heather brunskell-evans - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by heather brunskell-evans

Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching, Dec 12, 2012

Disability & Society, Jul 18, 2014

ABSTRACT How do you become an 'amputee', 'war-wounded', '... more ABSTRACT How do you become an 'amputee', 'war-wounded', 'victim' or 'disabled' person? This book describes how an amputee and war-wounded community was created after a decade long conflict (1991-2002) in Sierra Leone. Beginning with a general socio-cultural and historical analysis of what is understood by impairment and disability, it also explains how disability was politically created both during the conflict and post-conflict, as violence became part of the everyday. Despite participating in the neoliberal rebuilding of the nation state, ex-combatants and the security of the nation were the government’s main priorities, not amputee and war-wounded people. In order to survive, people had to form partnerships with NGOs and participate in new discourses and practices around disability and rights, thus accessing identities of 'disabled' or 'persons with disabilities'. NGOs, charities and religious organisations that understood impairment and disability were most successful at aiding this community of people. However, since discourse and practice on disability were mainly bureaucratic, top-down, and not democratic about mainstreaming disability, neoliberal organisations and INGOs have caused a new colonisation of consciousness, and amputee and war-wounded people have had to become skilled in negotiating these new forms of subjectivities to survive. http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409442103

Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching, Nov 5, 2012

Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence, Aug 1, 2019

George Soros and Open Society Foundation are supporting the decriminalization of prostitution by ... more George Soros and Open Society Foundation are supporting the decriminalization of prostitution by funding organizations around the world to advocate for this legal change. Heather Brunskell-Evans (FiLiA podcasts, London) interviews Jody Raphael,

Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence, Jul 1, 2021

The medical "transition" of children with "gender dysphoria" is increasingly normalized in North ... more The medical "transition" of children with "gender dysphoria" is increasingly normalized in North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Although each country has specific national gender identity development services, the rationale for prescribing hormone treatment is broadly similar. A minority rights paradigm underpinned by postmodern theory has gained traction in the past 10 years and has been successful in influencing public policy, the education of pediatricians, endocrinologists, and mental health professionals. In this view, any response other than an affirmation of the child's claim to be the opposite sex or "born in the wrong body" is understood as a denial of their human rights to have their "outer" body match their authentic "inner" self. The postmodern paradigm has brought about a concomitant shift in the classification of the patient from a child who suffers "gender dysphoria" to a child who is "transgender". Yet the practice of putting children on a medical pathway brings severe, lifelong consequences including bone/skeletal impairment, cardiovascular and surgical complications, reduced sexual functioning, and infertility. Examination of postmodern "transgender" health care reveals it is rarely expert, evidenced-based or objective but on the contrary, is highly politicized and controversial. Although the High Court in the United Kingdom has ruled those children 16 years and under cannot consent to hormone treatment, several lobby groups, as well as the NHS Tavistock and Portman Hospital Trust Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), have been granted legal permission to challenge the ruling. With the example of the United Kingdom, I demonstrate that if the appeal is successful, children's rights to protection from bodily and psychological harm will continue to be abused by the postmodern social justice paradigm which, in the very name of upholding children's rights, violates them.

Feminist Review, Oct 1, 2010

Making Modern Lives is a rare educational study in that it engages throughout in substantive meth... more Making Modern Lives is a rare educational study in that it engages throughout in substantive methodological issues with a distinct lightness of touch. The authors carry out an eight-year longitudinal study of twenty-six schoolchildren (fourteen girls and twelve boys) during the years 1993-2000 in four Australian schools, institutions chosen because they differ in terms of class and ethnic composition. The young people's lives are recorded at school through qualitative interviews, and then immediately beyond school through further interviews. McLeod and Yates examine how gendered, classed and 'raced' patterns of inequality are reproduced in the lives of the adolescents, yet sometimes transformed and resisted by students during secondary school and through career choice. What is compelling about this research is that it interweaves different, sometimes epistemologically separate methodologies for analysing the interview data in ways that take the reader not only beyond 'older' sociological theories about social structures, oppression and social reproduction, but also beyond 'newer' theories of power, and ideas about the discursive construction of the subject. The lightness occurs because one enters into detailed exploration of methodology through the authors' reflective interpretation of the students' narration of their own lives and choices.

Medical Law Review, 2019

Thirty years ago, the transgender child would have made no sense to the general public, nor to yo... more Thirty years ago, the transgender child would have made no sense to the general public, nor to young people. Today, children and adolescents declare themselves transgender, the National Health Service diagnoses ‘gender dysphoria’, and laws and policy are developed which uphold young people’s ‘choice’ to transition and to authorize stages at which medical intervention is permissible and desirable. The figure of the ‘transgender child’ presumed by medicine and law is not a naturally occurring category of person external to medical diagnosis and legal protection. Medicine and law construct the ‘transgender child’ rather than that the ‘transgender child’ exists independently of medico-legal discourse. The ethical issue of whether the child and young person can ‘consent’ to social and medical transition goes beyond legal assessment of whether a person under16 years has the mental capacity to consent, understand to what s/he is consenting, and can express independent wishes. It shifts to examination of the recent making of ‘the transgender child’ through the complex of power/knowledge/ethics of medicine and the law of which the child can have no knowledge but within which its own desires are both constrained and incited.

Power and Education, 2013

The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics in the United Kingdom launched a specific programme c... more The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics in the United Kingdom launched a specific programme called the Iraq Research Fellowship Programme (IRFP) in late 2006 at the height of an Iraqi assassination campaign against academics. Whilst the programme's aims are laudable and its results utterly worthwhile, this article explores, from the point of view of two British female academics, somewhat unexpected by-products in its power dynamics. The different cultural contexts of Iraq and the West mean that Iraqi and Western scholars find themselves differently placed with regard to privilege in their collaboration. The power relations between the Western academics themselves and the different roles they play within the IRFP are characterised by issues of gender and status hierarchy. The theoretical approach the authors take to understand the micropolitics of the IRFP is a post-structuralist feminist one, in particular the post-structuralism influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. The authors argue that the micropolitics of gender, status hierarchy, the West and Iraq present within the IRFP are those acted out in the macro context of Western and Middle Eastern politics. In doing so, the authors suggest, following Foucault's precept that ethics involves the praxis of 'changing the subject', that the deployment of a 'politics of grace' is a primary resource for transformative research fellowship in international collaboration and that, on this foundation, Iraqi reengagement with research and teaching can be truly facilitated.

This book focuses on the work of The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) in particular... more This book focuses on the work of The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) in particular, the work of one of its contemporary branches, the Iraq Research Fellowship Programme (IRFP). Through the IRFP CARA has worked to support the academic freedom of Iraqi scholars at risk of oppression and exclusion from the academy.

SensePublishers eBooks, 2012

This book is without doubt one of the most important publications that I have read for a very lon... more This book is without doubt one of the most important publications that I have read for a very long time. These stories by Iraqi scholars raise many important insights, issues and questions. Their accounts provide some chilling insights into the terrible forms of oppression and discrimination that are part of the barriers to the realisation of an inclusive and creative development. It is extremely difficult to appreciate the pain and suffering that has been an integral part of their lives. Their accounts are readable and refreshingly honest. I do believe that there is a moral responsibility for all members of departments in universities to read and discuss this book as a matter of urgency. This needs to be done in terms of what we can learn about Iraq and in turn, to critically examine our own current conditions, relations, policies and practices, so that we can also struggle for a more inclusive system of educational provision and practice in higher education.

The theory of New Public Management (NPM) suggest that one of the features of advanced liberal ru... more The theory of New Public Management (NPM) suggest that one of the features of advanced liberal rule is the tendency to define social, economic and political issues as problems to be solved through management. This paper argues that the restructuring of Higher Education (HE) in many Western countries since the 1980s has involved a shift from an emphasis on administration and policy to one of its efficient management. Utilising Foucault’s concept of governmentality rather than the liberal discourse of management as a politically neutral technology, managerialism can be seen as a newly emergent and increasingly rationalised disciplinary regime of governmentalising practices in advanced liberalism. As such the contemporary University as an institution governed by NPM can be demonstrated to have emerged not as the direct outcome of democratic policies that have rationalised its activities (so that the emancipatory aims of personal development, an educated workforce and of true research can be fully realised), nor can it be understood as the instrument through which individuals or self-realising classes are defeated through the calculations of the state acting on behalf of economic interests, rather it can be seen as the contingent and intractable outcome of the complex power/knowledge relations of advanced liberalism. I analyse the interlocking of the ‘tutor-subject’ and ‘student-subject’ as a local enacting of policy discourse informed by the NPM of HE that reshapes subjectivity and retunes the relationship between tutor and student. I put forward suggestions for how resistance to these new modes of disciplinary subjectification can be enacted.

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Iraqi assassination campaign against academics. Whilst the programme’s aims are laudable and its ... more Iraqi assassination campaign against academics. Whilst the programme’s aims are laudable and its results utterly worthwhile, this article explores, from the point of view of two British female academics, somewhat unexpected by-products in its power dynamics. The different cultural contexts of Iraq and the West mean that Iraqi and Western scholars find themselves differently placed with regard to privilege in their collaboration. The power relations between the Western academics themselves and the different roles they play within the IRFP are characterised by issues of gender and status hierarchy. The theoretical approach the authors take to understand the micropolitics of the IRFP is a post-structuralist feminist one, in particular the post-structuralism influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. The authors argue that the micropolitics of gender, status hierarchy, the West and Iraq present within the IRFP are those acted out in the macro context of Western and Middle Eastern politi...

Rare Metal Materials and Engineering, 2017

Three kinds of FeCrAl fibers with different pore sizes were prepared by design, fabrication, sint... more Three kinds of FeCrAl fibers with different pore sizes were prepared by design, fabrication, sintering and repression. The pore size, resistance and capacity were tested. The results show that the initial resistance and efficiency is reduced, while the capacity is increased with the increase of pore size. The pulse-jet cleaning of fibers were operated based on VDI3926 standard at different face velocity and cleaning pressure. The result indicates sample 3 with 22 µm fiber diameter have the longest cleaning lifespan. The four stages of the standard VDI3926 are completed in the face velocity of 0.06 m/s, the dust concentration of 2 g/m 3 and pressure drop prior to pulse-jet cleaning is 3500 Pa. The sample increment weighing reaches 12.31 g, the average efficiency is as high as 98.5% and consumed time is 3 h after 30 times artificial aging. The fiber with 22 µm diameter shows the longest lifespan.