Writing Beyond Recognition

Writing Beyond Recognition: Queer Re-Storying for Social Change documents and analyzes the insidious ways heteronormativity produces homophobia and heterosexism, including how this operates and is experienced by those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer. Using critical arts research practices read through queer and feminist theories and perspectives, the chapters in the book describe how participants who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered gained critical insights by learning to write and read about their experiences in new ways. Their revised queer stories function to enable a movement beyond merely recognizing to appreciating and understanding those differences. Robson offers a powerful argument about how everyone is narrated by and through discourses of gender and sexuality. Therefore, the content of the book is directed at all readers, not only those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer. The book will be important as a text in any course or area of study that is focused on inclusive education, cultural studies in education, critical arts research methods, gender and sexuality studies, and critical literacy approaches in education. Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research Methods | Social Justice | Ethnography | Critical Qualitative Inquiry | Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies | Participatory Action Research | Arts-Based Research | Writing | Autobiography | Curriculum Studies | Teacher Education | Cultural Studies | Reading and Literacy Education | Community Education | Adult Education

On the arts and postmodernism

When Benjamin was a boy he believed in the afterlife. When he was bitten by a cat as a boy he became a devout ailurophobe and cat bully who vowed to hate cats forever. When he was an adult Benjamin was startled by a stray cat at a rooftop dance party. He fell off the roof and the next morning he woke up inside a cardboard box behind a 1970s-themed Disco bar. He was later taken in and adopted by his neighbor and friend and spent the rest of his life as the very thing he detested, a cat. Author's Note: When you finish the book there is a very simply crochet pattern at the end for you to enjoy!

Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement -- that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition -- this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and subjectivity based on Hegelian notions of recognition. The author's critical engagement with major texts of contemporary philosophy prepares the way for a highly original conception of ethics based on witnessing. Central to this project is Oliver's contention that the demand for recognition is a symptom of the pathology of oppression that perpetuates subject-object and same-different hierarchies. While theorists across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences focus their research on multiculturalism around the struggle for recognition, Oliver argues that the actual texts and survivors' accounts from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery are testimonials to a pathos that is "beyond recognition". Oliver traces many of the problems with the recognition model of subjective identity to a particular notion of vision presupposed in theories of recognition and misrecognition. Contesting the idea of an objectifying gaze, she reformulates vision as a loving look that facilitates connection rather than necessitates alienation. As an alternative, Oliver develops a theory of witnessing subjectivity. She suggests that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eyewitness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising than recognition for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing -- the possibility of address and response -- which puts ethicalobligations at its heart.

Seattle police sergeant Lou Boldt is stunned when the local fire investigator presents him with frightening evidence in a series of fires that have occurred in the Seattle area. These white-hot fires burn so cleanly that even the ash disintegrates--leaving not a trace of its victims or any evidence of criminal activity. Only when Boldt is taunted by someone sending him pieces of melted green plastic--houses from a Monopoly board--does he realize that an arsonist is involving him in a deadly game.

Margaret Laurence, best known for her germinal novels set in the Canadian prairies, is one of the nation's most respected authors. She was also an accomplished essayist, yet today her nonfiction writing is largely unavailable and therefore little known. In Recognition and Revelation Nora Foster Stovel brings together Laurence's short nonfiction works, including many that have not previously been collected and some that have never before been published. These works, including over fifty essays and addresses that span Laurence's writing career from the 1960s to the 1980s, reveal her passionate concern for Canadian literature and for the land and peoples of Canada. Based on extensive archival research, Stovel's introduction contextualizes Laurence's nonfiction writings in her life as a creative artist and political activist and as a woman writing in the twentieth century. The texts range from essays on Laurence's own writings and on other works of Canadian literature to autobiographical essays, several focusing on environmental concerns, to sociopolitical essays and writing advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament. By revealing Laurence as a socially and politically committed artist, this collection of lively and provocative essays illuminates the undercurrents of her creative writing and places her fiction - often informed by her nonfiction writing - in a new light.

The fourth volume in the successful IFTE series provides an international perspective on the knowledge and professional development of the English teaching workforce. It provides a state-of-the-art review of English teaching and teachers and how they are developed over time. With contributions from leading scholars around the world, this volume is divided into four sections that follow the journey of an English teacher from being a student, to the latter stages of professional development and becoming a teacher. It sheds light on how different elements such as school culture, professional development, higher-level qualifications, professional associations and government policies contribute or detract from retention and job satisfaction. International Perspectives on English Teacher Development serves as ideal reading for the research and teacher education community along with teachers and student teachers globally.

The essays in this collection give voice to the plurality of approaches that scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition have when they set forth to assimilate Bakhtin for their varied purposes. The collection is arranged in three major sections. The first attempts to capture the most important theoretical extensions of Bakhtin's ideas, and does so with an emphasis on what Bakhtin might contribute to the present understanding of language and rhetoric. The next section explores the implications of Bakhtin's work for both disciplinary identity and writing pedagogy. The final section looks at how Bakhtinian thought can be used to bring new light to concerns that his work either does not address or could not have imagined addressing concerns ranging from writing across the curriculum to feminism, and from computer discourse to the writing of a corporation annual report. Together, these essays demonstrate how fruitfully and imaginatively Bakhtin's ideas can be appropriated for a context that he could not have anticipated. They also serve as an invitation to sustain the dialogue with Bakhtin in the future, so that researchers may yet come to realize the fortuitous ways that Bakhtin will continue to mean more than he said.