USYD Sociologists at TASA Conference 2014.

Talking about knowledge and education.

Mathew Toll is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.  He completed his BA (hons) in 2012. His current research is in digital sociology and the sociology of knowledge, looking at the deficit model of public understanding of science, political deliberation and knowledge formation online. 

Title: Discerning Knowers: Exploring University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims.

Abstract: Sociologists often view the authority of knowledge as a reflection of social power. Educational research mirrors with theories that treat knowledge as primarily “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2009:13).  This study employed conceptual tools from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2014) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins 1994; Martin 1993) to explore university student’s perceptions of knowledge claims and if knowledge is deemed to be shaped both by social relations and epistemic relations.  Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2012 for an honours research project with participants from four Sydney based Universities.  Results indicated that students perceive knowledge to have its own organizing principles, its legitimacy and power not reducible to who have the social power to claim knowledge.

Alex 'talking back' to the settler state.

Alexander Page is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. He completed a BSocSc Hons. (First Class) with a thesis titled “Indigenous Peoples and the Settler-State in Twenty First Century Australia” in 2012. His research focused on the dynamic between the Australian Settler-State and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists/advocates in the regional city of Townsville, North Queensland. His current research embodies urban Aboriginal approaches to service delivery as resistance and reflexivity to the structures constructed by Australian governmentality. This project seeks to understand the role of Indigenous institutions and organisations as mediators; between state expectation and control on the one hand, and the needs of community on the other. Understanding such inter-relationships reveals the dynamics of power existing vertically and horizontally between the state, community organisations and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of Blacktown, Western-Sydney.  His blog can be found here.

Title: Taking on the Australian Settler-State: Sociology for Social Justice and Critical Indigenous Research Paradigm.

Abstract: The positioning of sociology as a critical response to the continued unfolding of colonisation in Australia could not be more vital. The current climate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander politics demands that we take on the modern Settler-State and enduring structures of marginalisation with Indigenous peoples. This paper seeks to provide the reader with some theoretical foundations of a sociology for social justice. Using structures of the Australian Settler-State as the focus of the critique, this paper outlines a paradigm of a critical Indigenous research methodology to challenge state practice. It calls for continued assessment within the contemporary political arena of the Abbott Coalition Government. Such a research paradigm seeks to: critique structures by talking back to power; foster hope for alternate futures by highlighting the possibilities for change through community agency; and aims for research outcomes which provide practical value for Indigenous peoples and their communities in the self-determination movement. Sociologists have the unique research tools, the passion for social justice, and the prime position to speak back to power in a continued effort to change the world for the better.  

Jessica Richards’ research interests broadly focus on the sociology of sport, with a particular emphasis on sport fandom and spatial geography. After graduating from the University of Sydney with a B.A (First Class Hons), she was awarded an Australian Post-Graduate Award to pursue further study in the field of the sociology of sport. Following work experience at a research agency, Jessica is now working full-time on her PhD, and is currently living between England and Australia. In Australia, she tutors in the Sociology and Social Policy department at the University of Sydney. In England, Jessica works as an Honorary PhD Student in the Management School at the University of Liverpool. Twitter: @j_richo1990

Title: ‘Beers, Balls and Banter’: The Maintenance of Gender Boundaries in Sporting Spaces.

Abstract:  This paper argues that sports stadiums are inherently gendered spaces that celebrate and protect physical and cultural representations of masculinity. Although sports stadiums are often read as uncontested or innocent places, this paper considers how they are physically and socially constructed, rather than a void or empty ‘stage’ on which actors perform. Drawing on ethnographic data generated from participant observation and semi-structured interviews collected during observations on Everton football club during the 2012-2014 seasons of Premier League football, this paper explores how the physical and social environment influences and encourages various types of sports fans behaviour within particular locations. It draws its theoretical support from the work of Cohen and his symbolic construction of the ‘boundary’, where the powerful symbolism and collective identity of sport means that it has the potential to reinforce feelings of belonging, providing a source of stability and community. However, at the same time it is these symbolic and collective principals that also have the ability to segregate, exclude, and marginalise. Additionally, the boundaries that surfaced remained tied to wider issues, including how both sports communities internalised the debates surrounding authentic and inauthentic ‘types’ of fandom and sport culture. The importance of physical sporting spaces in maintaining and legitimising the social, cultural, and masculine histories of the localised community and sports team it represents are the focus of this paper. However, whilst sporting spaces reproduce and reinforce normative gendered discourses, this paper also considers how they can also create space for counter hegemonic and resistant practices.

Daniel HedlundJorquera is a PhD Candidate from the University of Stockholm who is a visiting postgraduate researcher at the University of Sydney.

Title: Legislators’ Perceptions about Unaccompanied Minors.

Abstract: This study forms part of a larger PhD thesis project about perceptions about unaccompanied refugee minors in the asylum process in Sweden. The findings of this qualitative interview study is that chronological age becomes a key sign for how legislators understand the life situation, needs and best interests of unaccompanied refugee minors. Age was central for a legitimate asylum claim. Legislators’ strong differentiation between how to understand adolescents contributes to varying accounts interchanging between suspicion and protection. Contrary perceptions about unaccompanied minors depict them as either innocent or potentially threatening. Also, the findings from this study suggests that that the moralizing welfare ideology of the past is still present in political discourse and social planning, construing unaccompanied minors as an ambivalent category between civilization and savagery. The findings from this study indicate that legislators enact reforms of importance for unaccompanied children without considering them as agents of their own future, with their own motives and reasons to seek asylum.Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) was used in order to identify and analyse patterns in the interview data. The theoretical understanding of the identified themes and their meanings was informed by Willig’s (2012) insights on interpretation in qualitative analysis, with regards to how the findings were conceptualized and communicated, in particular interpretative phenomenology.

Natalia Maystorovich Chulio is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.  She completed her B Socio-Legal (hons) in 2012 and a BA in 2004. Her research interests include humanitarian and human rights law; transitional justice; the archaeological recovery of mass graves; and the capacity of social movements to elicit social, political and legal change as they seek justice for victims.  Her focus is on socio-legal research and qualitative methods in an attempt to merge her political and social interests with a scholarship which may enact social change. Since 2012 she has worked with the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH – Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory) in an attempt to draw attention to the difficulties experienced by victims and their relatives in the recuperation of their missing.

Title: Challenging the discourses of the past through the exhumation of mass graves in Spain.

Abstract: The local exhumation movement to recover, identify and rebury victims of the Spanish Civil War and Franco Dictatorship has emerged as a challenge to the prevailing dominant discourses regarding the defeated victims.  The bodily recovery of victims and the public testimonies told at the gravesites provide stark imagery while incorporating a historical context of the past, which remains socially; politically; institutionally and legally silenced for almost 80 years.  This movement, initially a grass roots operation, commenced in response to the Spanish states failure to provide the necessary institutional and legal support to investigate past political crimes.  The social movements have utilised transitional justice discourses and mechanisms to challenge the states choice of impunity to manage the transition to democracy.  This has forced symbolic and legal changes, however, the recent global financial crisis coupled with a change in government to Partido Popular has severely hindered the expansion of the movement.  Given the contentious and disputed nature of the period, those undertaking the exhumation of mass graves encounter varying responses from support to outright hostility and institutional impediments.   This has been the experience of groups such as ‘ARMH, in attempts to recuperate the missing and their personal histories during interactions with the social, political, institutional and legal fields. How successful has ARMH been in challenging the official narrative of the past?

Ideology and Symbolic power: Between Althusser and Bourdieu.

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics of symbolic power mechanisms. The theory of ideology advanced by Louis Althusser, with its assertion of the materiality of ideology, despite some tenuous overlap with the theory of dispositional practices provides a good counter-example to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, violence and domination.

Like Bourdieu, Althusser endeavor to understand symbolic domination was derived from the problem of social production and reproduction of stratified social structures. That is, for Althusser, the perpetuation of a class system inimical to the very interests of those who comprise the majority and unwittingly carry on their subordinated class position. Marxian analyses of the class system have often noted the repressive function of the state apparatus. Lenin unambiguously argued that the state was a product of “irreconcilable class antagonisms” and an organ for the hegemony of ruling class and their domination of other classes. The violence inherent in the state apparatus is augmented in the Marxian analysis by the subtle coercion of ideology. Althusser was concerned with the nature of ideology and its materiality both within individuals and within the so-called “ideological state apparatuses”.

The conception of ideology developed by Althusser differed in some respects to prior theoretical expositions of the concept, but it still retained essential elements common to Marxian analyses. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels defined ideology as an assemblage of ideas that distort and mystify consciousness about the nature of human relations . This distortion of consciousness always represents a class position. The class whom controls the means of production, are often said to control the means of intellectual production and therefore, the hegemonic ideas of a society are those of its ruling class . Althusser concluded that “ideology represents the imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence”.

An archetypal example Althusser offered was the “divine right” of Kings. The notion that the relationship between the serf, the aristocrat and the King was established by the imaginary dictate of God and not to be found in the historical development of class relations and political organizations. Ideological conceptions have the distinctive feature of a seemingly trans-historical nature. The monarchy or capitalism is presented through ideology as the end of history and the eternal law. Bourdieu definitely breaks with Althusserian theory, for him, constitutions and law are obeyed more from custom and habituation than the “misrecognition of the arbitrariness which underlines it”. In Bourdieu’s view, the law and state are not heavily dependent upon intentional mystification, but docile dispositions. This is one central difference between the notion of ideology and dispositional practices. Ideology concerns thought and consciousness, whilst Bourdieu’s symbolic power functions through non-conscious embodied reactions.

Althusser did postulate that ideology had a material existence and a “modality” of “materiality”. Ideology derived its materiality from it existence within the subject and moreover the formation of the subject by ideology transmuted via the ideological state apparatuses (families, educational institutions, etcetera…). However, Althusser is still concerned with consciousness and its imaginary dimension even if seated within the individual subject. Althusser paid little to no attention to the body and its reactions, his assertion of the materiality of ideology seem to be more motivated by a defense of metaphysical materialism than the extent of inculcation. Bourdieu offers a theory that breaks with what he calls the intellectualism of the Kantian tradition in drawing attention to non-conscious and automatic bodily reaction in the mechanisms of symbolic power.

The physical and non-conscious reaction to symbolic power and the acquiescence to symbolic violence and domination are grounded in the imbedded dispositions that individuals acquire through interaction in social fields. Dispositions, or what Bourdieu calls their “habitus”, are durable structures that form generative principles that underpin practice. These generative principles are primarily the product of the family and educational system, but are not passively absorbed. There is an active component in individual practice. Central to the development of dispositions was the “socially elaborated” nature of “desire”; Bourdieu hypothesized a tentative thesis based upon a distinctly Freudian framework of the transition from ‘libidinal’ narcissism to the investment within the social field.

The transition from libidinal energy invested in bodily desire to investment within the social field and social reaction constitutes a crucial transitional point in which symbolic capital and therefore symbolic domination become a reality through the “search for recognition”. The individual develops a looking-glass self, by which is meant the individual start to evaluate itself via other people’s perception of him or her self. This search for recognition and self-evaluation via others becomes the source of satisfaction for what Freud called our primary narcissism, but it can also engender problems for individuals. Bad evaluations can elicit feelings of guilt and shame and individuals can develop phobias and complexes from repeated negative judgments upon themselves. There is also a lack of social capital or social regonition in the form of “glory, honour, credit, reputation, fame” etcetera and these common evaluative schemas allow for the symbolic domination of those with minimal symbolic capital.

“Symbolic violence”, wrote Bourdieu “is the coercion which is set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator”. Symbolic power is constructed through the common evaluative schema that are habituated and inculcated within individual throughout their life, by the primary institutions of socialization and the constant re-socialization throughout day-to-day symbolic activities. The reaction to symbolic power is not initialized in the realm of consciousness, but is prereflexive and expressed as bodily reaction or emotional responses. In this sense, Bourdieu argues we are the outcome of a long process of “autonomization”. This automization take the form of a “quasi-bodily involvement in the world” and is not a process of conscious calculation. To exemplify his position on symbolic power, Bourdieu uses the example of orders and preformative utterances and linguistic exchanges in general.

The “symbolic force” or the illocutionary power of an utterance such as an order is said to derive from the previously acquired disposition of the body. Acquiescence to the order, for Bourdieu, is “automatic” and appears mechanical in its process. This symbolic force also depends upon the position of the speaker and their possession of authority invested in them by social institutions and their linguistic practices. Bourdieu utilized the example of judges to explain the importance of institutions and symbol of power. The judge can sentence someone to prison, not because of his intrinsic qualities, but because his speech is backed by social institution, manifested by the symbols of power and authority, the robe and gavel. Interpersonal linguistic exchanges are also sites of symbolic power and domination.

Linguistic exchanges are often conducted by individuals with an uneven distribution of linguistic capital, competence and expressive styles. This unequal distribution of linguistic recourses is often linked to both the condition under which it was acquired and the market (the receivers of linguistic products) under which it finds it conditions of use. The condition of primary acquisition of linguistic habitus is often highly related to economic capital and class position. Education imbues the individual with both linguistic dispositions and a bodily hexis. Different classes are said by Bourdieu to be characterized by different form of expression and hold their body in different ways. These characteristics are often tailed toward different social fields. When an individual from one class is placed within a social field that his or her upbringing had not prepared them for, they often find it harder to compete for social capital with those whose linguistic expression was formed for the field. This can manifest itself in nervousness and hesitant delivery in linguistic exchanges between those with different levels of cultural capital.

The conceptualization of symbolic power put forth by Pierre Bourdieu breaks with the conceptualization of ideology advanced within the Marxian tradition and Althusser’s work in particular. Althusser sought to understand the production and re-production of stratified social system in terms of ideology and its power over individual consciousness. Bourdieu identified this as a continuation of the tradition of Kantian intellectualism that privileged conscious thought over the body and ignored bodily reactions and habituation in the development of dispositions and symbolic power. Symbolic power and domination are therefore much broader concepts than ideology, despite Althusser’s assertion of the materiality of ideology. Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic power is given an interpersonal dimension with its focus upon the uneven distribution of symbolic capital and the conflict over symbolic profits. Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic power is therefore, both deeper and broader then that of ideology, while also breaking with its intellectualist bias.

Written by Mathew Toll.

Bibliography.

 

Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: (Notes Towards an Investigation)”, Lenin and Philosophy: and Other Essays, trans Ben Brewster, (1971, New York: Monthly Review Press).

Bourdieu, Pierre, Pascalian Meditations, Trans Richard Nice, (1997, Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Bourdieu , Pierre, The Logic of Practice, Trans Richard Nice, (1990, Oxford: Polity Press).

Bourdieu , Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, Edited John B. Thompson, Trans Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, (1991, Cambridge: Polity Press).

Lenin, V.I, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, (1999, Sydney: Resistance books).

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, “The German Ideology: A Critique of the Most Recent German Philosophy as Represented by Feuerbach, B. Bauer, and Stirner”, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Trans and Edited Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, (1967, New York: Anchor Books), pp. 403-473.