Pamela Fisher

Experiential knowledge challenges 'normality' and individualised citizenship: towards 'another way of being'

This paper draws on the narratives of parents of disabled babies in order to conceptualize enabling care. The analysis emerges from the Sheffield site of an ESRC research project ‘Parents, professionals and disabled babies: identifying enabling care’, which is being undertaken by the Universities of Sheffield and Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne. In New Labour Britain individualized citizenship and self‐sufficiency are upheld as the embodiment of ‘the good life’. A culture of individualized citizenship obliges citizens to strive towards maximum independence, interpreted narrowly as self‐sufficiency, and acts to devalue the lives of some disabled children and their parents. In the area of disability this reinforces the individual model of disability and fails to properly value experiential knowledge acquired in the private sphere. This paper suggests that parents are engaging in reflection that counters hegemonic understandings by embracing alternative narratives that recognize diversity whilst questioning narrowly conceived interpretations of normality. This leads to the reconstruction of parental identities through discourses shaped by mutuality and interdependence.

Methodology and mental illness: resistance and restorying.

Concerns with social justice have been traditionally associated with a modernist concept of the individual whose actions express an underlying, essential and unified self. This paper compares the usefulness of two methodologies (post-structuralist and narrative) that are based on a rejection of identity of a unified self and compares their usefulness in relation to the development of a social justice paradigm within mental health. It considers how professional forms of knowledge may be deconstructed by post-structural analyses, arguing that these have also been used by service users to articulate more enabling discursive alternatives. The notion of agency is central to our understanding of social justice. We question the commonly held assumption that although post-structuralism deconstructs power and challenges its legitimacy, it is nevertheless unsuited to facilitating the necessary agency to put forward viable alternatives. The second half of the paper considers how narrative research offers greater emancipatory potential by enabling the research subject to author their stories and thereby brings about their own subjective transformation. Nevertheless, the interpretation of peoples stories by researchers may result in the imposition of narrative templates that erase complexities and contribute to the perpetuation of oppression. This raises ethical implications in relation to how peoples stories are interpreted.

Making Healthy Families

Certain geographical areas and neighbourhood types have come to symbolise patterns of ignorance, lack of opportunity and ‘poor lifestyle choice’ in public discussions of family food practices. The media, reporting recently on the activities of one of the UK’s ‘celebrity’ chefs announced: ‘Jamie Oliver to teach the poor how to cook ‘the basics’ in town [Rotherham] where mums opposed his school dinners campaign’ (The Daily Mail 28 March 2008). Concern about diet and about contemporary eating practices is therefore widespread. An increasing public focus on diet and health is not surprising: in England the number of obese children has tripled in 20 years. Ten per cent of six year olds are estimated to be obese, rising to 17% of 15 year olds (Zaninotto et al. 2006). While current concern about childhood obesity is usually expressed in terms of what children eat, implicit in contemporary discourses about health is also a critique of how they eat. While the ‘what’ is subject to scientific debate among for example, nutritionists and members of the medical profession, discussion of the ‘how’ has often been dominated by prejudice, myth and unquestioned assumptions which are grounded in notions of appropriate — and inappropriate — forms of parenting and family life.

Narrative approaches in mental health: Preserving the emancipatory tradition

Narrative approaches have exercised an emancipatory influence within mental health. In this article, it is suggested that there is a risk that the emancipatory tradition associated with narrative may be co-opted through contemporary mental health strategy by a narrow agenda which promotes a particular Western and neoliberal form of citizenship. This may limit the way recovery can be imagined by equating it solely with the future-orientated individual who strives, above all, to be economically independent. To resist this, it is suggested that narrative in mental health should be approached with recourse to therapeutic thinking which promotes a relational ethos of ‘recovery together’. The ‘recovery together’ model is subsequently considered in relation to narrative research on temporal understandings which have been conducted in disability studies and in the area of chronic illness. These studies point towards the value of a relational orientation towards well-being in the present, rather than fixating on future goals. It is suggested that a relational philosophy of the present might be usefully incorporated into narrative approaches when working therapeutically with people suffering from mental distress. It is argued that this might enable users and practitioners to extend the available narrative templates and to imagine recovery in diverse ways which support personal transformation and, ultimately, contribute to social change.

‘Am I doing enough to help them?’ Learners, care work and well‐being: Further Education trainee teachers

This article draws on a small‐scale case study of English pre‐ and in‐service Further Education (FE) trainee teachers from a northern university. It explores their understanding of notions of well‐being and health. In particular, it examines trainees’ orientation to care as well as their constructions of learners. It analyses two contradictory but overlapping discourses, one that constructs learners as in need of care and support whilst the other utilises a ‘pathological’ model. This is followed by an analysis of the labour process within Further Education and the emotional labour involved in supporting students as well as meeting the range of demands faced by those working in the sector. Whilst the trainees reflect models of the dual and learning professional characteristic of teachers in the sector, marked by an expanded professionalism, they have as yet not developed a fully politicised notion of teaching.

The “Autodidact”, the Pursuit of Subversive Knowledge and the Politics of Change

This paper contrasts two types of “autodidact” located in the UK in different historical periods, which utilised different learning/research technologies to different ends. From the 1920s to the 1960s some working-class activists committed to the Communist Party of Great Britain became “educated” in Marxism (and more) through the processes intrinsic to their politics. This radical acculturation was undertaken outside the universities in consequence of both an absence of access to higher education and because of the relatively enclosed social world of British Communism. The widening of educational opportunities and the decline of political Marxism effectively extinguished this kind of autodidact. New technologies have meant that the 21st century is witnessing individuals and cyber-communities that are creating knowledge-based challenges to professional and institutional power in the face of personal/family “medical” crises. The paper outlines the characteristics of these two categories of autodidact and a new terrain of counter-hegemonic learning.

(Con) Fusing Commerce and Science: Mixed Methods Research and the Production of Contextualized Knowledge

It was in the mid seventeenth century that Cardinal John Henry Newman (1858), in his foundational text ‘‘The Idea of a University,’’ first clearly articulated the purpose of the University as being about the pursuit of learning. The emphasis was specifically on learning associated with a liberal education based on the tenet that knowledge is valuable in its own right. Nevertheless, this original invocation of the University has been contested longer than is commonly recognized. It was Michael Oakeshott (1950/1989) who most openly predicted the demise of the so-called ‘‘Enlightenment’’ university and the threat to scholarship posed by ‘‘the emerging corporate mission of industrialscale research’’ (Rolfe, 2012, p. 733). Since the 1980s, debates around the corporatization of public institutions have intensified in response to what has been termed the ‘‘McDonaldization’’ of higher education. This concept, developed most fully by the sociologist George Ritzer (1993), is a now familiar backdrop to most scholarly debates around the standardisation and cost effectiveness of knowledge production, and indeed the purpose of research within the McVersity. The market-oriented approach to knowledge development, the new knowledge economy, and the increasing rhetoric around the economic significance of knowledge produced through research and university education raises interesting challenges around the fusing of commerce with science, and indeed the role of academics in developing and producing knowledge that is of direct benefit to society and to public life. The shift from the ideals associated with Newman’s vision of the University to those of the ‘‘entrepreneurial university’’ has been widely characterized as a move from an era of mode one knowledge production (knowledge that is disciplined-based and instigated by the researcher) to one in which mode two knowledge production (problem-based, interdisciplinary, mixed methods) prevails. While descriptors such as mode one and mode two knowledge production constitute ideal types that gloss over (as discussed above) a great deal of complexity regarding historic and contemporary processes of knowledge production, the point that mode two knowledge production has significantly gained in status since the ascendancy of neoliberalism is a legitimate one. At face value, mode two knowledge production has much in its favor. The story which is told, and which resonates with electorates, is that research conducted in universities

An Emancipatory Approach to Practice and Qualitative Inquiry in Mental Health: Finding 'Voice' in Charles Taylor's Ethics of Identity

The right to ‘voice’ has been identified as central in enabling agency and in ensuring human dignity. This paper discusses an understanding of ‘voice’ which has been derived from Charles Taylors concept of ‘strong evaluation’. Voice, from this perspective, is found within an ongoing process of identity development which is based on a quest for an authentic sense of self embedded in a moral journey. It is argued here that strong evaluation offers a new perspective within qualitative inquiry and emancipatory practice which may support agency and recovery in those affected by mental health issues. At the same time, strong evaluation offers the potential for positive self-transformation to all those involved in research or practice—either as service users or as service providers/researchers. The paper addresses how strong evaluation may be enhanced and extended by sociological understandings. This is discussed in relation to a study on the changing discursive landscape in the field of mental health. Despite its primary focus on mental health, this paper is relevant to researchers working within a range of marginalized communities whose members lack epistemological authority.

Revisiting the Panopticon: professional regulation, surveillance and sousveillance

In this article, we will consider how the regulation of populations is not just a feature of prisons, but of all institutions and organisations that control members though hierarchies, divisions and norms. While nurses and other allied health professionals are considered to be predominantly self-regulatory, practice is guided by a code of conduct and codes of ethics that act as rules that serve to uphold the safety of the patient, whether they are a sick person in a hospital bed or an inmate in a prison. The codes of conduct espouse a number of rules that to a certain extent govern the behaviour of individual and groups of practitioners through reciprocal rewards and punishments. Supervision is one method of monitoring the effectiveness of the codes of conduct and ethics while regulating both the minimum standard of individual practice and of training organisations. It is posited that one of the possible effects of clinical supervision is to make the person effectively self-regulatory as, an autonomous practitioner. We take the view that professional autonomy is a highly problematic concept requiring closer examination.

Tomorrow we live: fascist visions of education in 1930s Britain

The present paper explores the fascist vision for education in 1930s Britain through the presentation of extracts from official publications of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), as well as from the writings of Party members. The paper presents a socio‐historical study of British adherents to fascism and provides an account of their thinking in relation to education and schooling, exposing a milieu of ideologues, Party functionaries and serving teachers who were animated by their political commitment. Following a brief outline of the early years of British fascism, there is an account of some key members and their educational ideas, followed by a discussion of the BUF’s educational policies and of its approach to internal education and training. The orientation of the BUF and its membership to education, and the Party’s formulated policies in this field present a modernist vision that was calculated to have particular appeal to educational professionals. There is a consideration, through memoirs, of the experiences of two BUF members who were teachers. The paper reveals a relatively hidden episode in the social history of British educational politics; one that contained paradoxes of intent and outcome, and of means and ends, when ostensibly progressive and socially elevating concepts were employed in ways that had an ultimately destructive impact on individuals, both personally and professionally, as well as on whole societies.