Category Research Profiles

Entries 15 Total

I Am Redneck, Hear Me Roar

Oct 19, ’10 8:00 AM

Y’all call me Bubba.  Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money, and nothing particular to interest me in Southeast Missouri, I thought I would move away, get an education, get a job, and join former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s “knowledge workers” feasting at the table of the global economy.  I was just like everyone else – reaching out to grasp my own little share of the rusty old American Dream of personal prosperity and the consumer goods that came along with it… but, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum… I mean, at Will Rogers Auditorium… that changed everything for me.

In the winter of 2000, I bought tickets to the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” and got to hear Jeff Foxworthy tell redneck jokes up close and in person.  I also got to hear Larry the Cable Guy explain that Al Gore lost the election because a handful of rednecks from a Dade County, Florida trailer park didn’t know how to operate a voting machine.  I suppose if those same machines were designed to look like those video poker “eight liners” or a cigarette machine that our political landscape would have been a whole lot different in the first decade of the 21st century.  Essentially, George W. Bush won the election because a handful of rednecks could find “Jones” on a jukebox but couldn’t find “Gore” on a punch card.  If ballots had only looked more like those Bingo cards, the disaster of George W. Bush’s presidency could have been averted – that is, assuming that us rednecks had the good sense to vote with our wallets and not cast ballots based on the emotional manipulations of a Karl Rove or a Lee Atwater.

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Reclaiming Learning – a return to Vygotsky

Oct 16, ’10 8:00 AM

We are confronted by and complicit in war, misery, poverty and that acute and chronic crisis, climate change. The complex inter relationship of these chronic crises is a material basis for the acute crisis that could lead to species extinction. In this paper I will argue that the process of learning, modified, manipulated and caricatured in the dominant and related paradigms of neo liberalism and neo conservatism (Wrigley 2007), can be reclaimed as that process through which we can draw together critical resources for a practical struggle that seeks both “survival” (John-Steiner & Souberman, 1978:133) and ultimately that flourishing and love that has no purpose or point beyond a reciprocally created self development (See Eagleton 2007). The notion of reciprocal self development can be reduced to the obvious, I develop because as you develop you provide space, time and support for my development and vice versa, and there is nothing wrong with that. However for me the notion contains that process through which we develop critical resources to both understand our world and change it, they are shared resources that through personal appropriation can make you and me socialists.

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Reclaiming Learning – introduction

Oct 15, ’10 8:00 AM

The Challenge: “Given that structures function to give persons powers, the specific use that agents make of these structural capacities is not pre determined by the nature of the structures themselves. Alternative courses are open to agents: they may simply perform the routine actions that are necessary to reproduce the existing structures, or they may seek to modify or altogether to transform those structures.” (Callinicos, 2006:190)

The Questions: Is there something fundamental to our species that creates conditions and dimensions of being that enable people to take those ‘alternative courses’ of action – the submission of our will to the structures we have created historically and our capacity to challenge the very foundations of these structures – and to do them almost at that same time and in the same spaces. To submit, to resist and to change make up the contours of our lives, are they separate geographical lines, do we ascend and descend across submission, resistance and change or are these ‘impossible contours’ that cross the life span vulnerable to a past, those practices, that project people into their present, that moment of choice when the very structures that bear down on us provide that possibility of a future that is cast in front of us as a shadow? The crucial point here is that the shadow moves and turns as we turn corporeally. The future thrown before us is within our material grasp precisely because the structures we erect provide a capacity for us to submit. If we have that capacity to do something, we have it in moments before the act, do those moments provide that space that may yet provide years of servitude or struggle?

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The Affair that Ended in Rape: Researching Australian Footballers and Sexual Assault

Aug 2, ’10 10:00 AM

In 2006, when I began research into Australian football and sexual assault for my doctoral thesis, I was a footy fan. No, I was an Australian Football League fanatic: a ‘Proud, Passionate and Paid Up’ member of the Hawthorn Football Club, as numerous bumper stickers on my old car attest. At the games, week in, week out, rain, hail or shine, with my dad, my sister and my brother, my mood for days wholly dependent on the outcome of those two short hours on the weekend. When it came to umpiring, although I wasn’t as one-eyed as some supporters, and could on occasion concede that a free kick paid against the Hawks was warranted, more often than not I was yelling about the ‘soft’ decisions that went against ‘us’ and the ‘obvious’ rule-breaking thuggery of the opposition that the umpires ignored. It’s probably a mentality that most fans share, at least to some extent − as you stand up for your best friends or family against anyone else, and believe in them, I believed in and defended my ‘teammates’ against accusations of weakness, softness, unfair play and any number of on-field indiscretions.

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María Martínez: Story of an Indigenous Woman

Jun 16, ’10 11:00 AM

María Martínez Aldana was born in 1939 in Ixtlahuaca, a small village located in the municipality of San Martín de las Piramides in the state of Mexico.  María does not know exactly the day of her birth, “I have two birthdays”, she says, smiling, but what she knows is that this year she will celebrate her 71st. birthday. Although she has slowed down in recent years, Mariquita, as she is normally called, still runs the family house and looks after two of her eleven grandchildren as their primary carer.

Growing up after the Mexican Revolution at the time when the Mexican government launched a de-indigenisation movement of the population in order to create a unique Mexican identity, María lived through the time when many indigenous men and women migrated to the urban areas of Mexico as the only option to improve their living conditions (CDI 2006, Oehmichen Bazan 2005, Reyes Ruiz 2010).

María Martínez is my grandmother and my chief inspiration for conducting sociological research in the areas of gender, indigenous people and migration.  Since my parents were both finishing their professional training and working at the same time, I lived most of my childhood at my grandparents’ house. In fact, it could be said that I was essentially raised by my grandmother. Given my long personal association with María, the story I tell here may be different from those recorded by oral historians or journalists who usually interview their subjects in two or three sessions. The tale I tell here is one I experienced and heard many times while growing up at María’s home, and through more recent deep conversations with her. For the purposes of this work María agreed to be taped and to make public her life-experiences. I also recall conversations that I held with María’s mother, Altagracia (my great-grandmother) in my frequent visits to her place before she died in 1996. Thus, the close relationship and affection that we feel for each other has given me the courage to risk writing the story of this indigenous woman in my own words but relying on hers for descriptions of the most dramatic events in her life.

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