volume 3 features stories that reflect the exacerbated inequalities of race, gender, and income across the world. These inequalities and power relations remain continuously con-tested, particularly in these trying times, despite being captive to a particular economic ideology built on the premise of exploitation and subjugation. The stories told in this volume tell against the orthodoxy, the colonizer, and the (seemingly) powerful. They are organized as stories of resistance, emancipation, and transformation. They invite us to rethink the multiple ways to (re)structure power relations between the colonizer and the colonized, and open up spaces for the marginalized underprivileged voices.Volume 4 is designed to create a new business storytelling paradigm that critically approaches business narratives that have historically privileged a corporate agenda. It explores the various ways that images of the other in business are developed, presented, and accounted for through powerful and dominant narratives. The stories in this volume, collectively, help readers to understand, resist, and provide strategies for change through various analyses of how business narratives come to develop, get written, are legitimized, are challenged, and get changed over time.Volume 5 brings together the practices specific to the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM). SEAM is a method of change management developed through research interventions carried out in more than 2,000 companies and organizations since 1975. This method is systemic, it considers the whole company, and tends to simultaneously increase social and economic performance by focusing mainly on the development of human skills and behaviors, making it possible to reduce dysfunctions and recycle hidden costs into added value.

Breasts Across Motherhood: Lived Experiences and Critcal Examinations

Breasts Across Motherhood: Lived Experiences and Critcal Examinations
Author: Patricia Drew
Publisher: Demeter Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1772582719

Breasts are integral to mothers' bodies; over the life course, they can swell, droop, be judged, be aroused, lactate, be altered, be removed. A woman's own breasts may be foremost in her mind during some life events, only to recede into the background at other times. Breasts are complex; they are enveloped by larger cultural meanings that go far beyond their mammary gland function, and we cannot fully understand breasts without examining the myriad discourses surrounding them. Social policies, cultural norms, and interpersonal interactions all help construct localized breast discourses which, in turn, shape mothers' breast experiences. Through examining commonalities and differences over the lifespan, we can see that women's breast experiences inform us about the social conditions in which women live their lives.

Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State

Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State
Author: Jocelyn M. Boryczka
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2023-06-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000907791

Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State examines tensions between a push for clear boundaries defining nation-states and who “legitimately” belongs in them and a pull away from citizenship as capturing what membership in a political community looks like in the twenty-first century. Borders signify and represent these physical and metaphorical challenges in a world where (anti)migration and (anti)refugee rhetoric are central to the production and reproduction of postcolonial and nationalist political discourse and identity formation. With an expansive view of citizenship, authors challenge dominant narratives, explore alternatives to neoliberal frameworks, and link theory and practice through participatory opportunities for non-citizen political participation. In doing so, they present possibilities for reimagining citizenship for a just, more sustainable future. This book will appeal to academics and practitioners working in the disciplines of Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Political Sciences, Citizenship Studies and Migration Studies. It was originally published as a special issue of New Political Science.

Hot Mess

Hot Mess
Author: Sarah Marie Wiebe
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2024-09-26T00:00:00Z
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1773637126

No longer is the climate emergency purely an external threat to our wellbeing: this profoundly political circumstance is deeply personal. The summer after giving birth, Sarah Marie Wiebe and her baby endured the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, with temperatures over 20 degrees above normal, creating all-time heat records across the province. It was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. The extreme heat landed Wiebe in the hospital, dehydrated and separated from her nursing baby from dawn until dusk. So began a year of mothering through heat, fires and floods. The climate emergency’s many incarnations shaped Wiebe’s politics of parenting and revealed the layers, textures and nuances of the disastrous emergencies we encounter in a world dominated by extractive capitalism. Drawing on hospital codes to explore the connections, Wiebe opens up tender conversations about intimate matters of how our bodies respond to emergency interventions: informed consent, emergency C-sections, reproductive mental health, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. A critical ecofeminist scholar, Wiebe invites collective envisioning and enacting of caring, ethical relations between humans and the planet, including our atmospheres, lands, waters, animals, plants and each other.

Technical Automation in Classical Antiquity

Technical Automation in Classical Antiquity
Author: Maria Gerolemou
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350077615

Technical automation – the ability of man-made (or god-made) objects to move and act autonomously – is not just the province of engineering or science fiction. In this book, Maria Gerolemou, by taking as her starting point the close semantic and linguistic relevance of technical automation to natural automatism, demonstrates how ancient literature, performance and engineering were often concerned with the way nature and artifice interacted. Moving across epic, didactic, tragedy, comedy, philosophy and ancient science, this is a brilliant assembly of evidence for the power of 'automatic theatre' in ancient literature. Gerolemou starts with the earliest Greek literature of Homer and Hesiod, where Hephaestus' self-moving artefacts in the Iliad reflect natural forces of motion and the manufactured Pandora becomes an autonomous woman. Her second chapter looks at Greek drama, where technical automation is used to augment and undermine nature not only through staging and costume but also in plot devices where statues come to life and humans behave as automatic devices. In the third chapter, Gerolemou considers how the philosophers of the 4th century BCE and the engineers of the Hellenistic period with their mechanical devices contributed to a growing dialogue around technical automation and how it could help its audience glance and marvel at the hidden mechanisms of self-motion. Finally, the book explores the ways technical automation is employed as an ekphrastic technique in late antiquity and early Byzantium.

The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory

The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory
Author: Joel Jay Kassiola
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2023-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3031143469

This Handbook aims to provide a unique and convenient one-volume reference work, exhibiting the latest interdisciplinary explorations in this urgently burgeoning field of intellectual and practical importance. Due to its immense range and diversity, environmental politics and theory necessarily encompasses: empirical, normative, policy, political, organizational, and activist discussions unfolding across many disciplines. It is a challenge for its practitioners, let alone newcomers, to keep informed about the ongoing developments in this fast-changing area of study and to comprehend all of their implications. Through the planned volume’s extensive scope of contributions emphasizing environmental policy issues, normative prescriptions, and implementation strategies, the next generation of thinkers and activists will have very useful profiles of the theories, concepts, organizations, and movements central to environmental politics and theory. It is the editors’ aspiration that this volume will become a go-to resource on the myriad perspectives relevant to studying and improving the environment for advanced researchers as well as an introduction to new students seeking to understand the basic foundations and recommended resolutions to many of our environmental challenges. Environmental politics is more than theory alone, so the Handbook also considers theory-action connections by highlighting the past and current: thinkers, activists, social organizations, and movements that have worked to guide contemporary societies toward a more environmentally sustainable and just global order. Chapter “Eco-Anxiety and the Responses of Ecological Citizenship and Mindfulness” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Otherwise Than the Binary

Otherwise Than the Binary
Author: Jessica Elbert Decker
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2022-07-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438488815

Otherwise Than the Binary approaches canonical texts and concepts in Ancient Greek philosophy and culture that have traditionally been understood as examples of binary thinking, particularly concerning sexual difference. In contrast to such patriarchal logic, the essays within this volume explore how many of these seemingly strict binaries in ancient culture and thought were far more permeable and philosophically nuanced. Each contribution asks if there are ways of thinking of antiquity differently—namely, to examine canonical works through a lens that expounds and even celebrates philosophies of difference so as to discover instances where authors of antiquity valorize and uphold the necessity of what has been seen as feminine, foreign, and/or irrational. As contemporary thinkers turn toward new ways of reading antiquity, these selected studies will inspire other readings of ancient texts through new feminist methodologies and critical vantage points. When examining the philosophers and notable figures of antiquity alongside their overt patriarchal and masculinist agendas, readers are invited to rethink their current biases while also questioning how particular ideas and texts are received and read.