A Complex Parade: Problems and Prospects for Picturing the Nation

Preempting Parochial Patriotism Richard Flynn A s I write, it is about a month before the presidential election here in the United States, and I have been devoting many hours registering voters and campaigning for my candidate. I am obsessed with politics and the economic meltdown at present. By the time this issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly appears, the election will have been decided (hopefully), but the article that opens this issue, Anastasia Ulanowicz's "Preemptive Education: Lynne Cheney's America: A Patriotic Primer and the Ends of History," will remain timely. The editors had hoped to reproduce some illustrations from Cheney's primer, including using one as our cover illustration, but Simon and Schuster responded too late to the repeated permissions requests and refused even to consider waiving a permissions fee. Whether this is the typical practice of large corporate publishing or a more sinister political decision we cannot know. Ulanowicz's article makes what I consider to be a most persuasive case that Cheney's alphabet book—her "patriotic primer"—promotes "a willful negation or repression of the more painful and distasteful moments of the American experience." In lieu of the colorful and upbeat illustration from the book, I have selected the Farm Security Administration photograph on the cover as an antidote to Cheney's rosy version of history, which, as Ulanowicz argues, "validates the concepts of justice and equality without ever giving its reader a sense of what injustice and inequality might look like, or what humiliations countless individuals have had to endure in their pursuit of a just society." In any event, this portrait of a heroic schoolteacher teaching the alphabet in rural Louisiana in 1939—a time of economic distress—is, if you'll forgive the expression, worth a thousand words. If our intention to illustrate "Pre-emptive Education" with telling visual examples did not quite work out, it is serendipitous that we are able to present two articles on the children's fiction of Neil Gaiman, both of which take advantage of psychoanalytic approaches but that complement rather than duplicate each other. Elizabeth Parsons, Naarah Sawers, and Kate McInally's critique of postfeminism [End Page 339] in two Gaiman novels though the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis is provocative both in its argument and in its acknowledgement of the collaborative process among the three authors. While I did not afford them the opportunity to collaborate further with Richard Gooding, his article and theirs speak to each other in ways that, I hope, will extend beyond a discussion of the work of the very gifted Neil Gaiman. Gooding's analysis of Coraline in terms of Freud's concept of the uncanny is most provocative in suggesting further inquiry into the promises and limitations of adult-child cross-reading and cross-writing. Sarah Fiona Winters's postcolonial Bakhtinian reading of four Margaret Mahy novels discusses the ways in which the "fluidity of adolescence" acts to "destablilize expectations of race as self-contained and complete." Mahy's novels focus on "the nature of being a Pakeha, a New Zealander of European descent." Winters allies this figure with the adolescent and sees "Mahy's Pakeha [as] a chronotope that embodies the fault lines of Maori space and European time. In doing so, she takes exception to Clare Bradford's reading in Unsettling Narratives and argues that the white children in Aliens in the Landscape do not find themselves "comfortably fixed and at home." I am grateful to all of these writers for showing us ways in which we may begin to preempt the parochial patriotism perpetuated by the soon to be-former Second Lady ever since she helped initiate the so-called culture wars during her tenure with the National Endowment for the Humanities. These articles are nuanced, impassioned, and carry on their conversations within a global community of scholars. They demonstrate that a narrow patriotism surely is the last refuge of scoundrels. [End Page 340] Copyright © 2009 Children's Literature Association

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Shaw, Powell, & De La Ossa, 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.

Some of the research activities undertaken towards the completion of this study were carried out as part of the project Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts (DigiCONFLICT) that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 699523 (Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage), implemented in the United Kingdom by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under Project Ref AH/S000119/1. I am grateful to all the individuals and families who welcomed me to their homes with open arms and enabled me to explore their photographic collections, together as well as independently. Their kindness, generosity, open mind and sincere cooperation were fundamental to my ability to develop the multiple layers of this study.

The four years of commemorative outpouring and activities in response to the Centenary of the First World War have led to the production of a multiplicity of amateur and professional, academic, media and community histories of the conflict. These can be seen as exciting examples of what Raphael Samuel (2012) once optimistically described as history made by a thousand hands, which can democratize the past. However, all histories are framed by the cultural milieu in which they are produced and the centenary of the first industrialized conflict, which cost the lives of millions across the world1 is taking place in Britain, a fractured country, still reeling from the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, which heralded in austerity politics and a restructuring of welfare provision. The centenary has coincided with the rise of UKIP and 2016’s divisive referendum about Britain’s membership of the EU. The commemoration of a conflict, which has a significant place in British national narratives, is taking place against a backdrop of hotly contested debates about who exactly is entitled to see themselves as part of the nation, and who is entitled to support from the national purse if they are in crisis. This has an inevitable, though perhaps, unintentional consequence on the selectivity and the silences in the histories of the First World War that have emerged. My own recent work with heritage organizations and community groups as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Voices of War and Peace World War One Engagement Centre, 2 suggests that in the present political climate, despite the best intentions and determined efforts of many cultural agents, some hands were mu

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 6Front coverWAR TRAUMA IN CONTEXTLost identity (2018), 50×70 cm, acrylic on canvas by Willarekezi.Rwandan Willy Karekezi's painting reflects on how forcibly displaced people imagine themselves in recollections of home and flight. Their memories become fractured, even unrecognizable, over time.This artwork is part of a collection that was shown in an exhibition called ‘When we return’, in Gulu, Uganda, during July and August 2019. It brought together research and visual outputs from Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artwork was an output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Politics of Return Research Programme, curated by Kara Blackmore (an exhibition catalogue is available).1Based on the Politics of Return work, as well as long‐term research supported by linked Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants, in this issue, Torre et al. argue that the literature underlying the recently published World Health Organization's assessment of mental health in conflict settings is inadequate. It sets aside crucial evidence and promotes misleading responses to suffering.(1). https://issuu.com/lseflca/docs/new_por_catalogue_print_final_sept_2019-digital-isBack coverDetail from Three women on the lake (2018), 245×170 cm, collage on canvas by Kusa Kusa Maski Gael.The figure is located in a dream‐like vision of the lake and mountain range between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.It is a complex image, full of nuances and ambiguities, linked to the artist's own memories of flight from the Congo, as well as those of the conflict‐affected people he worked with in Uganda.In this issue, Torre et al. warn that conceptualizing war trauma in terms of psychiatric pathologies promotes the symptoms that therapists and aid projects purport to address. Without due consideration for the specificities of lived experiences and cultural contexts, what is actually happening may be largely overlooked, with potentially harmful consequences.

ABSTRACTThis article is a record of conversations held between Margaret Ames and Mike Pearson during the creation and performance of a site-specific theatre project made by Cyrff Ystwyth and directed by Ames. Cyrff Ystwyth are a company of people with and without learning disabilities. The performance, Capel: The Lights Are On, was made by Adrian Jones, a company member with learning disabilities and was his response to research questions that formed the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded enquiry; ‘Challenging Concepts of “Liquid” Place through Performing Practices in Community Contexts’.

This chapter examines the transition and alignments of communities through a consideration built around the changing role of the community in the photographic archive and the shift from subjecthood to agency. It also examines the use of the photographic archive as a means of exploring the new potentialities of the community archive. The chapter reflects on the sense of the community as pictured within the archive and the increasing potential of self-archiving and curation afforded by new digital technologies. It draws on recent projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities and Digital Transformations schemes. A model in which the disruptive can be privileged and the counterfactual become an essential component of the archivist's armoury is offered.

The Nature Initiative Research, Development & Demonstration Project, based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), carried out a series of rapid response research activities to inform the UK government’s efforts to refine research priorities for existing and future international nature-focused research programmes, with a particular focus on ODA contexts in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia and North Africa, and small island developing states (SIDS). This research was commissioned by the UK cross-government (x-HMG) Environment and Nature Research Working Group representing interests of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UKRI (UK Research and Innovation). Research councils that were closely involved include the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The research was funded by the ESRC.

The main purpose of this article is to show how Functional Grammar of Dance (FGD) can be applied to dance discourse analysis to reveal the discursive strategies that underlie choreographies and support movement-based communication. In recent years, studies in Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) have benefited from the development of several models of analysis, and from the emergence of a new focus on the materiality of semiotic modes. The Functional Grammar of Dance is a recently developed model of analysis that draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics theory and focuses on movement-based communication starting from dance (particularly ballet as a starting point). The Functional Grammar of Dance has been adopted as a central theory in an international collaborative project funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) in the UK and the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, ‘German Research Foundation’) in Germany, The Kinesemiotic Body, where it has been used with the ELAN annotation system. ELAN annotation based on the Functional Grammar of Dance was used for both live-collected data from dance rehearsals and for dance videos and revealed aspects of dance performances that are not necessarily captured by the naked eye. This paper proposes three case studies where we show that our ELAN annotation with the FGD provides an effective and very flexible interface for the grammaticalization of movement-based communication and the study of movement-based discursive strategies.

As the end of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding for the Perdita Project drew near in autumn 2005, the team started thinking about a suitable finish to the project. We had had ...

This paper discusses approaches used in an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) research project across a number of sites in the United Kingdom. The Disability and Community: Dis/engagement, Dis/enfranchisement, Dis/parity, and Dissent (D4D) project explores issues around disability and community, investigating diverse topics related to inclusion/exclusion. The D4D project is distinctive in the combination of academic and nonacademic Co-Investigators. One objective is to contribute to the evolution of a research language that is accessible to a wider public. Using arts-based approaches, the research team also seeks to develop research methods and an ethical framework that will be appropriate for co-constructed community research. This paper focuses on different ways of exploring and expressing participant experience. First, it considers the use of cultural animation (CA) as an alternative to the traditional interview, providing participant and researcher reflections. Cultural animation is a participatory arts-based and embodied methodology of community engagement and knowledge coproduction that draws on everyday experience of participants. Transcription poetry (TP) converts interview transcripts into poems. Short interview extracts and poems are selected here to illustrate the approach. D4D team members believe that CA generates authentic and rich data where there is not only fidelity to participant experience through the TP process but a greater resonance in the words than would have been the case in traditional representations.

This paper reports on the first author’s ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded PhD research exploring the potential for disruptive design interventions within the context of health and social care. This paper describes an ongoing project to map the services available to people with dementia and their carers, with a specific emphasis on the services available before the patient receives a formal diagnosis of dementia.Many service users are simply unaware of the support available to them, and are left to navigate their own paths through the unfamiliar and intimidating landscape of dementia services. This paper reports on the development of two tools for use by carers, patients, and dementia service providers. These tools offer innovative ways of enabling service users to visualise the pathway of their current and future care, whilst also allowing service providers to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the type of support they provide.

Chapter 3 presents an overview of the nature of the hoard evidence from Roman Britain, based on the work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded joint British Museum and Leicester University research project, titled Crisis or continuity: Hoarding in Iron Age and Roman Britain with special reference to the third century AD. The project, led by Roger Bland, has collected data on all Iron Age and Roman coin hoards found in Britain to understand their archaeological context and the changing nature of hoard deposition during this period. Analysing numismatic data alongside information on the archaeological and landscape context of coin hoards allows this material to be reintegrated into wider social and archaeological narratives for Roman Britain and studied alongside the large data set of single finds held by the Portable Antiquities Scheme. This approach also highlights a number of methodological issues in the interpretation and definition of coin hoards.

This co-authored book chapter is an output of 'Extending Empathy Network - A Network to Exchange Tools/ Methodologies and Processes from Design, Performance and Restorative Justice'. This was a 12-month collaborative project with Canterbury Christchurch University (PI L Gamman) which commenced in August 2014 to June 2016. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)/ Research Networking Scheme.

Changing Theories of Undergraduate Theatre Studies, 1945–1980 Anne Berkeley (bio) Introduction The history of theatre study in American undergraduate education is a story of prodigious quantitative success. Although it took two centuries to secure the right to perform plays at American colleges, it took only eighty years for the curriculum to grow from a few isolated courses at the turn of the twentieth century to well over 14,000 in the 1970s.1 By far the steepest growth occurred during the unprecedented expansion of higher education between 1945 and 1979. But academic theatre's meteoric rise after the war years conceals more problematic qualitative achievements. Throughout its ascendancy, vexing questions persisted concerning the quality, standards, and evaluation of theatre programs. In academic journals and books, theorists explored with alacrity broad opportunities for educational theatre in the university. But they also bickered constantly about objectives and practices and their role in academe, ultimately providing a decidedly ambivalent assessment of accomplishment. According to Oscar G. Brockett, the fundamental questions are, What place, if any, should theatre have in a university? and, For what are students being educated?2 This study traces answers to these questions given by scholars and educators between 1945 and 1979.3 It explores the connections between the scholarship about theatre studies and the programs that developed, what scholars and educators wanted it to become, and what it became in the context of liberal arts education. These years are important because they are the golden age of higher education, a time of unprecedented expansion. Following World War II the G.I. Bill greatly increased student enrollment, and academic and research programs surged. At this time, the [End Page 57] university's governing interests were established by the politics of the Cold War, and the desire to surpass the Soviet Union at everything motivated the expansion of higher education.4 The National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 (legislation made possible by a prosperous economy) injected vast financial resources into program development, and federal programs such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were established. An earlier study of theatre curriculum between, roughly, the Civil War and the Second World War provides a useful background against which to interpret the data for this later period.5 From the earlier study we learn that academic theatre suffered from religious hostility for two centuries but that by the end of the nineteenth century there were extracurricular dramatic clubs and productions. The emergence of the modern research university brought with it the expansion and diversification of knowledge, the differentiation of the colonial college's general curriculum into discrete disciplines, and the departmentalization of the curriculum. As principles and aims for liberal arts education, and the bachelor of arts degree, began to take shape, reconstruction of the curriculum included the introduction of departments of speech and literature, which included dramatic curricula.6 Academic theatre first began in classical and later modern language departments as a way of teaching literature in another language; later speech and English departments added courses in oral interpretation and playwriting. After George Pierce Baker opened the theatre department at Yale in 1925, theatre became an autonomous field of study in increasing numbers of universities. During this early period several developments took place: curriculum for theatrical studies developed out of extra-curricular theatre, theatre was identified and justified as a humanistic study, the seeds were planted for the university's eventual role in nonprofit and professional regional theatres, and the study of theatre as a legitimate academic discipline was developed. During this period, too, most theorists argued that theatre was one of the liberal arts and should be taught as part of the humanities. Late in the period there developed a small but increasingly vocal group of scholars and teachers who began to argue that theatre departments should teach technical skills of theatrical performance as well as humanistic inquiry. Thus was born the so-called craft or culture dichotomy: should educational theatre emphasize the crafts of performance or the humanism that prevailed in general (unspecialized) liberal study? The Forties and Fifties: The Curriculum Diversifies...