No abstract

It is contested to what extent public employment services (PES) help build resilience in young unemployed people. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 19 people born in Germany and Norway between 1990 and 1995, the article examines stories about how PES, in two different activation regimes, help young people find meaningful work. The analysis and discussion are carried out within a theoretical framework that combines the capability approach with social resilience literature in a novel way. The findings show that PES are portrayed as being more present in young Germans' lives. The German informants seem to feel undue pressure from PES and they describe differences between personal aims and the “placement priority” of PES. Sanctions imposed by PES were also a much more predominant topic among the German informants. The Norwegian data were dominated by stories about young people in activation programmes who had been demotivated by being trapped in a cycle of programme participation, which did not result in employment. Across the two countries, our data suggest that PES rarely build social resilience: PES provided young people with a means to survive, but rarely helped to build their capacity to overcome their difficult situation. In line with previous research, the stories of young Germans and Norwegians also emphasise the need for a PES that provides tailor‐made services that build on young people's motivation and ambition. The article demonstrates that combining the capability approach with social resilience theory enables a dynamic perspective on the development of people's capabilities.

No abstract

Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect of many groove-based musics. In the present study, we explore the interconnectedness of musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians and producers’ discourse in five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop and traditional Scandinavian fiddle music). Through semi-structured interviews, we found both genre-specific accounts of how such musical features interact at the microlevel of rhythm and a cross-generic focus on inducing movement by shaping sound and generating rhythmic friction. The study empirically substantiates the multiparameter nature of musical performance and experience, and that particular genre-typical configurations of temporal and sonic features are needed to create the experience of groove. It thereby adds to the scholarly discourse on groove, which has often taken a more general and time-oriented view of rhythm.

Drawing upon Rancière's argument that aesthetics instigates politics, Latour's rethinking of agency as relational, and Ortiz's work on Afro-Cuban music aesthetics, this article explores how the experience of aesthetic pleasure in Cuban timba grooves makes politics audible and affective in novel ways. Through a combination of ethnographic and musical analyses of Havana D'Primera's performance of ‘Pasaporte’ live at Casa de la Música in 2010, it unpacks the political affordances of call-and-response singing and polyrhythmic timba grooves among participating listeners in Havana. In contrast to the recurrent tendency to exclude musical details from research into the politics of music, this article suggests that engaging grooves and catchy melodies do important political work as musical actants by creating affective communities and new expressions of political critique. The concept of musical actants serves as a lens through which to view these pregnant interactions between rhythmic, melodic, social, and political meanings in time.