Activism across the lifecourse: Circumstantial, dormant and embedded activisms

Maynard, Naomi

doi:10.1111/area.12349

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…I worry that this sense of inadequacy is intensified by discourses of research 'impact' in the contemporary academy, where particular kinds of (big, auditable, self-assured, heroic) forms of IMPACT are systematically valorised and rewarded through mechanisms like the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), Research Council 'pathways to impact', and HEI marketing (Pain et al, 2011;Evans, 2016;Horton, 2020). As Askins and Blazek (2017) argue, these logics of IMPACT must not make us lose faith in the more messy, collaborative, circumspect (and less lucrative and glamorous) work through which most of us 'feel our way' in attempting to care and act affirmatively within our research, in ways which might be variously quiet or loud, visible or modest, ever-present or circumstantial (Pottinger, 2017;Maynard, 2018) .…”

Section: Failure In Terms Of… Regret or Wanting To Do Morementioning

confidence: 99%

Failure failure failure failure failure failure: Six types of failure within the neoliberal academy

Horton

2020

Emotion, Space and Society

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I am not a failure…but I feel like one 1 . As a Geographer working within the contemporary academy I am proud of my achievements 2,3,4 …but I feel like a failure, and expect to fail, every day of my working life 5 . And when you feel like a failure, and expect to fail, it is hard to escape the conclusion that you are a failure. Even if your CV, profile and performance indicators make a powerful case to the contrary.Recent theorisations of failure, gentleness, modesty and (un)wellness within contemporary academia have provided important openings to acknowledge the prevalence of failure and fear-of-failure in academic workplaces, disciplines and careers in four senses. First, through these lines of work, there is increased recognition of failure as collateral damage of neoliberalisation within contemporary academia. It is 1 This was not an easy sentence to write. It is not easy to disclose feelings of failure, and I suppose it has taken years (and a certain accumulation of confidence, experience, social capital and ontological security) to feel able to put this into words. More practically, it took many iterative drafts to write 'I am not a failure…but I feel like one'. I spent days wondering how to articulate the co-presence of, and oscillation between, 'not-failure' and 'failure' (as caricatured in the preface). At various stages, too, the wording changed from 'I feel like a failure' to 'I sometimes feel like a failure', 'I often feel like a failure' , 'I always feel like a failure', 'I usually feel like a failure', or 'I know I am a failure' (maybe depending on my mood, circumstances, or how much melodrama I was enjoying playing with in my writing). 2 I find it interesting that I feel an obligation to begin by asserting my success. (I suppose I want to get across a sense that I am not writing from a bitter place devoid of success: rather, I know I have been fortunate enough to have some significant successes in my field, but feel like a failure nonetheless). It is also notable that I feel uneasy speaking of myself as a success (e.g. I find myself undercutting my narrative with footnotes, parentheses and excessive, self-effacing detail). So while I could write an uncomplicated, triumphant account of myself as a success (exceptional academic achievements; first in my family and street to go to university; from PhD to Professor in a decade; from profound shyness to international keynote speaker; £100,000s of research income; leadership and editorship roles; 100s of citations; and all that), I find I just cannot do it. Perhaps I am just inherently bashful; perhaps I am working toward a more self-effacing mode of autoethnographic practice (Horton, forthcoming); perhaps the dramatic social mobility of my career has created such dissonance and dislocation that I feel embarrassed -even ashamed -about how things have ended up; perhaps I am reacting to the overweening ambition and self-promotion I perceive in some colleagues; perhaps I just find it fun and productive to write complex, footnoted sentences. I don't know.3...

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Section: Failure In Terms Of… Regret or Wanting To Do Morementioning

confidence: 99%

Failure failure failure failure failure failure: Six types of failure within the neoliberal academy

Horton

2020

Emotion, Space and Society

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“…Gentleness and acting gently in literary environmental activism, then, might be understood as recognizing the capacity for literature to tell of, and importantly call for, a more careful/care-full and responsible engagement with the more-than-human (after Finn and Jeffries, this volume). But acting gently can also be at turns subversive, unsettling, uncomfortable, persistent (Maynard, 2018;Pottinger, 2017), and this paper is interested in this troubling of gentleness and acting gently for ecological and political reform, and how this might play out in modifying actions at Bears Ears. This exposition of a gentle literary activism at Bears Ears is rooted in and informed by geographical scholarship on quiet politics (Askins, 2014(Askins, , 2015 and quiet activisms (Pottinger, 2017;also Maynard, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The quiet politics and gentle literary activism behind the battle for Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument

Smith

2020

Area

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In the closing weeks of his administration, President Obama used his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act to designate the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah, a redrock landscape sacred to many Native American tribes. With the designation, Bears Ears became the second national monument in Utah-after Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, designated in 1996-where literature and the literary imagination had formed part of the arsenal of campaigners petitioning for the designation. This discussion looks to the works of writers across the American West who have spoken out in defense of Bears Ears (both pre-and post-designation), to consider the place of literature in environmental activism. In particular, this discussion examines how literary activism emerges as a creative yet gently subversive performance, allowing commentators to speak back to an ethics of (ecological) care, responsibility, and to respond to injustices at Bears Ears. Across these two national monuments, and three accompanying and pivotal anthologies, this discussion unpacks and interrogates an ongoing gentle political rhetoric and dialogue surrounding the Bears Ears national monument. But this quiet resilience has been disrupted, upended by the Trump administration's review of more than two dozen national monument designations, which specifically targets Bears Ears, but also includes Grand Staircase-Escalante.Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Matt Finn and Jayne Jeffries for putting together this Special

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“…This paper builds on previous research in social and cultural geography that examines local, quiet, implicit, and embodied activism (Horton & Kraftl, 2009;Maynard, 2018;Pain, 2014;Pottinger, 2017) by focusing on the everyday embodied spaces, places, and emotions of parental disability activism. In particular, this paper invokes Sara Ahmed's (2016) notion of "affinity of hammers" to understand how parental disability activism affects social change.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday activisms: Parental places and emotions of disability activism in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Morrison

Woodbury²,

Johnston

et al. 2021

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Traditional accounts of activism are often characterised by staged acts of public resistance that are "'grandiose', 'iconic ', and 'unquestionably meaning-ful'" (Horton & Kraftl, 2009, p. 14). Constructing activism in this way means the experience is out-of-reach to "ordinary" people and the issues, politics, and spaces that inform their daily lives. To understand more about the everyday embodied and emotional geographies of activism, this paper focuses on the disability activism of seven parents in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.Everyday ableism creates the socio-cultural conditions for disability activism. Ableism refers to "ideas, practices, institutions, and social relations that presume able-bodiedness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalized, oppressed, and largely invisible 'others'" (Chouinard, 1997, p. 380). Ableism is part of structural socio-cultural power relations that create spaces fit for supposedly autonomous people with "able" bodies and minds (Gahman, 2017;Goodley & Lawthom, 2019), and it is felt as a profoundly personal and embodied experience (Morrison et al., 2020).

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Activism across the lifecourse: Circumstantial, dormant and embedded activisms

Cited by 8 publications

References 34 publications

Failure failure failure failure failure failure: Six types of failure within the neoliberal academy

Failure failure failure failure failure failure: Six types of failure within the neoliberal academy

The quiet politics and gentle literary activism behind the battle for Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument

Everyday activisms: Parental places and emotions of disability activism in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

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