Re-writing the “rules of engagement”: Using critical reflection to examine ableist social work practice

INTRODUCTION: Normative beliefs and practices reaffirm a hegemonic construction of human ability that legitimises the socio-cultural status quo. This disenfranchises people with diverse abilities who are excluded from this construction whilst simultaneously normalising the structural inequality and oppression that they experience. Helping professions such as social work often provide support to people who are disadvantaged by these social structures. However, practitioners within these fields are not immune to the influence of socio-cultural norms, therefore it is essential for them to reflect on the ways in which they might reproduce them within their practice.APPROACH: This article outlines my experience of using critical reflection as a research methodology to examine an incident from my practice. Deconstruction and reconstruction methods were used to analyse the normative assumptions within my construction of this incident.REFLECTIONS: The deconstruction analysis revealed how assumptions about impairment within my account of the incident were underpinned by ableist discourses. Reconstructing this through a neurodiversity lens enabled me to generate new insights around the anti-oppressive potential for using a pluralistic approach that undermines hegemonic constructions of ability.CONCLUSIONS: By critically reflecting on this incident, I realised the importance of challenging normative assumptions when practising within neoliberal contexts where socio-cultural hegemony is amplified.

Kulturowe źródła prawa i kulturowe uwarunkowania władzy politycznej. Wewnętrzny kolonializm i casus akulturacji prawnej Ślązaków

Cultural Sources of Law and Conditions of Political Power. Internal Colonialism and the Case of Legal Acculturation of Silesians The article addresses legal pluralism, namely the interaction of norms resulting from either custom or law, which takes place in the face of emancipation processes in Polish Silesia. It concerns legal conceptualizations of regional autonomy and the negotiations of the legal status of the regional group that aims at a higher level of sovereignty. Namely, investigating the relationship between cultural and legal norms, I analyse the judicial procedure regarding the way of adjudicating and defining Silesianness. Considering the existence of multiple parallel ethnic identities in Poland, I strive to illuminate the question of the legal definition of Polishness and the normative dimension of legal definition. I bring to light the making of the adjudication in the Polish justice system, and thus highlight the mechanisms present in the legislative process and rationalisations operating wherein. I am interested in the consequences of these processes for establishing the legal and the factual status of different groups. The conception of identity used by modern jurisdiction derives from the definition of the dominant group (of Poles) and works towards strengthening its status against the status of other, parallelly existing groups whose self-identities do not fall squarely within the hegemonic construction. My hypothesis is that the process of interpreting the law in force in Poland follows subjective ideas and is often drafted in programmatic terms.

Reasserting hegemonic masculinity: women's leadership within the far right

The emergence of a global far right has been seen as a significant development in recent years and as a challenge to wider forms of neo-liberal globalization. While much has been written about its significance and representation, little has been written on either the gendered nature of the far right and the role that women have played as actors within it. Though there still remains a gender gap in terms of the support and participation of the far right, there has been an increasing rise of leaders and figureheads within the respective movements themselves. This article argues that despite the emergence of these women, the far right looks to construct an extreme form of masculinity in which anti-feminism appears as a significant part of its overall strategy. By engaging with both the Gramscian understandings of hegemonic construction and subsequent notions of masculinist hegemony, it argues that the appearance of women both as leaders and ‘organic intellectuals’ within respective national movements allows them to gain greater legitimacy. Rather than ‘feminizing’ or indeed moderating the form of far-right narratives, women had looked to re-inforce such extreme masculinity by adding to existing understandings of anti-immigration, nationalism and in particular of the meaning of ‘anti-feminism'. Thus, recent leaders of far-right political parties appear alongside media columnists and ‘celebrities’ in contributing to the construction of extreme masculinity with the far right.

The BRICS, A Post-Hegemonic Model With Its Own Normativity: How do the BRICS reach to influence WTO law through the oriented use of WHO policies?

In response to Krasner's view, exclusively focused on geopolitical tensions and power games on the world stage, Keohane’s counter-multilateralism approach brings a solution: that of cooperation. The fact remains that the explanation delivered by international relations overlooks the fundamental role of law. Currently, the BRICS legal policy presents itself as a paradigmatic model, which shows how Krasner's and Keohane's theories complement one another, thanks to their targeted use of international law. This paper aims to demonstrate that the BRICS — in defining an innovative and independent legal policy influence normativity processes — are a post-hegemonic construction, with their own normativity, intended to fight against the organized hypocrisy of our international system. In view of the question of how the BRICS participate in the moralization of capitalism, I have considered the hypothesis of a BRICS hegemony, in the sense that the forms of cooperation promoted by the group are innovative and are not corresponding to any concept currently in force: the group uses WTO and WHO's health policies to curb world trade regulations. The main idea of this paper is to try to articulate the international relations theories with a legal analysis. In other words, my working assumption is that to be able to design its own normativity, the group diverts the WTO's political and legal mechanisms, via the WHO's health requirements, and is, therefore, rising as a new hegemonic formation.

Fueling Climate (In)Action: How organizations engage in hegemonization to avoid transformational action on climate change

This study examines how organizations avoid the urgent need for transformational action on climate change by engaging in a hegemonization process. To show how this unfolds, we draw from Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, focusing on the case of BP and its engagement with the climate change debate from 1990 to 2015. Our study takes a longitudinal approach to illustrate how BP defended its core business of producing and selling fossil fuel products by enacting three sequential hegemonization strategies. These included: adopting new signifiers; building ‘win-win’ relationships; and adapting nodal points. In doing so, we demonstrate how hegemonic construction enables organizations to both incorporate and evade various types of stakeholder critique, which, we argue, reproduces business-as-usual. Our study contributes to organization studies literature on hegemony by highlighting how the construction of hegemony operates accumulatively over an extended period of time. We also contribute more broadly to conversations around political contests and the natural environment by illustrating how the lack of effective climate responses is shaped by temporal dynamics.

On Being a “Good” Indonesian Muslim Woman: An Autoethnography

In this study, I propose through my own voice, attachment, and representation an expansive and inclusive construction of Indonesian Muslim middle-class women that may pose a challenge to the hegemonic construction of Indonesianness. I explore the renegotiation of the self, using the definition of Ibuism, state laws, and Islamic teachings as the frameworks through which the “good” Indonesian Muslim woman is constructed. Ibuism, derived from Ibu, an Indonesian term for “mother,” refers to the social construction of Indonesian womanhood within the household domain, as imposed by the authoritarian government for nearly 32 years (1966–1998). I use reflexive notes as my data to explore how the postauthoritarian era has affected me as a representative subject. Autoethnography offers a space to find that others’ assessment of my Muslimness is an effective lens through which I view my being and my becoming as a woman, an Indonesian, and a Muslim.

The Ancestral Room of the State? Scotland and the United Kingdom on Jamie’s Great Britain

This article analyzes how Jamie Oliver’s show Jamie’s Great Britain represented Scotland in 2012, when the referendum on Scottish independence had already been announced. It follows Anderson, Bourdieu, Bhabha, cultural studies, and the idea that the nation is a hegemonic construction. Biosemiotics provides useful perspectives on the representations of Nature and Culture. Semiotic analysis interprets representations of the nation on the show. The results show that, while Oliver identifies English and Welsh food cultural origins with the Industrial Revolution and the Coal Boom, respectively, he finds Scotland’s food origins in the Vikings. Scotland is a land of ancestral habits and people, where Nature is inhospitable. Oliver represents England and Wales through the cultural categories of indices and symbols, while crude iconic representations of Nature are used to depict Scotland. Moreover, the Vikings also originated England and Wales (and Ireland), and in the end, the Vikings are constructed as the common roots of the nation that Oliver celebrates, the United Kingdom. Thus, Scotland is only represented as a part of the state-nation, a kind of ancestral room of the big house of the United Kingdom.

“What’s his is his and what’s mine is his”: Financial power and economic abuse in Aotearoa

AIM: This study aimed to understand the experiences and effects of economic abuse for women in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly in relation to methods of coercive control, with the intention of developing risk matrices to be used by practitioners.METHODS: We conducted a survey with 448 respondents—with 398 the focus of analysis for this article. The survey contained a combination of scaling and open-ended questions.FINDINGS: Abusers employed a range of abusive methods to restrict victims’ freedom and exercise domination. These abusive behaviours seemed to follow traditional hegemonic construction of masculinity as synonymous with “provider” in that many of these methods relied on the reproduction of gendered stereotypes which subjugate women to a subordinate position in the household. Women experienced a range of adverse emotional impacts as a result of this abuse.

HEGEMONIA E EDUCAÇÃO: teoria e prática para a transformação social

O presente artigo versa sobre o aprofundamento da conceituação de hegemonia e a relação estabelecida com o alargamento do conceito de Estado desenvolvidos por Gramsci. Desse modo, enfatiza a importância da questão formativa e a intrínseca relação entre hegemonia e educação, expressando a tradutibilidade, a necessária congruência teórica e prática ao contexto histórico, para o estabelecimento da vontade coletiva, impulsionadora de um processo revolucionário de construção hegemônica para a transformação social.Palavras-chave: Hegemonia; Educação; Tradutibilidade; Vontade coletiva.HEGEMONY AND EDUCATION: theory and practice for social transformation AbstractThis article deals with the deepening the conception of hegemony and the established relation with the extension of the concept of State developed by Gramsci. Thus, it emphasizes the importance of the formative question and the intrinsic relation between hegemony and education, expressing the necessary theoretical and practical congruence to the historical context for the establishment of the collective will, propelling a revolutionary process of hegemonic construction for social transformation. Keywords: Hegemony; Education; Transluctability; Collective will.