Graduate Journal of Social Science

Articles

• Precarity and Privilege: A Response to Linda Lund Pedersen and Barbara Samaluk

  Gwendolyn Beetham and Melissa Fernández Arrigoitía

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  • pp. 19–23

• PHDs of the UK, Unite! Your Future Depends on It

  Jenny Thatcher

  • Abstract

    This paper addresses the increasing casualisation of academic labour in higher education and its implications for PhD students in the UK. It will contextualise a recent campaign resulting in the formation of The Postgraduate Workers Association established by a group of PhD students in an attempt to build a collective resistance to the growing exploitation of postgraduate students that teach in UK universities. It is also concerned about the way the competitive marketisation of higher education benefits some institutions and disciplines, particularly at the expense of the ex-polytechnics and the social sciences and humanities. As the future of some universities will be left in jeopardy, the future of social science may depend on its willingness to adapt to the new economic climate and help those most affected by inequalities of the market to develop a more reflexive mode of relating to the social world. Lastly, it questions what consequences the increasing exploitation of PhD student teachers might have on social class hierarchies in academia.

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  • pp. 24–39

• The Coming Crisis? Some Questions for the Future of Empirical Sociology in the UK

  Sam de Boise

  • Abstract

    Working in commercial research, it was interesting to note that many researchers had little grounding in academic social research methods or social theory. Organizations dealing with research often took for granted that to get at ‘the truth’ involved either simply ‘talking to people’ and looking at an aggregation of opinions, or carrying out a mix of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ (usually online) surveys and ‘ad-hoc’ pieces which privilege Likert scales as the primary tool of ‘measurement’. As Mike Savage and Roger Burrows (2007) note, such industries have challenged the public legitimacy of empirical sociological inquiry. Such a challenge arguably hinges on political rhetoric around demonstrable ‘impact’ and ‘maximising efficiency’. However, a lack of attention to research design poses significant problems for the authority that these industries lay claim to. Noting sociology’s ethical value and personal experience of commercial, ‘client led’ research, this paper seeks to outline a case for the continued importance of rigorous, ethical social research in contemporary society and against narrow conceptions of impact.

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  • pp. 40–64

• Future Subjects? Education, Activism and Parental Practices

  Yvette Taylor

  • Abstract

    This paper considers the ‘coming forward’ of certain classed subjects through the fields of education, parenting and activism. Questions of the future pose who, where and when questions: who is ‘stuck’ in the past, who is capacitated as taking ‘us’ forward, and what embodied, spatial and material collisions occur in these renderings of past-present-future? I locate feminist questions in educational trajectories, parental practices and forms of activism, and highlight the implicatedness of past and present in ‘travelling’ beyond research trajectories. As some are recognized as activating their own (and their families’) futures, others are condemned as failing, irresponsible and out-of-place. This is a distinctly classed process, witnessed in educational journeys and the parental - even activist - claims enacted therein. In these encounters, class 'sticks' as waste and as wrong, as a past residue attached to those behind the times and without worthy futures.

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  • pp. 65–85

• Precariousness and Futurity: the Example of Subcontracted Cleaning Workers in the Banking and Finance Industry in London

  Gerald Koessl

  • Abstract

    By adopting a temporal perspective this article examines the relation between people’s conditions of work and their possibilities of being agents of their future working lives. This is done in the empirical setting of subcontracted cleaning firms servicing the banking and finance industry in the two main financial districts of London – the City of London and Canary Wharf. An analysis of eighteen in-depth interviews with cleaning workers and two trade union organisers reveals the divisions and processes of polarisation within organisations along core and periphery positions, resulting from the fact that cleaning workers are not employed in-house but by subcontracted cleaning firms. The precarious conditions of work induced by the periphery position from their ‘real employers’, that is, the banks, undermine cleaning workers‘ possibilities to individually confront their future. Poverty wages - in many cases still being paid - in combination with the absence of appropriate social protection (e.g. sick pay or pension schemes) force many of the workers to ‘stabilise the present’ whilst future plans remain out of individual reach. However, in recent years, many of the workers have joined trade unions, aiming to collectively improve their future working lives.

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  • pp. 86–108

• Melancholia and the Radical Particular: Against Archer’s Realism

  Thomas Allen

  • Abstract

    The successful refutation of post-modern conceptions of subjectivity does not automatically give one the right to posit an acting subject. What is missing in any such positing is a value-judgement. How much is such a subjectivity worth? Why is such an attempt even being made? This paper argues that it is precisely these questions which go unasked in Margaret Archer’s work, and as such her human being is hollow. This is not because it is purely linguistic, but because if conditions of generalised exchange are taken as a normative ground for subjectivity then it can only exist as a bourgeois capitalist. To posit agency within these boundaries is to affirm them. To gain a different view of subjectivity one must forego the liberal need to rescue the ‘soul’ of the human and investigate the subject in its unfreedom and in its non-actuality. This position is, paradoxically, one which remains far more true to the idea of meaningful subjectivity than one which believes that the wrong life may be lived rightly. This paper begins by manifesting a contradiction in Archer's work and goes on to read her development of human agency through the work of Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno. Following this I read Lars Von Trier’s (2011) film Melancholia through Sigmund Freud and Adorno and claim that in times of crisis a negative conception of subjectivity may allow for an experience of emancipation precisely due to the tangential relation between the subject and the social world. I conclude with a brief consideration of the ontology of capitalist crisis and maintain that a melancholic and essentially negative structure is essential for understanding agency as it exists outside of demarcated social roles.

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  • pp. 109–130

• Holding on to a Lifeline: Desiring Queer Futurities in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

  Hwa Yi Xing

  • Abstract

    This paper seeks to address the question: How do we ‘arrive’ at queer(er) futures? To begin with, queer rethinkings of futurity need to make a radical break from logics that find their basis in heteronormativity and reproductive futurity. Sara Ahmed's concept of orientations provides a framework within which we might move beyond nostalgic narratives and the reiteration of these normative logics. Developing orientations that are critically queer (enough) will enable one to choose lines of disorientation, to remember differently, and to integrate the past and future differently in relation to the present. I also look at José Esteban Muñoz’ suggestion that we put queer ‘on the horizon’, viewing it as potentiality for a different world. Further, I regard the element of community as an essential element in one's queer knowledge production, as ‘queer’ cannot exist in isolation. How to shape our bodies, lives, and worlds differently, and develop queer potentialities that might eventually materialize? In Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods, I examine how her characters are orientated, and how they reorientate themselves when obstacles throw them off course. What do they do with these queer moments? Do they invest in them, or do those moments just slip away, unnoticed?

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  • pp. 131–152

• The Future of Slavery: From Cultural Trauma to Ethical Remembrance

  Tracey Walker

  • Abstract

    This paper focuses on the current and ongoing engagement with slavery as a space for traumatic remembrance and explores how one's sense of self and identity might be transformed by applying ethics to the remembrance of slavery. I reject the ideas central to trauma theory purported by Cathy Caruth (1991) that considers cultural trauma to be rooted in the tragic episode itself, arguing that it is driven by the strategic, practical and political interests of both nationalist discourses and the Black diaspora. By engaging with new thinking in cultural trauma proposed by Jeffrey C. Alexander (2004), I maintain that trauma is evoked through the effects of stories, narratives and images which are adopted and accepted as our history and attempt to look past the constructed slavery narratives premised on death and victimhood to reveal subjectivities that expose tropes of renewal, creative energy and agency. I further criticise trauma theory's denial of unconscious fantasies and psychopolitical forces behind the representation of traumatic memories and consider the importance of applying psychosocial thinking to the impact of this cultural atrocity on a post-slavery generation. The paper attempts to fashion an ethical mode of remembrance by engaging with postcolonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman and Toni Morrison and includes literary pieces by Caryl Philips, Octavia Butler and William Blake. In addition, Judith Butler’s (2005) theory of ‘opacity’ is used to reveal the fragmented nature of slavery and slave subjectivity. Overall, I argue that applying ethical thinking to the memory of slavery is of critical importance not only for the creation of black subjectivity and political lives, but also for the future of multicultural relations in the UK.

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  • pp. 153–178

• (De/con)structing Political Narratives: Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida on Crafting a Positive Politics

  Caitlin Boland

  • Abstract

    In 1961 the notorious organizer and facilitator of Nazi death camps, Adolf Eichmann, was tried in Jerusalem for war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Second World War. He was found guilty after weeks of often gruesome testimony and in 1962 he was hanged. Hannah Arendt—a Jew who had escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to America—attended his trial. Although the detail and accuracy of her reporting on the trial was widely applauded, the analysis she included throughout her book Eichmann in Jerusalem outraged many who previously had praised her. That Eichmann organized the day-to-day logistics of the Holocaust Arendt never disputed. That he was responsible for the Holocaust or that his death was somehow retributively just she found not only implausible but counterproductive. Arendt forced her readers to think: are legal and illegal the same as right and wrong? Should they be the same? Can we make them the same? In this article I weave Arendt’s questions and answers about law and politics in with those of Jacques Derrida—a thinker who also cared a great deal about political meaning and responsibility. Derrida’s theory of deconstruction revealed political meaning in stories and poetry, in songs and speeches, in language itself. Taking an interdisciplinary approach I argue that together, Arendt and Derrida shed new light on the significance of political narratives, the importance of remembrance—linguistic, historical, political—and the tragic yet hopeful nature of responsibility.

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  • pp. 179–202

• Towards Narrative Futuring in Psychology: Becoming Resilient by Imagining the Future

  Anneke Sools and Jan Hein Mooren

  • Abstract

    In this article we develop a narrative psychological approach to futuring (imagining the future). We explore how this approach addresses the question of how people can become resilient in order to anticipate (social) crisis and change. Firstly, we bring to the fore how futuring takes shape in psychological theories. We argue that the linear-causal temporal perspective underlying the classical theories developed by Alfred Adler and Albert Bandura is insufficient to deal with the increasing speed and complexity of social change. The more complex temporal approaches of Frederick Towne Melges and Thomas Lombardo seem better suited for the purpose at hand. Secondly, we complement our search for a psychological theory of futuring by exploring the role a narrative approach can play in understanding and enhancing resilience. We illustrate the potential of a narrative approach to futuring with an example of on-going research into the relationship between narrative futuring and well-being at the life-story lab at Twente University, the Netherlands. We conclude with a reflection on methodological and epistemological issues of the proposed narrative psychological approach.

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  • pp. 203–226

Book Reviews

• Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory by Clare Hemmings

  Allison Kinsey Robb

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  • pp. 227–230

• The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed

  Julia Downes

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  • pp. 231–234

• The Queer Art of Failure by Judith (Jack) Halberstam

  Marianna Szczygielska

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  • pp. 235–239

• Children of the Sun: An Ethnographic Study of the Street Children of Latin America by Jerry Hollingsworth

  Christian Rojas Gaspar

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