Debra Ferreday

Networked learning a relational approach - weak and strong ties

In this paper, we explore the idea of weak ties in networked learning. We go back to the original conception of the strength of weak ties and relate this to Bakhtin and a dialogic understanding of networked learning. These theoretical ideas are applied to the examination of two networked settings in which educational leaders exchange ideas and have the potential to create knowledge. We examine these networks from the point of view of the overall pattern of interaction and from an interest in the kinds of dialogues engaged in by participants in the network. We identify an area for further research in a comparison of the dimensions of links that appear to be weaker in these networks, those concerning affective aspects of the relationship, with those concerned with the sharing of knowledge which appear to be relatively well developed. We suggest that presence and proximity become forms of telepresence and tele-proximity and rely more heavily on interactional means to achieve identity formation. Finally we note that knowledge is negotiated and the marks of its personal and situated origin are essential parts of the exchange through dialogue.

Dialogue, language and identity: critical issues for networked management learning

This paper draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Norman Fairclough to show how dialogue is central to the construction of identity in networked management learning. The paper is based on a case study of a networked management learning course in higher education and attempts to illustrate how participants negotiate issues of difference, inclusivity and belonging through relational dialogue.

Game of Thrones, rape culture and feminist fandom

Abstract Throughout its run, HBOs adaptation of George RR Martins A Song of Ice and Fire book series, retitled Game of Thrones (GoT), has attracted controversy for its depiction of nudity and graphic sex and violence. But a particular recent scene, in which a brother rapes his sister, caused outrage in media and fan commentary. This article considers the scene in question, and feminist responses to it, in the context of wider cultural debates about rape culture and the media representation of sexual violence. Following Sarah Projanskys argument that rape is a ‘particularly versatile narrative element’ that ‘often addresses any number of social themes and issues’, I read GoT and its online fan responses alongside literary theories of the fantastic, to examine how dominant rape culture discourses are both reproduced and challenged in fan communities. In particular I argue that fan narratives both reproduce discourses of masculinity and futurity that contribute to rape culture, but also provide a potential space for change through speaking out about silenced experiences of trauma.

Anorexia and Abjection: A Review Essay

This article draws on a review of Megan Warin’s 2010 book, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia, to discuss the ways in which a feminist ethnographic approach might disrupt dominant cultural narratives of eating disorders and embodiment. My argument draws on feminist work on figuration and ‘body image’ to discuss how the anorexic body becomes a figure of abjection, both in media images and in popular feminist discourse. I examine how cultural narratives and images are pathologically capable of both engendering disgust in the non-anorexic spectator and, second (and more threateningly), moving vulnerable, female spectators to imitation – a power to affect and infect onlookers which is central to contemporary debates about what is popularly called ‘body image’. By drawing on Warin’s work, the article examines how a critical feminist ethnography might move debates on eating disorders beyond the reproduction of tropes of abjection, disgust and discipline which have led to an impasse in the field, and ask whether, by paying attention to the lived experience of anorexia, it might be possible for the anorexic subject to speak.

Reading Disorders: Online Suicide and the Death of Hope

This article examines the representation of cybersuicide in the popular media. Taking as its starting point two cases, those of Abraham Biggs and the so‐called “Bridgend suicide cult”, it analyses the moral panics that circulate around online suicide to suggest that the representation of youth suicide involves a mobilisation of “the death of hope” in both news reports and academic theorising, which is typical of media effects models more generally. The article uses Abigail Brays notion of “reading disorders” to explore the ways in which such an account of online relationships constructs some forms of engagement with digital media as pathological, excessive and dangerous. This popular account of online interaction thus entails a call to a collective work of despair, in which “generation 2.0” are represented as beyond help and hence figured as already lost to hope, as already dead. The online subject is portrayed as monstrous, as tainted with death, and hence no longer belongs to the world of the living. Through a close reading of newspaper coverage of online youth suicide, the article argues that this narrative of disordered reading forecloses more hopeful ways of thinking through our relationship with media texts and hence ignores the potential of digital media to facilitate connection, functioning as a technology of hope.

Affect, Fantasy and Digital Cultures

The Endless Forest is a game, which seems to defy the logic of gaming, in fact is closer in spirit to what has been termed ‘hyperliterature’. The website Hyperliterature Exchange defines this as literature which resists and subverts traditional linear narratives as well as positioning itself on the margins of print media: ‘Literature which makes use of the computerised/digital medium in such a way that it cannot be reproduced in print — for example it employs animations, sound-effects, nonlinear structure, interactivity, or a combination of these’ (Picot, n.d.).

Becoming deer: Nonhuman drag and online utopias

In this article I explore the ways in which fantasies of becoming nonhuman queer the relationship between ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Nonhuman trans is not, in itself, a new idea. Popular culture is saturated with (usually monstrous) figures that occupy the boundary between human and nonhuman. As Donna Haraway notes, ‘queering has the job of undoing ‘‘normal’’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/nonhuman sorting operation’ (2008: xxiv). The notion of trans is important in the feminist turn to the nonhuman; as Myra J. Hird points out, transex as a phenomenon is not merely an effect of human culture; recently, feminist theorists have turned to nonhuman examples to shed light on questions of human sex, gender and embodiment (2006: 36). For Hird, the myriad transformations found in ‘nature’ challenge human assumptions about binary gender, but also about the nature/culture binary itself (2006). In popular culture, the most visible human/nonhuman trans figure is the werewolf, whose violent transformation from human to animal is often held to embody the expression of an innate animal nature which has been repressed; werewolves are queer monsters (Bernhardt-House, 2008: 179). The werewolf queers the boundaries of the human by (forcibly) reminding us that the human is always-already animal. Here, though, I want to pay attention to the emergence of a new, less violent and more ambiguous hybrid subject; the human/deer amalgam sometimes known as cervine or cervid. By tracking cervine imaginaries across multiple spaces of performance, I want to suggest that the cervid queers the human/nonhuman binary through practices of nonhuman cross-dressing and performance, and that, by parodying the notion of either being ‘fully human’ or becoming/‘returning to’ the animal, these practices perform the anxiety and melancholia at stake in anthropocentrism. The Endless Forest is a game which falls within the category of ‘hyperliterature’. The website Hyperliterature Exchange defines this as literature which resists and subverts traditional linear narratives as well as positioning itself on the

Like a Stone in Your Stomach: Articulating the Unspeakable in Rape Victim-Survivors’ Activist Selfies

This chapter examines Project Unbreakable, a photographic project which posts selfies made by survivors of rape and sexual abuse, to demonstrate how selfie culture operates as a space of embodied resistance. Following Senft and Baym’s view of selfies as relational and constitute practices that involve the mobilisation of affect as a basis of politically engaged community building, it examines the ways in which selfies disrupt dominant narratives of survival as ‘speaking out’, a discourse which privileges some survivors’ experiences as more worthy than others. Selfies, I argue, are moving in that they literally move, circulating virally in a culture that produces victim-survivor experience as both ‘unspeakable’ and ‘spoken for’: this chapter pays attention to the ways in which they both move and mobilise us.

Investigating ‘fame-inism’: The politics of popular culture:

This special section of Feminist Theory emerged from the interdisciplinary workshop ‘The Politics of Popular Culture’, organised by the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster University in March 2015 as part of Hear Me Roar, Lancaster’s first feminist arts festival. This festival brought together diverse performances and audiences embracing very different approaches to and understandings of feminism. The shows ranged from the Rose Theatre’s rehearsed reading of a previously unperformed Restoration Comedy by Elizabeth Polewheedle, to the participatory ‘Bush Rush’ in the town square which invited everyone to join in a mass performance of the choreography for Kate Bush’s celebrated single Wuthering Heights. Reflecting this context, the workshop invited participants to explore ideas around gender, performance, activism, mediation and spectatorship.

Only the bad gyal could do this : Rihanna, rape-revenge narratives, and the cultural politics of White Feminism

In July 2015, Rihanna released a seven-minute long video for her new single, entitled ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ (more widely known as ‘BBHMM’), the violent imagery in which would divide feminist media commentators for its representation of graphic and sexualised violence against a white couple. The resulting commentary would become the focus of much popular and academic feminist debate over the intersectional gendered and racialised politics of popular culture, in particular coming to define what has been termed ‘white feminism’. ‘BBHMM’ is not the first time Rihanna’s work has been considered in relation to these debates: not only has she herself been very publicly outed as a survivor of male violence, but she has previously dealt with themes of rape and revenge in an earlier video, 2010’s ‘Man Down’, and in her lyrics. In this article I explore the multiple and layered ways in which Rihanna, and by extension other female artists of colour, are produced by white feminism as both responsible for perpetrating gender-based violence, and as victims in need of rescue. The effect of such liberal feminist critique, I argue, is to hold black female artists responsible for a rape culture that continually subjects women of colour to symbolic and actual violence. In this context, the fantasy violence of ‘Man Down’ and to a greater extent ‘BBHMM’ dramatises the impossibility of ‘being paid what one is owed’ in a culture that produces women of colour’s bodies, morality and personal trauma as abjected objects of consumption. I read these two videos through the lens of feminist film theory in order to explore how such representations mobilise affective responses of shame, identification and complicity that are played out in feminist responses to her work, and how their attachment to a simplistic model of representation conceals and reproduces racialised relations of inequality.