A scrapblog of collaborative and individual thinking.
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Thinking with Bourdieu: Doxa
Claire Birkenshaw “In every cry of every Man,In every Infants cry of fear,In every voice: in every ban,The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” (William Blake, 1794). Sociology’s purpose, Bourdieu (2013, p.10) argued, is to “uncover the social unconscious” in order to examine and explain “the social relations of domination”, which “deny others the full expression…
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Discipline, Incorporated
Claire Birkenshaw “By means of strange incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion” (Foucault, [1972] 2009, p.3). Film, as Sian Barber (2015, p.4) reminds us, is a “crafted artefact”, which is “never produced in a cultural and social…
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Billy Elliot and Sociological Imagination
Claire Birkenshaw “For girls. Not for lads, Billy. Lads do football, or boxing, or wrestling. Not friggin’ ballet!” (Billy Elliot, 2000). The dramatic kitchen table confrontation between Billy and his dad about the discovery of Billy’s pursuit of ballet instead of boxing, is a knock-out moment in the film Billy Elliot (dir. Daldry, 2000). Within…
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A brief genealogy of British art’s influence on imagining childhood innocence
Claire Birkenshaw In his book, Imperial Nostalgia, historian Peter Mitchell (2021, p.3) powerfully reminds us that: “The violence of the past is ongoing in the present; not only structurally, in that it is built into the foundations of the society in which we live, but in more subtle, more constitutive ways: in the words we…
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An introduction to the work of Michel Foucault
Excerpts from my PhD thesis (Pierlejewski, 2022 p26-30) Dr Mandy Pierlejewski Power For Foucault, power was always a focus. He does not see power as a top-down force, oppressing individuals, but as something which exists between people in their relationships with each other and the social body. Foucault was interested in what he called the…
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Pupils or products?
Dr Mandy Pierlejewski. This week, at universities across the UK, Coca-Cola were giving away free samples of their newly packaged bottles of Coke Zero. I noticed that although the bottles were made of a recycled material which was a little darker than the original bottles, essentially the branding was exactly the same. Every Coca-Cola product…
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Developing doppelganger as method
Dr Mandy Pierlejewski. Have you watched the Marvel series Moon Knight (2022) or the cult film Fight Club (Fincher, 1999)? In these and many other stories, the protagonist comes face to face with another version of themselves- a doppelganger. The idea of a doppelganger or ghostly double is a feature of the gothic genre of…
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Origins
It wasn’t really an academic discussion about Foucault. It was an academic discussion about something else. For reasons I cannot exactly remember, Foucault popped into the conversation and orbits shifted. I suggested Peppa Pig was a transmitter of some of Foucault’s thinking and exampled Peppa at the Dentist. Left field, right? Surprisingly, I wasn’t ushered…
Got any book recommendations?
Altered States of Academia 