Simon Weaver

The ‘Other’ Laughs Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-racist Comedy

This article outlines the ‘reverse discourses’ of black, African-American and Afro-Caribbean comedians in the UK and USA. These reverse discourses appear in comic acts that employ the sign-systems of embodied and cultural racism but develop, or seek to develop, a reverse semantic effect. I argue the humour of reverse discourse is significant in relation to racism because it forms a type of resistance that can, first, act rhetorically against racist meaning and so attack racist truth claims and points of ambivalence. Second, and connected to this, it can rhetorically resolve the ambiguity of the reverse discourse itself. Alongside this, and paradoxically, reverse discourses also contain a polysemic element that can, at times, reproduce racism. The article seeks to develop a means of analysing the relationship between racist and non-racist meaning in such comedic performance.

Innovation sustainability in challenging health-care contexts: embedding clinically led change in routine practice.

Summary The need for organizational innovation as a means of improving health-care quality and containing costs is widely recognized, but while a growing body of research has improved knowledge of implementation, very little has considered the challenges involved in sustaining change – especially organizational change led ‘bottom-up’ by frontline clinicians. This study addresses this lacuna, taking a longitudinal, qualitative case-study approach to understanding the paths to sustainability of four organizational innovations. It highlights the importance of the interaction between organizational context, nature of the innovation and strategies deployed in achieving sustainability. It discusses how positional influence of service leads, complexity of innovation, networks of support, embedding in existing systems, and proactive responses to changing circumstances can interact to sustain change. In the absence of cast-iron evidence of effectiveness, wider notions of value may be successfully invoked to sustain innovation. Sustainability requires continuing effort through time, rather than representing a final state to be achieved. Our study offers new insights into the process of sustainability of organizational change, and elucidates the complement of strategies needed to make bottom-up change last in challenging contexts replete with competing priorities.

Jokes, rhetoric and embodied racism: A rhetorical discourse analysis of the logics of racist jokes on the internet

This article outlines the racist rhetoric employed in anti-black jokes on five internet websites. It is argued that racist jokes can act as important rhetorical devices for serious racisms, and thus work in ways that can support racism in particular readings. By offering a rhetorical discourse analysis of jokes containing embodied racism – or the discursive remains of biological racism – it is shown that internet jokes express two key logics of racism. These logics are inclusion and exclusion. It is argued that inclusion usually inferiorizes and employs race stereotypes whereas exclusion often does not. The article expands this second category by highlighting exclusionary ‘black’ and ‘nigger’ jokes. These categories of non-stereotyped race or ethnic joking have been largely ignored in humour studies because of a reliance on a problematic and celebratory definition of the ethnic joke. Thus a wider definition of racist humour is offered.

Developing a rhetorical analysis of racist humour: Examining anti-black jokes on the internet

Racist humour is frequently the subject of media and public debate in relation to issues of offence and acceptability. Despite this, little has been done to analyse it or its relationship to other forms of racism. I argue that an analysis of racist humour needs to account for the rhetorical structures of humour – to consider humour as a rhetorical device similar to metaphor or metonym – that has a persuasive potential. Using jokes from four US websites, the rhetorical aspects of humour are unpacked through the use of rhetorical discourse analysis and semiotic theories of humour. I then identify an important effect of racist humour. Zygmunt Baumans ideas on the problem of ambivalence for dichotomous discourse and category formation are employed to argue that racist humour expresses racist dichotomies and has the potential, among others, to “hide” the ambivalence to which such dichotomies are prone. The article then considers the meaning and ambivalence of less severe racist joking.

A qualitative study of families of a child with a nut allergy

Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore, using qualitative methods, the experiences of children and their parents living with nut allergy. Methods: Children with a confirmed diagnosis of peanut allergy were identified from a database of patients maintained at an allergy clinic at a large teaching hospital. Interviews with 26 families were conducted involving 11 children, 25 mothers and 12 fathers. Results: The diagnosis of nut allergy signalled a critical transition—or biographical disruption—in the life of the family. Parents took on the role of ‘alert assistant’ and sought to create ‘safe places’ where nuts were not permitted, but often struggled when outside the home environment. The option of ‘passing as normal’, often used by people with a chronic illness to avoid stigma, was not available to them. Consequently, parents often reported being treated as faddy, demanding, and neurotic, and children suffered from teasing and exclusion. The social consequences of nut allergy were worsened by poor labelling and control of foods and products containing nuts. Discussion: In many ways, nut allergy may be considered a form of disability, because it imposes social barriers on participating fully in society.

A rhetorical discourse analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes

Abstract Constructed with linguistic devices that resemble metaphor and other rhetorical devices, humour has the inbuilt ability to support racism in various readings. Through a discourse analysis of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes, this article outlines the connections between humorous and serious racism. It explains how online humour expresses two logics of racism: social inclusion and exclusion. Stereotypes and inferiorization are used in combination and separately to form ‘acceptable’ inclusive images in jokes. Where jokes depict exclusion, this is achieved through images of removal, violence or death. Although the stereotypes and exclusions of Muslims and Jews presented in the jokes are not the same, having both different histories and different trajectories in relation to contemporary racializations, it is argued that the underlying logic of racism is the same. This logic, in particular readings, supports the hard and extreme right-wing views of some of the websites, although the jokes are open to other interpretations as well.

Liquid Racism and the Danish Prophet Muhammad Cartoons

This article examines reactions to the October 2005 publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. It does so by using the concept of ‘liquid racism’. While the controversy arose because it is considered blasphemous by many Muslims to create images of the Prophet Muhammad, the article argues that the meaning of the cartoons is multidimensional, that their analysis is significantly more complex than most commentators acknowledge, and that this complexity can best be addressed via the concept of liquid racism. The article examines the liquidity of the cartoons in relation to four readings. These see the cartoons as: (1) a criticism of Islamic fundamentalism; (2) blasphemous images; (3) Islamophobic and racist; and (4) satire and a defence of freedom of speech. Finally, the relationship between postmodernity and the rise of fundamentalism is discussed because the cartoons, reactions to them, and Islamic fundamentalism, all contain an important postmodern dimension.

Institutional Complexity and Individual Responses: Delineating the Boundaries of Partial Autonomy

Research highlights how coexisting institutional logics can sometimes offer opportunities for agency to enterprising actors in organizational fields. But macro- and micro-level studies using this framework diverge in their approach to understanding the consequences of institutional complexity for actor autonomy, and correspondingly in the opportunities they identify for agents to resist, reinterpret or make judicious use of institutional prescriptions. This paper seeks to bridge this gap, through a longitudinal, comparative case study of the trajectories of four ostensibly similar change initiatives in the same complex organizational field. It studies the influence of three dominant institutional logics (professional, market and corporate) in these divergent trajectories, elucidating the role of mediating influences, operating below the level of the field but above that of the actor, that worked to constrain or facilitate agency. The consequence for actors was a divergent realization of the relationship between the three logics, with very different consequences for their ability to advance their interests. Our findings offer an improved understanding of when and how institutional complexity facilitates autonomy, and suggests mediating influences at the level of the organization and the relationship it instantiates between carriers of logics, neglected by macro- and micro-level studies, that merit further attention.

“Dude! You mean you've never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?!?” Nut Allergy as Stigma in Comic Books

This article examines the representation of nut allergy in comics aimed at children and young people. It maps the signification and stigma of nut allergy in comics, and includes an outline of the imagery, stereotypes, and connotations that are created on this condition. Three texts are examined: first, Allergic, a semi-autobiographical story by Adrian Tomine aimed at young adults; second, Whats Up With Paulina? from the Medikidz series of comic books that aim to help a pre-teenage audience learn about medical conditions; and third, Peanut, a forthcoming comic book by Ayun Halliday aimed at those in their early to mid teenage years. Using textual analysis, we focus on three principal areas of the texts. First, we consider the way in which the allergic character is represented in relation to examples of felt stigma, typified by feelings of shame and rejection, and compare this representation to common stereotypes of disability. Second, we look at the representation of other characters, drawing attention to the way in which stigma is enacted, highlighting acts of overt discrimination. Last, we examine the way in which the event of an allergic reaction is portrayed, considering how this might be used to help children and young people better understand nut allergy and combat the stigma attached to it. Throughout the article we compare the representation of stigma in comics with that depicted in empirical research on children living with nut allergies.

The reverse discourse and resistance of Asian comedians in the West

ABSTRACT The article builds on a theoretical framework that analyses the reverse discourse and anti-racist resistance of ethnic comedy, through examples of stand-up comedy produced by British and North American Asians. It is argued that humour often forms a complex rhetoric that can aid the truth status and ambivalence perception of serious discourse, and thus has a serious function. This observation is developed in relation to the concept of reverse discourse presented by Michel Foucault. Responses to racism produced by British and North American Asian comedians are analysed for both their anti-racist potential and their polysemicity — or their ability to rearticulate racism.