look maybe this is cringe or something but god what i wouldn't give to be a professor who teaches film, literature, and a few courses on the intersection of digital culture around media through a sociological and creative lens

Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which  is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

Dread Nation

by Justina Ireland

What it is: a novel where the dead start rising at the battle of Gettysburg. Yes, you read that right. it’s zombies, and the Native and Negro Reeducation Act, which is what ‘ended’ slavery and forced young Black children to go to schools to learn how to fight the undead instead.

Why it’s on this list: Although the identity language isn’t there, considering the era, it is still made explicit that the main character is attracted to boys and girls, and a secondary character admits to being attracted to no one at all. Having a Black leading lady say so, and so matter of fact, makes this even more significant.

Where you can find it: In any bookstore. It just hit the NYT Bestsellers List, it should be absolutely everywhere. The author is also on twitter here, and has a website over here.

Official Synopsis | Goodreads

I have been thinking about this book nonstop since I finished it.

I read it in one sitting. It was breathtaking, it was intense, it was all consuming in the way the best books are.

Whether you are interested in history, zombies, or just a good story, this is a book to pick up.

Now, this is going to be a bit of a different review. Honestly, I feel like I could talk about this book for hours, but I want to take a moment to link to another review, first.

As a white reader and reviewer, I think it’s important to use this platform as a way to highlight the experts. Black women are going to be able to talk about the details of this alternate history novel and how it examines racism, slavery, and Black lives being treated as a commodity in a way that I can’t. And in reading the reviews of Black people reading Dread Nation, it’s made me want to reread the whole book again, because my understanding deepens with each review I read.  Alex Brown’s review (warning for general spoilers) is an excellent read, really looking at and comparing some of the things in the book - things that might, to a unknowing reader, feel unrealistically cruel - with real life equivalents. For real, after reading her review I might just pick up the book and read it again tonight.

This book follows Jane, who was sent to a school that is supposed to mold her into an Attendant - a Black girl who is hired by a white woman to protect her, both her virtue and her flesh from the undead who would like to feed on it.

I feel like to even go into the plot much is to spoil it, and since I’ve already linked the synopsis and Alex’s review, I’m just going to jump right in to how this book made me feel.

Y’all, this book is triumphant. I feel like I should say that. Yes, it does not sugarcoat when looking at the intense racism, colourism, and sexism of the time (echoes of which we still feel today - none of these things are things we have left behind). But there is so much hope and strength in this book as well. Was it hard to read at times? Yes, absolutely. Was it also hopeful, did it have me punching the air at times when Jane, the lead, emerges from something victorious? Yes, yes, yes it did.

I’ve been reading mostly queer books. I picked this one up because it was history and zombies. So when the Conversation happened, where Jane talks about being attracted to girls as well as boys, had me doing a doubletake. Especially with how straight forward it was. This wasn’t implication, this was on the page confirmation. Another excellent example of how you can make queerness explicit and on the page, even in worlds and times where the vocabulary we are used to doesn’t exist.

“Is this your way of telling me you fancy women?” Not that I mind. I’ve been distracted by a pretty face every now and again myself...

...My face heats. “Well, Merry was very pretty and she had that amazing right hook.” Merry was also a very good kisser, taught me everything I know, but Katherine doesn’t need to hear about that.

And also Katherine discussing her lack of interest in anyone, and how quick Jane is to say there’s nothing wrong with that.

“But I don’t feel that way about anyone, Jane. I never had and I’m not sure I ever will.” “Oh, well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Just... such cool stuff to find, especially since I wasn’t expecting it. And that makes this story one about two queer Black girls and their relationship growing from frenemies into genuine friends and supporters of each other, which is incredible, because finding that, especially in a speculative fiction book, is basically unheard of.

Jane’s agency in terms of her sexuality in general is something I love in this story. She is very blunt when she comes across someone she finds attractive, and we meet a few boys she is attracted to, and I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that let a lady lead talk so honestly about being attracted to multiple people in a way that didn’t paint it as wrong or at the very least shallow. Jane is a badass female lead, she’s Black, and she is not desexualized or softened/made weaker by being interested in people.That’s really cool and refreshing to see, again made especially so by the fact that this is a historical setting and you could totally explain away if she wasn’t allowed to do this based on the setting.

Jane and Katherine are also allowed the space to be angry, which Black girls aren’t often allowed to do in media and in real life without really racist things being said about it. This is another topic I’d love to see written about by a Black woman, so I’m going to keep an eye out for any awesome reviews or articles talking about this and I’ll come back and edit this with some links when I do find some.

Also, can I just say... This is the only piece of fiction I’ve ever read by a non-Indigenous author that’s mentioned residential schools. The author goes so far as to include additional information and resources on the subject in her author’s note at the end of the book. That was... That was so cool to see. And can I just remind you that this is in a zombie book.  Like, everyone else? Do better. Damn.

It’s funny, because so many of the things people say ‘can’t be in historical stories’, because it would be ‘unrealistic’, are included in here. We have amazing Black women leads. We have a really interesting Native American character that I am so hoping we get to see more of in the sequel. This story takes so many people that are dismissed in genre fiction and creates such complex and diverse characters. Including a really rad disabled character (a scientist and potential love interest of Jane?), and a lady named Duchess and her girls, who are sex workers. In most books, these characters would be nameless, maybe used to colour in the background of the world the white leads walk through. But Dread Nation takes great care with all of its characters, especially the ones with identities often dismissed.

Seriously, if I see those kind of arguments, I’m gonna chuck this book at them.

The fact that this is all happening in what is technically a horror book is especially important, because horror as a genre is so often garbage. Mainstream horror so often relies on biases based in sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. It’s notorious for this. But horror can be so damn good, when in the hands of marginalized folk. Look at Get Out, for another example. Horror in the hands of the downtrodden or ignored is such a powerful tool, and that is why I say I’m a fan of horror. Because of stuff like this.

On that note, it is a zombie book. There is definitely violence, and some horror elements. So if that’s something you’re sensitive to, be careful. If you want to read it, but fear of character deaths are what’s stopping you, you’re welcome to message me. Sometimes, you need something spoiled in order to enjoy it with less stress, and I do not judge.

Seriously. Go and get this book.

Reading Dread Nation? Let us know what you think! And if you’re looking for more great queer content, reminder that this is Day 10 of 365 queer reviews, one for each day of 2018.

(We’re very behind, but we’re doing our best)

You can find all the reviews here.

Dr. Jess O-Reilly Plays 20 Questions with SHA!

Dr. Jess O-Reilly Plays 20 Questions with SHA!

“You’re the ultimate expert in your own sexuality and pleasure.”

The Sexual Health Alliance (SHA) is centered around providing Provocative Dialogue and Radical Collaboration. What would radical collaboration look like for you?

To me, radical collaboration involves sharing my business and working with industry peers who don’t have the same opportunities and privilege as I do. This might involve referring out services to folks who are better qualified to speak on specific issues (e.g. Black sexuality, sex for people with disabilities). It also involves sharing resources, insights and experiences for low/no cost to those in financial need. And at times, it involves sharing the financial profits on specific projects (e.g. collaborating on products like books, video courses and speaking engagements).

As a prominent sexuality professional, you have made a wonderful career as a sex educator. What would you recommend to young educators or therapists wanting to follow in your footsteps?

Ask for help. Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for the support of your peers and potential mentors. Many of us want to help and if you’re very specific with your request (e.g. Can I pick your brain? is too broad, but Could you look over this introductory paragraph of my book proposal? is more manageable), you’ll probably receive a positive reply.

What book(s) are you reading right now?

I’m rereading Life and Death in Shanghai.

What’s the most important thing you talk about with your clients?

Custom-designing their relationships. There is no one-size-fits-all approach and you can make almost any arrangement work if you’re not burdened by social pressure.

What are the top 3 items on your bucket list?

1. I’d like to build an affordable housing building in my hometown of Toronto and see if we can grow the project to be sustainable; eventually, I’d like to continue to build additional units.

2. I’d like to adopt a child.

3. I want to live to be 100+.

One of our goals is to provide all therapists and healthcare providers with high quality sexuality training because they often receive little to no education in sexual health. What is the most important piece about sex that you want all providers to know? What would you want them to incorporate into their practice?

I’d like every professional to understand that our personal sex and relationship lenses can be completely irrelevant to our clients/patients’ lived experience. This doesn’t mean that our work isn’t shaped by personal experience, but simply that we need to be aware of our own biases and limits. And we need to be more aware of our layers of privilege related to race, gender, income, education, ability, nation of birth, relationship status, social status and professional roles.

What are your top 2 books that have influenced you and why?

Give and Take by Adam Grant. This was an affirming read, as he shares stories and data suggesting that good people do finish first in life and in business.

Our Bodies, Ourselves. I read this many, many years ago when I was in school and it offered such an important perspective on so many different topics. I know they’ve updated it since then and I’ve been meaning to go back to it and read the new version, so thanks for the reminder!

What is bad advice you have heard other people in our field give?

I still hear professionals talk about other cultures and countries as though they’re monoliths that they understand because they worked with clients from a specific culture or they lived in a place for a few months or years. If you’re not a part of a group or culture, elevate the voice of someone from that group instead of speaking for or about them. Nothing about us without us.

Who is your sexual role model?

That’s a great question! I’m not sure I know enough about anyone else’s sex life to call them a role model. Marla Renee Stewart is a general role model — personally and professionally — and I believe she has very happy relationships — sexual and otherwise.

SHA utilizes social media to reach our members as well as to find new sexuality content and research, how do you think social media has influenced our culture’s sexuality?

I’m so thankful for the reach and impact of social media. Putting the power of broadcast into individual hands (instead of allowing it to rest in the hands of a few corporations) has shifted and broadened the content we consume. Accounts like @SexPositiveFamilies, for example, disseminate essential information that mainstream (old) media would never have touched. Research shows that digital consumption and connections can foster digital empathy, galvanize support, create feelings of belonging and build community. Of course, social media is still owned by a few corporations and we don’t have access to how they disseminate our posts, so we have to be mindful that new media also has its limitations.

Our team finds podcasts, youtube and other social media platforms sometimes more educational and useful than traditional models. Do you think social media should have a place in formal training, and if so, how much?

There are accounts that offer high-quality, evidence-based information and there are also powerful accounts that provide misinformation. I think it’s important to analyze media (including social media) in all training and examine messages and biases. Part of all learning processes involves developing and tuning our critical thinking skills and I believe that we can certainly use social media as both a lens and subject.

What made you create your Happily ever after approach to working with couples?

I work primarily with folks who run or own businesses. They’re passionate about their work and they claim that their family is the most important aspect of their lives, but they don’t always act like it. Our Marriage As a Business approach involves applying business practices and acumen to intimate relationships. This might entail hosting board meetings (relationship check-ins), building a support team (e.g. therapists and babysitters), respecting timelines (e.g. showing up to dinner on time), planning ahead (e.g. carving out time weeks, months or even a year in advance).

As a Canadian born, Chinese-Jamaican and Irish by descent person, what has been the most challenging aspect of working in this field?

My gender, appearance and (perceived) ethnicity provide me with both privilege and challenges. As a woman talking about a sensitive topic in the public eye, I draw considerable criticism, harassment and personal attacks — on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, my website contact form and even on LinkedIn. I ignore most of it, but sometimes it does feel like death by a thousand paper cuts. Luckily, I have a lot of support too. And I love life and I’m lucky in so many ways, so I try not to expend my energy on the harassment.

Where is your next dream vacation?

I’m not sure. I have a big birthday coming up in February and I’m deciding between Tuscany, Japan and Jamaica. Help me choose!

What are 2 of the most important things you do everyday?

If I’m home, my partner makes me a decaf macchiato or cortado in a small double-wall glass, which I try to take the time to enjoy without reading, working or scrolling. The glassware and all the details add to my enjoyment; he weighs the beans, grinds them with a beautiful manual grinder, pulls the shots at the right pace and warms the milk to the perfect temperature. It sounds pretentious, but I don’t care, because it’s delicious.

I don’t have many rituals, because I’m on the road most of the time and everything is always changing. But I do make time to enjoy myself wherever I go — even if I only have a few hours in a new city or country, I try to walk to a local third-wave coffee shop or market to get a pulse on local life. If I have time for lunch, I always treat myself to something delicious. Food is my love language and working in the food industry is a part of my family background.

What’s your favorite place you’ve traveling to for you job and why?

It’s hard to pick a favorite place, but Istanbul certainly stands out as a highlight. The people are always so warm and gracious. The rich culture, history and architecture overwhelm me. And the food is so delicious and varied. I hope to return again soon.

What’s the most challenging aspect of being in business with your partner, Brandon? (They are married)

Me. I’m the most challenging aspect. He’s much easier to work with.

We don’t work together full-time. He helps out to co-host the podcast, but he has his own unrelated business that keeps him very busy.

The most challenging aspect relates to my travel schedule. I love travel and I love flying and dealing with the unpredictability of new surroundings, but I do miss being physically together. This was a challenge for several years, but he travels with me far more often now, as he has more flexibility with his business.

What’s your favorite story to tell?

I’m a storyteller. As they say, a story doesn’t have to be true to be good. Ha!

But here’s a true one:

On a flight from Denver to Albuquerque a few years ago, a guy threw up all over me as the plane landed. Instead of just vomiting, he tried to keep it in his cheeks and so the trajectory changed and it sprayed everywhere — all over me and in the hair of the couple in front of us. People were dry heaving all around us and I was just hoping that no one else would vomit. I remember thinking that if one more person vomits, the whole plane is going to become a vomit comet. I don’t know why I picked that story, but it just popped into my head.

If you want something sexuality-related:

One time I was at a sex club and two people high fived on the bed next to us while exclaiming, “Oh yeah. This is so hot! And it’s a great workout, so we can skip the gym tomorrow!”. This was their dirty talk and it got them all riled up, but it killed the vibe for me and some of the others in close proximity.

Another time, as lady who was 7+ months pregnant stopped me and asked if I could help her figure out a good position for DP (double penetration) given her big belly. This was a time when I was reminded that they definitely don’t teach you everything you need to know in school.

Your bio says you like airplane turbulence! Can you tell us more about why you like it?

I just love airplanes — I love flying in them, talking about them, reading about them. And I like the physical thrill of a little turbulence — especially in a bigger plane. I will reroute to fly on a cool plane (e.g. the 787-9) and I hope to train as a pilot someday.

Being trained in sex & disabilities, can you give us some tips on why discussing disability is important?

All sexual health education needs to be inclusive and this includes talking about sex as it relates to race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, relationship arrangement, income, and disability. I facilitated sessions on sex and disability early on in my career and now I’ve learned that I should pass the mic and advocate for paying opportunities for fellow sexologists who have disabilities. There are many qualified folks who simply don’t get the same paid opportunities as I do because of ableism.

When we leave folks with disabilities out of the conversation, we reinforce inaccurate stereotypes and put them at greater risk, as sexual health education produces positive health outcomes regardless of whether or not you have a disability.

What's an important take away from your new book The New Sex Bible?

Do what feels good for you. Don’t worry about what the experts or your friends have to say. You’re the ultimate expert in your own sexuality and pleasure.

About Dr. Jess

Jess O’Reilly began working as a sexuality counsellor in 2001 and she has never looked back! Her PhD studies involved the development of training programs in sex education for teachers and her education and undergraduate degrees focused on equity and sexual diversity.

Her training includes courses in counselling skills, healthy relationships, resolving sexual concerns, sex education, clinical sexology, sexual development, sex and disability, group therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Alongside her academic and television credits, Dr. Jess is also an accomplished author with three best-selling titles. Her latest, The New Sex Bible, has received rave reviews from professionals and clients alike and her first book Hot Sex Tips,Tricks and Licks is in its fourth print! Look for her monthly column in Post City or catch her on Tuesday mornings on Global TV’s The Morning Show, Wednesdays on 102.1 The Edge and Saturdays on PlayboyTV.

Dr. Jess’ work experience includes contracts with school boards, social services agencies, community health organizations and private corporations. A sought-after speaker, her sessions always attract a full-house at conferences and entertainment events alike.

Check out more about Dr. Jess!

Follow Dr. Jess on Twitter & Instagram

Dr. Jess O-Reilly Plays 20 Questions with SHA! published first on https://spanishflyhealth.tumblr.com/

Ayat and Hadith that Prove Islam is a Religion of Peace

Critics of Islam often brand it as a barbaric and brutal religion. Their argument is generally based on a select few ayat (Quaranic verses) and hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) which seem to promote violence.

There are indeed a number of ayat and hadith which encourage Muslims to turn to combat in certain situations. It is important to remember, however, that much of the Quran was revealed during a time of war. The vast majority of seemingly pro-violence ayat and hadith were revealed to Muhammad PBUH while his followers were being persecuted by those who did not believe his message.

Despite bias interpretations from fringe extremist sects, the Quran encourages Muslims to remain cordial and non-violent in times of peace. Evidence to support Islam's preference for peace can be found in a great many ayat and hadith.

The peaceful ayat and hadith far outnumber those calling for bloodshed. There are so many, in fact, that we could not possibly examine them all in this article. For that reason, we have gathered a few of the most noteworthy here and encourage you to seek out additional examples during your own scripture study. Here are just some of ayat and hadith which prove Islam is a religion of peace,

Ayat Promoting Peace

The Quran is made up of a mammoth 6,236 verses. In the Muslim world, these verses are more formally known as "ayat" (or "ayah" individually). The ayat are spread out over 113 surahs (or chapters) and deal with a variety of topics. Below, you'll find some of the most memorable ayat encouraging peace.

Al-Qasas, Ayah 56 ​

When Islam was in its infancy, the pagan leaders of Mecca viewed Muhammad as a minor annoyance. As his following increased, however, his status was elevated to legitimate public enemy. Those who opposed Islam sought to stop it in its tracks by slaughtering even the most inconsequential Muslim.

When one considers the hardships Muhammad and his followers endured to practice their faith, it should come as no surprise that the Quran stresses the importance of freedom of religion. Despite what jihadi groups may believe, Islam teaches that each person should have the right to practice their religion. This is never stated more clearly than it is in the 56th verse of the 28th Surah, Al-Qasas. It reads as follows:

"Indeed, [O Muhammad], you do not guide whom you like, but Allah guides whom He wills. And He is most knowing of the [rightly] guided." (Quran 28:56)

Al-Baqarah, Ayah 190

The ayat that are often cited as "proof" of the Quran's violent nature rarely call Muslims to violence. In most cases, they merely encourage followers of Muhammad to defend themselves when attacked. So, according to traditional Islamic belief, a Muslim may only resort to violence if it is the sole way they can shake an aggressor. An example of this teaching can be found in Al-Baqarah, the second surah of the Quran. Ayah 190 of Al-Baqarah reads:

"Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors." (Quran 2:190)

Al-Baqarah, Ayah 195

​A lot of the Quran's peaceful ayat simply advise Muslims to avoid conflict and violence. While they are admirable in their message, they often draw criticism for their failure to encourage behavior which lends itself to the progression of a community.

Of course, as any Muslim knows, it is not enough to merely avoid doing bad deeds. To enter the gates of paradise, a Muslim must also improve the lives of others through their words and acts. This is reflected in numerous ayat throughout the Quran, including Quran 2:195.

In surah Al-Baqarah, just five ayat after advising Muslims to avoid violence whenever possible, the Quran does so again. This time, however, it also encourages readers to perform good deeds. The ayat reads as follows:

"And spend in the way of Allah and do not throw [yourselves] with your [own] hands into destruction [by refraining]. And do good; indeed, Allah loves the doers of good." (Quran 2:195)

Al-Insan, Ayat 8-9

​We have all heard about the grizzly videos of jihadi soldiers torturing prisoners of war. Disguising their blood lust as obedience to Allah, members of ISIS and similar extremist groups behead, drown, and even burn their prisoners. Unsurprisingly, their actions are responsible for much of the negative press Islam have received in recent years.

In reality, these jihadi fighters are directly violating the commands of Allah. Although the Quran does permit the keeping of prisoners in a time of war, it states unequivocally that all prisoners of war must be treated justly. An example of this can be found in surah Al-Insan, ayat 8 to 9.

"And they offer food to the needy, the orphan and the captive. [Saying] "We feed you for the sake of Allah alone; we wish for neither reward nor gratitude from you.'" (Quran 76:8-9)

Hadith Promoting Peace

In Islam, the Quran is complimented by hadith. Hadith are accounts of sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. Just like the Quran, the hadith come out strongly in favor of peace and kindness. Some of the most popular peace-promoting hadith are outlined below.

Entertain Your Guests And Keep Peace With Your Neighbors ​

​Arabs are famous for their hospitality. If you have traveled to the Middle East - or even paid a visit to your local mosque - you likely have first-hand experience of that fact.

Arabs prided themselves on their hospitality even in the pre-Islamic age. Once Muhammad gained a following, however, showing kindness to your neighbors and visitors became even more important. In the eight book of Sahih Bukhari, you'll find one of many sayings of Muhammad on the importance of being a good host.

"Anyone who believes in Allah and the Day of Judgement should not harm his neighbor. Anyone who believes in Allah and the Day of Judgement should entertain his guests generously and should say what is good, or keep quiet." (Sahih Bukhari)

You Cannot Hate And Be A Muslim

​Critics of Islam often point towards its opposition to same-sex marriage as evidence of its supposed hateful nature. While mainstream Islam teaches that same-sex relations go against the commands of Allah, it does not call on Muslims to hate members of the LGBTQ community. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad clearly stated that anybody who hates another person cannot be a Muslim, let alone enter Paradise.

Islam is very much about loving your neighbor, regardless of what they do or who they love. Evidence of this can be found in a passage of Sahih Bukhari, which reads:

"You will not enter Paradise until you believe and you will not believe until you love each other. Shall I show you something that, if you did, you would love each other? Spread peace among yourselves." (Sahih Bukhari)

Arguments Are Not Constructive

​While Muhammad was known to enjoy a hearty discussion about theology, he made sure his followers understood the difference between a debate and an argument. While a debate can contribute to the development of a community, an argument can have the exact opposite effect. An argument would have been particularly destructive in the early days of Islam, when Muhammad needed Muslims to stand together against the non-believers.

According to Sahih Muslim, Muhammad warned his followers that consistent disagreements among them would prevent the expansion of Islam, saying:

"Verily, those before you were ruined by their differences over the Book". (Sahih Muslim)

Avoid Selfish Acts

As a child, Muhammad was fascinated by fallen civilizations, such as the Biblical lands of Sodom and Gumorrah. As exhibited in both the previous and following hadith, the Prophet was ever mindful of these tales even in adulthood. He often reminded his followers of the mistakes made by the people of these once-great civilizations, which had ultimately led to their destruction. If Muslims were not careful, Muhammad warned, a similar faith would befall them.

Selfishness and miserliness were particularly ripe in 7th-century Arabia. Muhammad went through great efforts to ensure such issues did not infect his community of believers. In Riyad as-Salihin, he states:

"Avoid cruelty and injustice, and guard yourselves against miserliness, for this has ruined nations who lived before you." (Riyad-us-Salihin)

We Should Actively Seek To End ConflictEnter heading here...

When our friends are having an argument, it can be tempting to just sit it out and let them sort things out for themselves. This is understandable. However, Muhammad advised against such indifference.

According to the Prophet, if two warring people are left to argue, it is unlikely that a mutually-beneficial resolution will be reached. Those involved in the dispute will be too blinded by emotion to conceive of a solution that will please both parties. For that reason, Muhammad encouraged his followers to act as a mediator in disputes among their family and friends, saying:

"Shall I inform you of something that holds a higher status than fasting, praying, and giving charity? Making peace between people, for verily sowing dissension between people is indeed calamitous." (Kenzul Ummal)

So apparently I wanna talk about Secret Empire

[Shows up a month late with Pete’s Coffee]

There’ve already been a lot of well-written thinkpieces and entries about this comic, about Nick Spencer, about it all.  But I wanted to maybe throw my two-cents into the pile because, to this day, I think most people are still a little confused about where the outrage is coming from, what exactly is making people uncomfortable, and why it all just keeps snowballing on itself.

And honestly I don’t blame those people; this whole situation is kinda hard to parse.  You think it’d be easy to understand why “They turned Captain America into a Nazi” makes people upset, but the thing about Secret Empire is that it honestly does a good pretty job of covering its own ass, of not doing anything overtly offensive, of leaving in all the loopholes and technicalities and escape clauses to its own premise. “It’s going to be undone in the end.” “He’s not actually a Nazi, he’s just brainwashed (even though the story goes on and on for pages about how he’s actually not brainwashed and is in fact a Nazi).” “We’re treating Nazis as bad guys, not glorifying them.” “And they’re not really Nazis, they’re Hydra, it’s totally different.” “We’re tackling topical issues!  Aren’t we brave!  And daring!”

And that’s the kind of stuff I wanna try to cut through here, but it’s gonna require...well...yet another thinkpiece.  Sorry about that.

So I think that Tumblr has covered much of this pretty well, but something to be aware of is that, for a while now, genre media has had A) really iffy mindsets about Jewish issues and B) a sort of casual flirtation with "cool Nazis" as some edgy cool thing to hype and market.  It’s not glorifying Nazis exactly, but it’s using that kind of imagery and ideology as tools to sell your books and movies and TV.  And when I say "genre media" has been doing these things, I actually am specifically referring to Marvel comics and studios for a notable chunk of these instances.

When you combine those instances with the state of the world where Nazism has been regaining traction with the 'chans and redditors and within the White House itself, with Holocaust denialism and Jewish defamation being a regular fixture of the news cycle...it's no wonder that members of the Jewish community and blogosphere has been feeling disenfranchised by a lot of the old entities and structures that had seemed like they should be able to count on as a matter of course. That includes the government, that includes our fellow citizens, and it also includes the media.

(sidebar, I am not Jewish, I just enjoy their comics!)

That's what readers mean when they say this feels like the worst sort of climate for a story that reveals and is marketed on the premise that Captain America was secretly a Nazi all along. It's not that people don't want the current political climate to be examined and lampshaded in media, it's that this specific method of examination comes across scarily comparable to all the antisemitic media and rhetoric that's been released throughout the years which has led us to this current political climate in the first place. It's the media-slash-rhetoric where Jewish (and other) characters have their origins retconned and whitewashed into homogeneity, where pontificating supervillains are just misunderstood revolutionaries who might have a point or something, where fascist police-states are shock value tropes to engender hype and interest amongst audiences.

Spencer's argument is that this story, which depicts a universe where the fascists win, is intended to incite discourse and criticism against such a universe. Hydra are still clearly the bad guys of the story, we're obviously intended to want to see them lose, of course they're going to lose by the end. But the way that the story has been constructed up to this point exhibits a lot of the same signatures of various antisemitic story beats we've had throughout the years. Captain America being retconned from a stalwart defender of Jewish people into being a Nazi agent, for instance, evokes Wanda and Pietro Maximoff being changed from prominent Jewish-Romani superheroes into whitewashed Hydra recruits on the big screen...and there was certainly no secret message or hidden allegory behind the Maximoffs' change; all it was was offensive and tone-deaf and that was it.

For another instance, Nazi Steve delivering issues-long sermons about how the heroes of this world have gotten complacent and misguided and that the world needs someone willing to make the tough choices, to do what it takes to protect it, is reminiscent of Tony Stark and Carol Danvers making fascism-apologia for months on end throughout the two Civil War event comics, like, hey maybe these guys playing the hardball roles have a point right? Hey aren't we so hardcore and edgy for tackling the hardcore and edgy topics?  CHOOSE YOUR SIDE!...and in the end this fascism-apologia is just played completely straight, no hidden critique, no last-minute swerve, just Marvel turning its heroes into borderline supervillains and that was the end of the story. But hey, this story here and now will be totally different from that! Becuuuz...for some reason.

To be direct about his: This isn’t our first rodeo, Marvel Comics.  Let’s not pretend that Marvel...and DC, let’s be fair...haven't in fact made a lot of legitimately terrible in-canon offensive character assassinations of iconic characters and that it's not that unreasonable to be afraid of it happening again at any given point.  Let’s not pretend that Marvel hasn’t done a lot of those things for the specific reason of angering readers and then feeding off of that anger and attention.

At the very least, there's been this weird romanticizing of Hydra Cap from Spencer in what I've read of these books so far; it doesn’t exactly refute the premise that Steve being Hydra is bad, but Steve is still the protagonist of these books no matter how brainwashed he is, so these issues seem to have come across less like "Our heroes have to prevail against this nefarious schemer and his nefarious schemes!" and more like "Watch in wonder as this shadowy agent prevails against all the clueless establishment and does badass things throughout his mission!" It falls into the "cool Nazi" trend where it's like, of course we're consciously aware that he's the bad guy here, but isn't he so edgy and hardcore and badass anyway? I haven't read as many issues of Hydra Cap as Spencer would probably like so, I dunno, let me know if I'm way off here.

So, to summarize...well, not summarize exactly, but to organize these points, lets’ do a list.  Everyone likes lists, right?

1) Showing the "bad guys" losing in, like, probably the very last issue of this year long storyline (which also included the main Captain America book which led up to the actual event) doesn't suddenly omit all those issues where the "bad guys" were shown being edgy and hardcore and badass and smart and powerful and pulling one over on all those dense clueless liberal "good guys," except in this case the bad guys are people who directly abetted in the Holocaust and not the guys who stole forty cakes.

2) This is during a time in the world where antisemitic rhetoric is seeing a startling resurgence -- or maybe just coming back into the light again after hiding away for a bit -- and Holocaust denialism, vandalism of public Jewish spaces, and outright physical violence being more and more common occurrences.

3) Readers in general have been consistently burned by Marvel's consistently tone-deaf depictions of moral or social narratives throughout their events (Civil War: police states are great!) (Civil War II: police states are great!) (IvX: Cyclops is goddamn HITLER for some reason). Jewish readers, in particular, have good reason to not to trust Marvel to be respectful and tactful of their issues. Any such complaints or concerns have been responded to with derision or misunderstanding on Spencer's part, which only makes everyone angrier and more wary.

4) Indeed, Marvel and Spencer's go-to insistence that Hydra are totally not Nazis at all and you're just being nitpicky if you say they're Nazis just further makes them come across as tone-deaf and bullish on the matter, on top of (probably unknowingly, if I’m feeling generous) mirroring the talking points of actual real life Nazis, who've been trying to rebrand themselves as something different for years in order to come across more fluffy and palatable to mainstream sensibilities.

5) I mean there's also the fact that Hydra is -- as currently depicted in this very event by the very writer who keeps saying they're not Nazis on Twitter -- a completely fascistic political regime that stifles free thought and rewrites history through fear, violence, and propaganda and oh hey did someone mention concentration camps? ‘Cuz there are concentration camps in this book.  Hydra is functionally indistinguishable from Nazis in this actual book. This is not a book about Captain America being brainwashed by Saturnians to plant death lasers on the moon, this is a book about Captain America being a Nazi and doing things associated with Nazis in absolutely every respect.  But sure let’s get comic shop owners to dress up like them and stuff

6) "I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever. I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait." Copypasted directly, because how can you get clearer than that.

7) Spencer's work with Sam Wilson Captain America, which generally turns him into a centrist apologist at best who couldn't believe that he himself was ever that much of an annoying liberal activist or something and occasionally fights literal "social justice warriors" on college campuses throwing bombs and internet slang, isn’t a particularly encouraging thing to have hanging on the back of your mind while reading this story about how Steve Rogers was actually a Nazi all along. 8) In a world where an X-Men artist is literally sneaking secret antisemitic propaganda into books that are supposed to celebrate diversity and civil activism, can you really blame people for being antsy about a comic book that is making members of Stormfront cream themselves by revealing that Steve Rogers was a secret Nazi all along?

So yeah, I dunno if I have any great point to make with any of this.  I just felt like collating all the outrage and shedding a little light on how the situation comes across to me.  Secret Empire isn’t exactly the sort of clear-cut idiocy where, y’know, some dense writer fridged yet another female character or replaced yet another hero of color with his white predecessor from forty years ago.  Its problems are a bit more intricate, which means the blowback is a bit more intricate as well.

3 Things TV Can Teach Gaming about Queer Storylines

Even though television had a head start on the first generation of video games, these two art forms have found themselves on an even playing field within the last decade. Graphically, games may have evolved a bit slower over the decades but, that didn’t stop them from leaving as much of a cultural mark on the world as popular TV shows. Motion capture technology has allowed games the ability to deliver cinematic experiences in a far more immersive setting. One thing that is truly holding back major video games from exploring a range of gender and sexual identity, is the production process. In many cases, big name game developers can take two to four years to produce one title, and that’s if they’re lucky. Television shows take far less time to produce and thus, have done more to advance stories of the queer community by simply providing more of them over time. This is not to say that games have not attempted to include queer characters at all. In fact, indie game developers have been leading the charge in intersectional diversity for years. The only time queer characters come close to being the sole lead of a multi-platform gaming franchise is if it’s a massive RPG and you get to create your own avatar. While these kinds of games are enjoyable, they do not provide the same definite representation that a game with a set protagonist does. If we look back at the Tomb Raider reboot we can see a clear example of an opportunity for representation that was missed. In a 2013 interview with Kill Screen, Rihanna Prachet stated that she wished she could make Lara Croft gay, and went on to make very clear points about representation beyond including more female characters in games: “Whenever anybody talks about a need for more female protagonists I say: “There’s a need for more female protagonists, but there’s a need for characters of different ethnicities, ages, sexual orientation, ability, et cetera.” We are very narrow when it comes to our characters.” This interview gave many fans, including myself, hope that the reboot would establish Lara Croft as queer, especially with Lara spending the first game rescuing her best friend Sam, whom she clearly had a deep connection with. Since this interview, we’ve had one more installment of the reboot that side stepped Lara’s sexuality entirely. This didn’t make the game any less enjoyable but the complete disconnect from the events of the first game was not unnoticed by fans. Not only was Sam nowhere to be found in game, her Wiki page stated that she was in a mental ward. Now with Pratchet leaving the post of lead writer for the third installment there is not much hope left that we may see a queer Lara Croft anytime soon. It’s my belief that if major game developers studied three key factors of how queer storylines have been handled well (and poorly) on TV, they may be more willing to consider writing queer protagonists. Maybe even some that fall under that “et cetera” category Pratchet was talking about nearly four years ago.   I find that most forms of mainstream entertainment relegate any serious exploration of gender identity to the fringes. Independent filmmakers, indie games devs, premium or non-cable TV networks. Billions, a Showtime original series, is introducing the first major genderqueer supporting character in a drama series. The character’s name is Taylor, and will be played by Asia Kate Dillon, an androgynous actor that identifies with they/them pronouns. In 2016, the now canceled MTV show, Faking It, featured many queer characters within one plot. It also had the first intersex character in a supporting role on a TV show. There are far more examples to pull from in television these days, with many shows including at least one queer character and sometimes even multiple queer storylines and once. It seems like an odd thing to dwell on because nobody ever says “look at all these hetero people in my plotline” but if we really think about the number of mainstream shows or movies in recent years with more than one or two queer protagonists who aren’t in a relationship with each other, it’s not as common. A current instance of this is Orange is the New Black. While not without its faults, there are a range of queer identities throughout the show. This does not make it exempt from failing its audience by killing off queer characters in misguided ways or failing to uphold a character’s sexual identity, however. Piper, the main character of the show, is clearly established as a bisexual woman through her various romances and yet, is never referred to directly as a bisexual. She is often referred to as a “former lesbian” “dyke” and so on, but she never corrects anyone. Oddly enough, the best onscreen conversation about bisexuality didn’t happen in a show like this, it happened on a now canceled show that aired on ABC family, Chasing Life. In episode seven of the second season of Chasing Life, Brenna Carver attends an LGBTQ club meeting and her bisexuality is brought up. The conversation that ensues showcases many of the most common misconceptions that bisexuals face. The conversation Brenna has reminded me of the conversation Krem in Dragon Age Inquisition has with the Inquisitor if they choose to have drinks with Iron Bull and his crew. The primary difference being that once the conversation is over in Dragon Age Inquisition, Krem turns back into NPC set dressing and in Chasing Life, Brenna is still a full-fledged member of the plot. Krem’s presence in Inquisition was incredibly important, but the impact he would have had if he had been a romanceable party member would have been astounding. Many people probably wouldn’t scoff at a trans male character like Krem at the helm of a major video game plot. Adding queer characters to a story is as important as actually utilizing them within it. It would also be ideal to include more than one queer character, to increase the likelihood that a queer character might end up alive at the resolution of a story. They often end up in shows or movies where “anyone can die” and due to the low number of queer people present, usually take the entirety of the stories queer representation with them if they get killed or written off. When this happens, it creates a bitter fan base and usually leads them to stop watching a show or seeing a filmmaker’s next 90-minute dramedy. It’s simple: don’t write queer storylines like an episode of Highlander. There can be more than one. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the closet knows the depths to which one will claw at any scrap of positive representation they can identify with, even if that means reading into things only they can see. Often we are forced to create our own worlds within the restrictions put forth by the storytellers. Games like Final Fantasy XIII, while widely regarded as the most unfavorable game in the franchise, is also considered being the queerest one due to subtext. This is the result of the seemingly over-affectionate nature of characters Vanille and Fang. For those who didn’t pay too much attention to the development of the game, like me, you probably were unaware that Fang was first developed as a male character. This could explain why the relationship between Vanille and Fang reads as romantic. Intentional or not, if Fang had remained a male character, it’s highly likely that we wouldn’t be having debates over whether or not her and Vanille were a couple. We can only imagine the impact that game could have had if the relationship between them had been at the forefront. This “close female friendship” phenomenon is a very common form of subtext. A TV show notorious for subtext of this kind is Rizzoli and Isles. Ending in 2016 after seven seasons, plenty of beards and a hefty amount of queerbaiting, our heroines found themselves relaxing in a bed planning a trip to Paris together. Completely normal non-romantic behavior right? Let’s put things into perspective here. Bones, a show that has been on air since 2005, featured almost the same dynamic, a cop and a medical examiner working together with a rag tag group of scientists and detectives. The difference being that the heterosexual relationship between the two lead characters is acknowledged and fully actualized with them going on to marry each other in season 9 and even have children. Bones got to marry her quippy lovable detective friend, while Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles were constantly being bounced around to romantic storylines severely lacking in chemistry in order to deflect from the fact that they were perfect for each other. Had the relationship been made explicit it would have been the first major network detective show of its kind to put a queer female romance at the forefront. The resolution of the hero’s journey often relies on martyrdom or some other form of doom and gloom to wrap up a story. This is never more true than for the queer individual. If it wasn’t, then the Bury Your Gays Trope wouldn’t exist. It is very real, and self-explanatory but if you truly don’t know what it is, you’re one Google search away from being fully briefed on the topic. I’m one of those people who love a great ambiguous ending or twilight zone twist at the end of a story, but when it comes to queer characters, I would take riding off into the sunset over death any day. Games like The Last of Us provide us with Ellie, a queer supporting character who ultimately rises to equal footing with her male counterpart Joel but, her story is still rooted in tragedy. Many responses from showrunners have been that death is just part of the show and if we want to be treated like everyone else we should except it. Sure, that might make sense for Game of Thrones but not for shows like Last Tango in Halifax, which grew in popularity between 2013 and 2015, due to its inclusion of a genuine late-in-life coming out story and romance between two women. In the finale of the third season, Caroline marries her pregnant live-in girlfriend Kate, only to be widowed within 24 hours. Kate gets into a car accident off screen and dies, and a little piece of every fan rooting for them dies too. These types of “sudden death” storylines occur across television and film far too often. At a certain point, it stops being about just one character. Each new death rubs the salt deeper into an already open wound, a wound that constantly throbs with anger. An anger rooted in the fact that queer people have been around as long as there have been stories to tell and yet, we still live in a world that consistently fails at replicating our experiences. It’s 2017, and the only shows where there are well established queer female romances that will most likely not end with one of them dead are featured in shows like Wynonna Earp and Supergirl. Everyone involved in the creation of these two shows including the actors, has openly stated that they are invested in the characters that make up their queer representation, treating them as they would a heterosexual couple. SyFy even created an entire section of the Wynonna Earp website dedicated to the relationship between Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught. Games have the unique ability to sidestep the restraints of having to seek out crowd drawing actors or shooting in expensive locations because they can literally mold characters out of polygons and build their worlds out of code. This uniquely positions them to create something we have never seen before, someone we’ve never seen before. As Rhianna Pratchet put it: “Exploring something about what it means to be a gay character, bisexual character, transgender character, in games, that would create some interesting stories.” I couldn’t agree more http://dlvr.it/NKvGm1

I May Destroy You: a Bold Show Only a Survivor Could Write

https://ift.tt/3h2mtbs

Warning: contains spoilers for the I May Destroy You finale

Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You is a tour de force creation of laser-focused storytelling. A creator working at the current height (but clearly not yet the apex) of her power, Coel’s take on trauma and consent is the kind of prestige exploration that only a survivor could write. The series starts with Coel’s pitch-perfect take on the nuts and bolts of trauma, from the intrusive thoughts and sarcasm toward art therapy to the ringing we hear when main character Arabella is triggered to Arabella downplaying her own trauma by comparing it to various global tragedies. But Coel goes beyond that and puts every kind of consent under the microscope, pushing the audience to look at the aspects of rape culture that make us the most queasy, even if – especially if – they’re inside ourselves.

With Arabella’s drug-induced blackout in the first episode, I May Destroy You sidesteps the depiction we’re most used to seeing of sexual assault – detailed, graphic imagery of “what happened” – in favor of a more guttural and nuanced portrait of the thing that lasts: surviving sexual assault. As a result, the show has so much more to say than the usual fare, staying with Arabella and her friends for at least a year to see the changes great and small after the assault, and to examine consent across their lives from a number of different angles. Only someone who’s spent so much time swimming in this topic could write it so intensely and accurately.

Usually, when rape and sexual assault are depicted in mainstream storytelling, they are used as a storytelling device — a time-saving shorthand to further the plot for a male character who has a relationship with the victim, to show how deeply evil the perpetrator is, or perhaps to make the victim seem more sympathetic or to provide her with sufficient motivation to be an active protagonist in her own story. (Why else would LadyCops exist?) These tropes are discussed in heteronormative terms because most sexual violence on screen ignores the reality that men are survivors too, and that LGBTQ people are disproportionately affected, as are, for that matter, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).

Even when stories are primarily about sexual violence, the narratives tend to follow the same repetitive beats. The rape revenge movie, the Good Survivor™ who self-actualizes their way to justice—and also love! It’s lazy storytelling to retread the same arcs, but with the exception of a wonderful few, like Sweet/Vicious, The Assistant, The Magicians (which righted itself after a triggering start) and hopefully the forthcoming Promising Young Woman and Run, Sweetheart Run, it’s near-universal.

Enter I May Destroy You.

Drawing from a personal experience of sexual assault, Michaela Coel’s 12-episode show is a fictional depiction of Arabella, a millennial writer living in London who was drugged and raped while out for a drink one night when procrastinating on a deadline. Like many survivors, it takes Arabella some time to accept the label the police investigators assign to what happened to her, though they generally treat her well, certainly better than we’d expect here in the States. Don’t get too comfortable, though – for as well as Arabella is treated, her friend Kwame, a queer Black man, experiences something entirely different when he goes to report a rape.

From the beginning, it’s clear the investigator doesn’t understand sex between men and isn’t interested in taking Kwame’s information. He is afforded no privacy while the investigator takes his statement, while a door with a sign saying it must be closed is clearly left open. Kwame isn’t offered support or understanding – instead there’s a sense of judgment surrounding the circumstances, since he used a hookup app. The investigator brushes off the possibility of taking a DNA sample since, they say it wouldn’t prove anything since they had consensual sex, ignoring that at least then they would know it was the correct person. The entire interview is far too casual, with the investigator asking if he was penetrated or not almost as an afterthought, on their way out the door. We don’t have to imagine what an interview with a woman reporting sexual assault would look like, because we’ve just seen it, a few episodes ago. Even between two young Black Londoners with immigrant parents, there’s a hierarchy of privilege and treatment.

Kwame internalizes his experience and withdraws from the world. It takes his friends a long time to realize something is the matter, in part due to concern over Arabella. When they do, Arabella isn’t supportive and doesn’t equate their experiences, even going so far as to accuse Kwame of manipulating or somehow violating the consent of a woman he slept with by not disclosing his sexuality, as though anyone is entitled to that information in the first place. (Kwame primarily sleeps with men but patiently explains that it’s a spectrum and that after being raped, sleeping with men isn’t safe for him, he’s interested in sleeping with women, and he’d like to explore that.) For her part, the white woman Kwame slept with seemed all too eager to fetishize a Black man and then sing the n-word and use the f-word. He called her out on the latter, she became indignant, and she weaponized the language of consent and rape culture to turn the conversation off of her use of slurs and onto him, calling him cancelled and a predator. In her words, “I guess anything that you may have found offensive you wouldn’t have heard if you hadn’t have come into my house under false pretenses,” and I truly hope she warmed up before that stretch.

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TV

I May Destroy You Review: Fresh, Frank, Fluent Drama

By Louisa Mellor

TV

Unbelievable review: an insightful masterpiece from Netflix

By Delia Harrington

The fact of being a survivor alone doesn’t make a person an expert on all things consent and sexual violence. Some survivors choose to go deep on the research, become a certified rape crisis counselor, earn their Master of Social Work degree, or otherwise advocate for survivors in a technical capacity above and beyond their personal experience. But many do not, and it takes years for those who do. Survivors are not infallible; some of the most damaging, victim-blaming things I’ve heard have come from survivors in the early days of denial or crisis, including myself. The awful things we’ve said are usually more about the internalized shame and doubt we’re feeling about our own story than anyone else.

In Arabella’s case, becoming a warrior-survivor makes her feel strong and safe. Her and Terry’s limited understanding of sexuality causes them to be confused by a gay man wanting to have sex with a woman at all, and she gets hung up on that rather than seeing kinship with Kwame and understanding that sex with men is a safety issue for him at the time. Instead, she sees kinship with the racist, sexist white woman Kwame had the misfortune of hooking up with. At this moment in time, Arabella is more comfortable placing Kwame in a box where all men are perpetrators, and any information not shared is manipulation, rather than viewing him as a fellow survivor.

It’s completely understandable. It’s sadly not all that rare. And it’s completely unfair to Kwame. It’s also the kind of messy dynamic most people would not dare to write, let alone lay at the feet of a lead character who’s a survivor of sexual assault. But there’s more humanity in Coel’s take on survivors as fumbling, imperfect, traumatized beings than some sort of beatified victim persona or the ruined/broken/fallen woman trope. Survivors aren’t perfect or magic; we’re people healing from trauma. And for a decent part of the series, Arabella, like so many of us, is pretending she either has nothing to heal from or that healing isn’t an active pursuit. Wouldn’t it be weirder if we were just completely fine?

Coel captures the difficult phenomenon of social media as a public survivor. The push-pull of receiving much-needed support from unseen online followers, while fending off disturbing efforts from trolls and an inner urge to lean too hard on strangers. Social justice can make a survivor feel powerful, and online activism is the most readily accessible for most survivors. At any time of the day or night, you can send off a tweet or post and hear back from a chorus of support – or not. But like any coping mechanism, it helps until it doesn’t.

Being a public survivor turns you into a beacon for others in need. In many ways it’s a good thing, but receiving dozens of survivor stories every single day can become overwhelming. How do you respond adequately to all of them? How do you connect people to help if they need it? How do you read them all without triggering yourself? Coel deftly shows the realistic downsides of social media activism without lampooning it. It’s not that social media is ineffective, so much as it consumes Arabella. The survivors in her DMs need real professional assistance, something she can’t provide – she’s still going through it herself. As things come to a head toward the end of the season, Coel shows the other side of what it means to be a personality who becomes famous for their social posts on a traumatic topic. Yes, Arabella says a lot of smart things about sexual violence. But Arabella also needs to put down the phone and eat a real meal, get a good night’s sleep, go to group therapy, and spend time in the present tense with her friends.

Finally, there is the show’s ending. One could be forgiven for mistaking I May Destroy You for a whodunnit. After all, the primary question most sexual violence narratives ask are who did it, what exactly did they do, how devastated is the victim, and how will the perpetrator be punished? But in its kaleidoscope of possible endings and Arabella’s command that all of her perpetrator’s various incarnations leave her apartment, she and the show make it clear that this isn’t really about her perpetrator after all. It’s about Arabella, her healing, and the people who make her life full and strong. So she goes to the garden and hugs her neglected roommate Ben, their tending of plants (at publisher Sally’s suggestion) marking the passing of time.

While many survivors desire justice, the law and order portion of surviving is limited, if it exists at all, compared to disclosing to loved ones, getting triggered in public, reevaluating relationships with victim-blamers, having tough conversations about consent, negotiating how to keep a job and housing with lowered productivity – all things Arabella has worked through over the course of the season. Viewers may want to see fire and brimstone, but that would be unrealistic. It also might not even help. And as the various scenarios played out, presumably all versions of how it could have gone down plucked from Arabella’s mind, it’s not like survivors haven’t thought about this before. Instead, a part of her heals and moves on. She doesn’t forget, but she’s not in crisis or living on a knife’s edge anymore. She has enough psychic distance to write her book. She can put her friends’ needs above her own again, when they need her.

The ending may not feel satisfying to everyone, but it’s real. It certainly resonates with me, in spite of the somewhat stressful, chaotic nature of watching her spend so much time in the presence of her perpetrator. These are all very real dynamics that are playing out all the time, and the public conversation is catching up to that. It’s time that our media did too, rather than retreading the same old ground, but it’s not altogether surprising that only someone who’s thought about the topic so deeply would know how. The world of surviving sexual violence is rich with stories and experiences, if only people would actually look. That’s why it’s so frustrating to see the same stories told about this topic over and over again. But when survivors like Michaela Coel are in the driver’s seat, everything changes for the better. In I May Destroy You, she slices through the quaint stories we’re used to hearing, in favor of nervy narratives that reveal queasy truths we might not yet be ready for. One might assume that the show’s title is the perpetrator speaking to Arabella, or vice versa. But as we the audience hide from the truth about rape culture, wrapped up cozily in our own myths and assumptions, it turns out the title is the voice of Coel, speaking head on to all of us, with a glint in her eye.

The post I May Destroy You: a Bold Show Only a Survivor Could Write appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Gavin B. Sullivan, A Critical Psychology of Pride, 21 Int J Crit Psychology 166 (2007)

Pride is a personally and culturally significant feeling that has received little attention in psychology and has largely been examined as a positive emotional product of self-evaluative cognitions. Even when the self and identity are included in such theories, it is rare for psychologists to engage in reflexive consideration of the complexities that result from the experience and expression of pride within and by collectives. Critical examination of the work that references to pride and occurrences of proud feelings ‘do’ in contemporary moral, political and cultural practices is required. Pride can also be understood in terms of ‘waves of emotion’ and in broad connections with shame, racism, marginalization, patriotism. In this paper, critical connections with cultural and other theories of pride and shame are highlighted, followed by a brief analysis of events in Australia and Germany which manifest contradictions and tensions in the background to proud feelings. An important role for critical psychology is argued for in challenging disciplinary boundaries and exploring new directions in the understanding of emotional feelings.

Interest in emotion or affect has spread across and beyond the human sciences as biologists, psychologists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural theorists compete for the legitimacy of pronouncing upon the expressions, experiences, and descriptions of significant feelings. Despite disciplinary borders, it is now possible to explore multiple aspects, features or dimensions of emotion and to consider, for example, the neurobiology of shame in specific social and cultural practices without fear of contradiction or paradox. Considerable tensions – both metaphorical and real – exist between adherents to these perspectives. However, in combination they provide conceptual and empirical resources with which to fashion insightful and compelling theoretical stories which, in turn, may change existing practices. It is in the context of these recent developments that I will explore the possibilities for a critical psychology of pride, including relationships with other significant emotions in public and private life as well as the importance of proud feelings for understanding collective and cultural practices.

When adopting a thoroughly reflexive stance towards the current state of knowledge about pride critical questions arise: How can compelling critical accounts of pride as a self-evaluative emotion and self-conscious affect be fashioned? What features of feelings like pride are beyond the consciousness or control of the individual? What do liminal experiences tell us about people and practices that are exceptions to normative or ‘natural’ senses of pride? What is the role of ‘one eyed’ reporting of national participation in international competitions in creating a positive sense of ‘nation self’? How significant are changing constructions of the imagined observer of events that are reported worldwide? What pleasures, irrationalities and extremes become possible when people merge or even dissolve their identity in a collective? Why do ‘proud’ attachments to notions of nation states persist in a globalised world? What possibilities does critical psychological theorising and investigation of pride and patriotism create in practice?

Given such questions and the need for reflexive interdisciplinary work to be done with regard to ‘our’ feelings, the response will have three parts. The first section will provide a critical account of the methodological, conceptual and epistemological limitations of contemporary psychological theories and empirical research on pride. A central focus in this section will be to critique mainstream work on pride, although alternative theories and research will be included along with accounts of patriotism, group and national pride. The second section explores connections with critical work on pride that is gathered from outside the discipline of psychology.

The author’s use of a Wittgensteinian descriptive übersicht or overview of the grammar of pride provides a starting point from which to explore the elucidatory and elaborative interpretations and generalities of cultural theorists. Rather than follow-up multiple, potentially competing theoretical leads, the third section examines the applicability of the emerging critical psychology of pride to recent events in Australia and Germany. The conclusion provides a summary of possibilities for future critical psychology work on pride and related feelings.

A critique of contemporary pride research

From a psychological perspective, the topic of feelings easily evokes a set of overlapping concepts. It is tempting to connect feeling with sensation and to investigate empirically what this link may indicate about ourselves and others. For example, are the sensations of physiological arousal part of a sequence of bodily changes that result in an emotion, do they accompany particular forms of ‘action tendency’, and do we use these sensations to draw de facto conclusions about ourselves and others (e.g., to infer that I must be experiencing a particular emotion)?

Links can also be made between feelings and judgments, particularly where a range of feelings which are not necessarily identifiable as emotions invite particular judgments. For instance, uncomfortable feelings can tell a person who is in the midst of a patriotic crowd that flag-waving is still the wrong thing to do. An expression of a feeling can also demonstrate an error of judgment which may generate further emotions in others, which then move the offender to conform, defend themselves or deny a particular reality. In contemporary parlance, feelings are thought to contain information which may have been biologically encoded to serve a social purpose and also to form relatively discrete ‘objects’ of individual reflexive cognition and other forms of self-referential ‘emotion work’ (Rosenberg, 1990). Judgment, in turn, implies forms of cognition which range from machine-like processes which take place outside of consciousness to agentic self-reflection which are more conversational or dialogical in nature.

Feelings can also be performed and aligned in collective forms that can be contradicted by discourses of ‘emotional contagion’. For instance, an individual’s performance of national pride in a passionate sporting crowd may be treated, somewhat dismissively, as a product of powerful social influence. It is relevant too that the general public now expect their political representatives to literate in the use emotion ‘vocabularies’ and techniques (Squire, 2001; i.e., to capture accurately or to convey the ‘mood’ of a nation). Despite the a priori relevance of discourse to understanding one’s own and other’s emotions, accounts of emotion words as ‘labels’ for inner feelings persist in much of the psychological literature. However, social constructionist and discourse analytic alternatives invite criticisms that the embodiment of feeling is important only where it becomes a topic of talk that ‘does something’ in individuals and collectives (e.g., praise unintentionally embarrasses the recipient). Cultural theory analyses of emotion often produce important insights, but even recognition of culture as a ‘cognitive resource’ is typically regarded by mainstream psychologists as a shift from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ science (Bem and de Jong, 2007, p. 210).

Exploration of multiple dimensions or modalities of emotional feelings can lead to contradictory emphases. Hochschild (1990) succinctly captures a central paradox: ‘a feeling is what happens to us... yet it is also what we do to make it happen’ (p.120). Just as it is important to avoid extreme conceptual vacillations between the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in psychology, so it is important to avoid extremes of subjectivity and objectivity in understanding feelings and analysing emotions. Theoretical conflicts between positions on emotion in which ‘reality constructs person’ and ‘person constructs reality’ (Buss, 1978) need to be avoided if clear understanding of particular emotional feelings like pride is to be achieved.

Rather than adopting a middle ground theoretical solution, it is possible to build upon Wittgenstein’s (1978) way of ‘treating’ paradoxes (i.e., self-contradictory stances about emotion in psychology): ‘Something surprising, a paradox, is a paradox only in a particular, as it were defective surrounding. One needs to complete this surrounding in such a way that what looked like a paradox no longer seems one’ (Wittgenstein, 1978, p. 410).

By ‘complete this surrounding’, Wittgenstein can be taken to mean an examination of the detail of language use in relation to practices such as judging the genuineness of another’s emotions (Wittgenstein, 1958). Wittgenstein’s descriptive philosophical approach is an important counter to the type of theoretical excesses and generalities that allow emotional feelings to be regarded mostly as ‘social constructions’ or as largely ‘involuntary products’ of causal-cognitive or biological mechanisms.

Although Wittgenstein’s philosophy is often taken to represent a negative and destructive approach to philosophical and other theories, there is much to be gained from using his later philosophy as a starting point in a critical psychology of feeling. Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument provides a convincing demolition of a central Western individual picture of sensation, feeling and emotion as ‘private objects’ that are the referents of public linguistic ‘labels’. Rejecting the object-label view of first-person feeling words, provides a strong basis for examining how language actually works to express, replace and ascribe feelings in context. A picture of the autonomous individual is deconstructed and the way is opened for a more nuanced consideration of language and relational features of psychological experience. The grammatical approach not only encourages the charting of first-person language use (e.g., of a concept like pride) but also other grammatical forms including the expression and description of feelings in second-person and third-person language, and in both singular and plural forms. The implication is that language of feeling can be explored in all forms of relationships, from the interpersonal to the collective and national and the imaginary (i.e., different forms in which ‘we’ and ‘they’ are experienced and expressed).

This stance is not without controversy as language-based approaches to emotion encouraged by Wittgenstein’s (1958) ordinary language stance have been regarded, perhaps unfairly, as politically and morally neutral. The emphasis on description also displays an apparent disdain for theory in any domain. Critics argue that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and the discursive psychology he inspired lack the critical realism required to make reflexive moral and political judgments about the experiences, judgments and practices of others (see Gill, 1995). It may appear that an exploration of ordinary language use of feeling concepts fails to focus on private feelings or complex experiences (e.g., of vacillating or ambivalent emotions)1, and largely ignores the experiences of marginalised individuals. Instead, it appears to prioritise and examine only one ‘modality’ through which emotions are created and refined. To put this point in a way that draws upon the history of emotion, such a stance seems to encourage the view that we only need to focus on ‘emotion standards’ and how their cultural articulations change and not the feeling or experiences themselves (Bourke, 2005).

Despite these potential objections, Wittgenstein provides cogent criticisms of the psychology of feeling that afford a critical analysis of pride and still allows for connections with critical theories to be created. Wittgenstein’s critical approach is useful because it contrasts with the subject-object distinction of Descartes and the sensitivity to language use in context encourages alternatives to a Darwinian biological focus. Although social constructionists argued against the biological approaches which at one time dominated psychology (see Harré, 1986), even Darwin (1872/1999) indicated that emotions like pride and shame were dependent on social circumstances: ‘Our self-attention is excited almost exclusively by the opinion of others, for no person living in absolute solitude would care about his appearance’ (p. 342). However, Darwin indirectly devalued pride when he noted that ‘everyone feels blame more acutely than praise’ (p. 342), particularly when it concerns our personal appearance. He suggested further that ‘whenever we know, or suppose, that others are depreciating our personal appearance, our attention is strongly drawn towards ourselves, more especially to our faces’ (p. 342). The extended examination of Darwin is important here because his work continues to provide a focal point for the rival of interest in pride in recent mainstream psychological and cultural theory.

With regard to psychology, the literature on pride is relatively limited in comparison to accounts of other specific emotions. The work of Weiner (1989), Lewis (1999), and Tracy and Robins (2004a) typifies mainstream theories which are thought to improve upon the Darwinian account. That is, Darwin provided an initial explanation of the way in which shame and embarrassment are expressed in a facial ‘glow’, presumably downgrading the evolutionary significance of the opposite experience in the process. Through a focus on the face, Darwin believed that shame (or embarrassment) had a universal basis, in contrast to pride which has no distinctive universal facial expression.2 The central idea behind cognitive appraisal theory, articulated earlier by Lewis (1999) in the context of developmental psychology, is that pride is experienced when a person evaluates themselves or their actions as having reached or exceeded certain internal representations of standards, rules or goals. This account contrasts with Darwin’s evolutionary account of blushing in which the physiological relaxation of the facial capillaries has ‘become so habitual, in association with the belief that others are thinking of us’ that it can occur without ‘any conscious thought about our faces’ (p. 343). On this view, there is a certain involuntariness and automaticity in the way proud feelings are thought to occur in everyday life. As with Darwin’s account, the cognitive appraisal theory of pride tends to undermine the active person in a social context even though new notions of mechanisms are used to explain how thought generates feelings, apparently without thought. In all of this, a physiological feeling or arousal ‘component’ is central because a mere cognitive act or judgment is unlikely to move the person to engage in prosocial (achievement or moral) behaviour.

This type of theory focuses on what might also be called selfish emotions – emotions that characterise an individual with a self – in terms of the individual outcome of social and presumably cultural interactions: ‘the primary distinctive characteristic of self-conscious emotions is that their elicitation requires the ability to form stable self-representations (me), to focus attention on those representations (i.e., to self-reflect; I), and to put it all together to generate a self-evaluation’ (Tracy and Robins, 2004a, p. 105). Other theoretical perspectives are possible, but they remain marginalized. For example, in contrast to a simplistic view of others as internalised, theorists inspired by Vygotsky argue that it is interaction-based interest in others mediated by appropriately nuanced and mediated social interaction, which provides the prerequisite for feelings like pride. Such an analysis does not need to rely on the logical prerequisite of internal cognitive representations of a world of people, things and events because the representations emerge relationally (see also Scheff, 2000).3

An individualised and asocial view of the person and identity is maintained in cognitive-appraisal theory (i.e., social practices are excluded from view; Parrott, 2004). Indeed, the focus on the self and self-representations approaches solipsism in that the individual internalises societal standards in a one-way process of increasing autonomy. The self exists in a manner that resembles Wittgenstein’s (1961) early view which he later rejected: namely, the self as a point in a field (rather like the eye that surveys a particular area) in which solipsism and realism merge (i.e., the limits of the world are the limits of my experiential language and the world of the happy man is said to be different from that of the sad man). However, when we consider that individuals move through the world and relationships, rather than merely internalising and representing reality as they become more autonomous, then it makes sense to picture differently the relationships between individuals and the ‘objects’ of their pride. For example, patriotism or being proud of ‘my country’ is not simply a cognitive incorporation of external reality. Rather, the experience of national pride is something that occurs with others, often in particular settings. More importantly, the development of pride is not simply a one-way internalisation process because there is also the potential for various forms of externalisation of thoughts, feelings and practices (e.g., in therapy for low self-esteem). A person’s expressions of pride in the context of a relationship can transform that relationship, putting a certificate on a wall can implicitly invite comments from others, and pride can be felt as a result of years of moral and political leadership within an organization (indeed a person may become a symbol and personification of organisation’s pride).

Highlighting some of the oversimplified assumptions that underlie the cognitive account, Tracy and Robins (2004a) summarise the general model: ‘Put simply, society tells us what kind of person we should be; we internalise these beliefs in the form of actual and ideal self-representations; and self-conscious emotions motivate behavioral action toward the goals embodied in these self-representations’ (p. 107).

Although there is an awareness that ‘self-conscious emotions may be expressed more frequently through language than through nonverbal expressions’ (p. 108), this fact is still presented within a cognitive framework (with evolutionary backing) in which language has evolved to supplement existing expressive behaviours and their natural historical functions. Moreover, agency seems to be allowed only in the form of the ‘messages’ conveyed by pride which are, in contrast to basic emotions, ‘perhaps allow for more deliberate processing and the production of linguistic forms of conversation’ (p. 108). The authors appear to be unaware of the genesis of shame and an ‘empty self ’ in early experiences of invalidation and abuse (Sullivan and Strongman, 2003; Meares and Sullivan, 2004), as well as the manner in which therapy can encourage positive feelings to emerge in a conversational and relational manner.

The limited reflection on the intimate connections between language, agency and self-consciousness, extends to identity and culture. For example, identity-goal congruence is included in accounts of positive self-evaluation, but such process models only allow for complexity in identity from two sources: 1) when there might be a conflict with a survival-goal, and two, and 2) when an individual might experience a feeling like national pride ‘because the event is congruent with his or her ideal collective self-representations’ (p. 116). To put this point in another way, the question ‘are you proud?’ even in a specific situation does not highlight the relation between the person and the object of pride (e.g., if other than oneself). It is more appropriate to ask ‘what are you proud of?’, and the possible answers need not threaten a coherent sense of self. That is, an individual can be proud of their house, their car, their family, their country, their workplace in ways that do not generally contradict each other or imply a fragmented or distributed self. My point here is not to ignore a rich history of accounts of the self and identity in psychology, but rather to highlight the way in which cognitive accounts actively exclude full consideration of such social and linguistic connections.

Similarly, the importance of culture in relation to pride is often limited to consideration of our evolutionary past in which complex and hierarchical social arrangements demanded new forms of social understanding. A few comments about collectivist self are also limited to the way in which the individual appraises how events reflect upon his or her family, rather than just him or herself. Tracy and Robins (2004a), for example, offer the unconvincing analysis that if an athlete ‘represents the individual’s country in the Olympics, then the individual might experience national pride because “My nation is good at sports”’ (p. 116).4 A vocabulary of sequences and processes is preferred to any investigation of how feelings, such as national pride and patriotism, occur in particular cultural and historical periods as individual and collective phenomena. Related feelings of collective guilt and shame are only now beginning to appear in the mainstream literature, along with accounts of pride as a moral emotion (e.g., see Tangeny, Stuewig, and Mashek, 2007). Cultural differences cannot be so easily be reduced to cognitive interpretation as Mascolo and Bhatia (2002) have pointed out in relation to pride in Indian families. For example, they highlight the importance of different values, ideologies and myths. Similarly, although they employ traditional psychological methods,5 Rodriguez Mosquera, Manstead, and Fischer (2000) have demonstrated that pride is experienced and experienced very differently in an honour-related culture such as Spain. However, it is clear from patterns of citations that such social, relational and cultural accounts of pride are actively excluded from the emerging mainstream literature.

Connections with critical and cultural theories of pride

Given the limitations of mainstream psychological accounts of pride, an outline can be provided of critical psychology alternatives. Language and the study of historical and cultural contexts should be central to any alternative account which also needs to be reflexive about psychology’s current practices and problems. As with the previous section, the aim is not to produce a general account of emotion which can then be applied to or tested by examining the details of pride. Instead, the aim is to examine work that focuses on pride and the subject, where the latter is considered in relational, psychodynamic and self-regulatory terms (Henriques et al., 1984). Without this interest in the detail of pride, there is an ever present danger of defaulting to a general model of self- conscious emotion (e.g., Lewis, 1999) or theorising proud feelings only in terms of what their implications for understanding broader topics of gender, race, sexuality, nationality, marginalisation, oppression, politics, and globalization (some important connections are, however, described later in this paper).

There are few cultural studies that focus attention specifically on pride while managing the tensions between different approaches. However, Probyn’s (2005) analysis of shame provides a direct indication of relevant issues for a critical psychology of pride, and indicates the need to examine the relationships between pride and other feelings (i.e., in contrast to viewing these as separate areas or ‘objects’ for research). This is important because the psychological literature tends to view emotions like pride, shame, anger, and fear in isolation. A positive account of pride is assumed rather than explored: if ‘pride is accepted and even vaunted, surely we must also acknowledge our individual and collective shame’ (p. xiv). The connections are important because an individual may attempt to overcome the shame of a marginalised identity, for example, by later acts that create some sense of personal value, individual triumph or superiority.

As is often noted in the context of psychotherapy, these feelings can occur outside of consciousness while at the same time being experienced as they are embodied. For example, an individual may not be aware that he or she reacts with angry defiance, what might be called a defiant pride, when one’s identity or origins are devalued. In addition, an arrogant person may have some awareness of their tone of voice or the angle of the head as consistent with a certain superiority, but may be unaware of the social forces that reinforce this ‘habitus’ and way of enacting the past (Probyn, 2005). In the psychological literature, this issue has recently been explored as an important connection between posture and proud feelings (Roberts and Arefi-Afshar, 2007) and as a fundamental distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘hubristic’ pride (Tracy and Robins, in press). However, investigations of this type fail to consider that the boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘extreme’ pride can shift over time as well as how the criteria are regulated in particular social and cultural groups, and what types of strategies and processes that might be used, directly or otherwise, to encourage an individual to ‘self-regulate’ their superiority (e.g., strategies using shame or guilt).

Probyn’s analysis of the corporeal blush of shame implies an account in which pride can be involuntary, automatic and unexpected as a result of conscious pursuit of particular goals, without necessarily returning to the traditional problems of determinism, causality, reductionism or essentialism. In other words, while some features of pride such as celebrating one’s success in words and gestures or reacting to praise from others may appear to become ‘automatised’ and have bodily features that can difficult if not impossible to control, this automatisation still ‘does not entail that these actions have become involuntary’ (Shanker, 1993, p. 234). This perspective does not allow for any simplistic notion of internalisation of social, relational contexts to the point of autonomy or cognitive determination of feeling. Instead, feelings can reflect one’s place (e.g., discomfort with positive attention despite a positive view of one’s actions or achievements), reinforce notions of nation and unity through a shared focus on events or people (e.g., a collective watching members of one’s group achieve international success in a public setting), evoke early attachments in unexpected ways (e.g., when seeing familiar symbols when overseas for the first time), and encourage like feelings through engagement in similar activities (even though specific thoughts and feelings may differ considerably), encode specific ways of expressing feelings of personal triumph and demonstrate, for some individuals, that they have exceeded societal notions of what a good sporting body can achieve (Probyn, 2000).

But what other prospects are there for critical connections to be forged? Work such as Probyn’s suggests how the relations between pride and shame can be embodied and articulated. Rather than treating pride and shame as opposite, we can explore how they are connected, such as where a person uses pride to ward off or replace shame. The following example shows how this may be achieved discursively. An Australian political leader registered his shame after sexually harassing female journalists and making racist remarks about the wife of a colleague: ‘I’m not at all proud for what I’ve done. They were the sort of acts that I’m not proud of and will never be proud of’ (ABC TV Lateline, 29 August 2005). The example is interesting because it seems that although he engaged in such acts he did not think that they could be valued positively by anyone, not least himself. Such discursive management occurs in many other settings where individuals manage their identities – rather than evaluating themselves as achieving identity-congruent goals – exposed to the gaze of a broader public.

The example of New Zealander golf player Michael Campbell who won the American Open in 2005, demonstrates the complexity of emotional management, reconstruction of a personal narrative as a success and recognition of a new role as a spokesperson for New Zealanders and, particularly, for Maori. At a press conference,6 Campbell clearly struggles to maintain composure as he is asked to relive his moment of victory and its significance. When asked to recall what his caddy said to him, he says: ‘and the words we exchanged was that he said “you’ve made a lot of people back home very very proud” (excuse me) and I got pretty emotional again – I lost it completely’.

At this point he follows immediately with:

but we have the understanding that ahh lot of Maori people back home are – are trodden on ahh they’re very much a race that some- times get very lazy – I admit to that too you know you go through phases where they get very complacent but umm but then they turn they – you turn your whole career around very quickly once again it’s like any sport we play any humans that we play – that play the sport we sometimes get a little bit lazy and ahh I’d be the first to admit to that.

The complexity of the work that is being done discursively and in a very public way seems quite at odds with the very simplified account of the standard cognitive appraisal view of identity and pride. Moreover, there are vacillations between ‘I’ and ‘they’ (rather than ‘we’) which seem uncomfortable for Campbell and they end with an admission of occasional laziness. There are also political overtones to the description of Maori as ‘trodden on’ and as a ‘race...that sometimes get very lazy’. Here it seems that Probyn’s (2005) remark that ‘shame makes an appearance only in discussions about pride, and then only as a shameful feeling’ (p. 2) is insightful. However, there is also something that is never mentioned in research on pride, that being the ‘first person of a group to achieve x’, especially against a background of limited opportunities, oppression or marginalisation, is a very important occasion. Such moments need to be included in any account of pride that recognises both past injustice and the cultural significance of positive experiences.7, 8

However, it is possible that the connection between shame and pride is overstated. For example, it may not always be the case that an emerging sense of autonomy must always overcome a shameful past:

National pride, black pride, gay pride, and now fat pride are all projects premised on the eradication of shame. As political projects, they clearly, and often with very good reasons, denounce shame. Increasingly, there is a sense that pride is an entitlement, a state we will all achieve once we have overcome our nagging feelings of shame and once society becomes a place where no one shames another (p. 2).

The topic of identity politics has explored the transformational potential of pride and, to a lesser extent, exposed the lack of grounds for a reading based on a right to pride, except in instances of oppression or denial. Britt and Heise (2000) note ‘prideful behavior occupies public space, or more simply, involves public display’ (p. 253). While this account may help to explain some of the further examples of pride and shame in the next section, other manifestations of ‘identity politics’ are relevant. That is, for someone to ‘walk tall’ in a particular space, presumably one needs to feel that one owns that space or belongs there.

Work by critical psychologists may provide the detail that complicates explanations of ‘converted shame to pride’ that rely on older notions of collective emotional contagion. The latter is evident in Britt and Heise’s (2000) account of shamed individuals who seek such conversion: ‘These individuals get pulled into demonstrations through network ties and crowd contagion. The collective public display of their stigma develops empathic solidarity and pride’ (p. 267).

And:

The emotional transformation likely does not end with pride. Pride may be regenerated repeatedly through collective public displays, and that may be necessary to erase earlier feelings of shame, but ultimately individuals come to accept the stigmatised identity as simply another component of the self. Pride is a prerequisite to acceptance of the identity, and the threshold to its de-emotionalisation (p. 267).

Whether de-emotionalisation is possible through pride is an open question because the alternative sounds odd, if not impossible: namely to be proud of being ashamed.

However, this is precisely what Ahmed (2005) suggests is possible in her cultural politics of emotion. Her position is built upon the some of the same events recounted by Probyn. That is, within the context of reconciliation with the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, she notes that ‘being moved by the past seems better than the process of remaining detached from the past, or assuming that the past has “nothing to do with us”’ (p. 72). Personal responsibility is not required as it is enough to know that you are identified and included within this domain of reference of the nation. The interesting claim is that ‘shame may be restorative only when the shamed other can ‘show’ that its failure to measure up to a social ideal is temporary’ (p. 76). Indeed, Ahmed (2005) notes that shame has the potential to ‘make the nation’:

By witnessing what is shameful about the past, the nation can ‘live up to’ the ideals that secure its identity or being in the present.9 In other words, our shame means that we can mean well, and can work to reproduce the nation as an ideal. The transference of bad feeling to the subject in shame is only temporary, as the ‘transference’ itself becomes evidence of the restoration of an identity of which we can be proud (p. 77).

A counter to this reading, however, is the example of pride and shame in present-day Germany. Until recently, a pervasive culture of shame and self-surveillance constantly threatened to destabilise any sense of unity, confidence, or positive identity. For example, there has been considerable attention in Germany devoted to the significance of the Wir-gefühl, a feeling of togetherness or unity, and euphorie that emerged during the 2006 World Cup and the wave of positive patriotism which was revived during the 2007 Handball World Championships. The intention here is not to use Ahmed’s analysis to undermine the positive feelings that emerged in Germany and which seemed to surprise many Germans. Rather, Ahmed indicates that if serious restitution of the nation as ideal is the political aim, then the rhetoric needs to be matched by financial and moral reparation.

Further issues in a critical psychology of pride

The desire to ‘pass through shame’ (Ahmed, 2005) by demonstrating one’s virtues to oneself as well as to international civil society may avoid the real, economic pain required to ‘repair the costs of injustice’ (p. 82). Thus, the rhetoric of feeling and the political apologies may also need to acknowledge that resources also will establish the autonomy or provide the reparation that will encourage collective pride. For Germans this seems to have emerged from taking seriously the notion of being a good European nation in everyday political life. Other concerns about low national morale are less concerned with a positive self-image for the sake of it, and more to do with using pride to encourage innovation, improve economic conditions and reduce forms of poverty that can be a breeding ground for nationalistic identities and prejudice (see Miller-Idriss, 2006).

The recent euphoria in Germany is therefore very different to the situation in developing countries such as South Africa which are often not surveyed for international ‘league tables’ of national pride (see Evans and Kelly, 2002). Rather, in 1994 it was reported that ‘the anecdotal evidence is so strong that there can be no doubt that black South Africans perceived the “election miracle” as personal as well as collective triumph after years of oppression’ (Dickow and Møller, 2002, p. 178). Their more recent findings indicate that white South Africans who could not identify with national achievements in sport were amongst the least happiest individuals in the country. More importantly, the black and coloured majority appears to be experiencing the gap between the early national optimism and the current failure of genuine social and political change to address material and infrastructure problems. The World Cup in 2010 in South Africa may therefore turn out to be a good example of the manner in which being the focus of world attention and possibly sporting success addresses a ‘binding problem’ within the nation without necessarily introducing new form of ‘boundary problem’ (i.e.,, new conceptualizations or imaginings of a competing ‘other’ or ‘others’ who wish to impede the success of one’s nation and thereby become temporary objects for the expression of disappointment and anger).

Of much more importance is the recognition that pride created through international sporting victories is undermined by material and social inequity. This seems to be the point that Billig (1995) has made in relation to the ubiquitous discourse of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that we often fail to notice in everyday life. On this account, it is not any experience of a ‘peak’ of national pride that will effect important personal and social changes, although things may feel different and there may be new confidence about what South Africa can collectively achieve in other forms of global competition. Rather, it is the continual background ‘flagging’ of nationality that recreates the boundary and ‘surface’ (Ahmed, 2005) conditions that may, in future circumstances, be resisted as new connections and collective bodies are formed. Such a focus may be complemented by the exploration of how children learn the ‘habitus’ of enduring dispositional connections between personal and collective pride. There are a range of practices that position children as ideal subjects for induction into the realm of the proud nation, in addition to practices which increasingly target high self-esteem as the real source of disorder (see Emler, 2001). Although such constructions can appear to be positive and progressive (e.g., not just celebrating what is unique and good about the country but also talking about how ‘we are all different’), there can also leave little room for criticism and the maintenance of other identities.

With regard to the politicisation of children’s feelings and identities, very quickly children learn what not to talk about as well as which figures are regarded as appropriate local and national heroes. However, such educational practices which aim to create a positive sense of pride does not stop those same ‘heroes’ being evoked towards actions that are destructive and even shameful. Moreover, the ‘flagging’ of the nation in small language may not contain and control tensions between groups that claim to represent the nation and others that feel excluded from it (Billig, 1995). In Australia, for instance, the ideological complexities of distinguishing between ‘healthy’ patriotism and ‘unhealthy’ nationalistic love for one’s country, were displayed internationally. In 2005, riots occurred in the Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla between predominantly white residents of Cronulla and Lebanese youths who lived in surrounding suburbs and regularly visited the beach. The basis of the riots was a feeling of ownership of the beach by the Cronulla youths, and a feeling that the Lebanese youths were ‘taking over’. During the riots some of the ‘Australian’ youths wore Australian flags as capes and pride was evoked to shape the nation’s understanding of the violence, mayhem and bad feeling produced. The explicit use of flags, media images of ‘100% Aussie Pride’ written large on the beach and talk of a ‘battle’ to defend the beach in language that evoked first world war Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) myths, did not appear to reflect the range of feelings involved: excitement, anger, hatred, triumph, satisfaction, fear.

The riots were not just about intolerance and racial insensitivity in a neighbourhood of Sydney, which might have been treated with traditional analysis of emotional contagion, loss of individual identity and the need for restoration of control by the state. These were also events that led to international attention and feelings of embarrassment (or shame if the riots were seen as revealing something deeper about Australia). The national narrative of tolerance failed to match the reality of ethnic tensions and feelings of exclusion. Forms of analysis that can identify cultural shifts from patriotism to nationalism if collective manifestations of changing feelings are to be understood (e.g., distancing comments that ‘they’ don’t represent ‘us’). It is possible that forms of ‘moral panic’ can occur depending upon whether negative national events register as newsworthy on CNN and BBC World. In contrast, the largely positive euphoria in Germany surrounding the 2006 World Cup also invited reflection about what this meant and how it would be viewed by national neighbours and the world (e.g., would it help or hinder the recruitment of new members by Neo-Nazi groups).

Against the background of Australian race relations and failure to fully address shameful past practices, Probyn (2005) indicates how the government can assume a central role in constructionist of national feeling which manifest class divisions. Particularly, she notes that: ‘those who disagree with aspects of the past and present government cannot admit to any national pride, and those who disparage any admission of guilt become the flag wavers of pride’ (Probyn, 2005, p. 46). It is not always the case that experiences of pride or shame remain fixed in the flux of possible objects of pride which include material objects, other individuals and abstract notions such as pride (balanced also by previous experiences of individual or collective shame, embarrassment or guilt). For example, the success of the Australian soccer team at the 2006 World Cup seemed to generate more genuine unity through what was then a marginal, ‘migrant’ sport than any post-Cronulla political or social initiative. After the euphoria of meeting or surpassing expectations for success, of course, persistent problems can return to awareness (coupled sometimes with repression of guilty feelings about excessive nationalistic celebrations). There is considerable potential for the emotion of reaching a standard to quickly give way to the somewhat less positive emotions that involve maintaining that standard. If there is the potential for pride to be taken from a treatment of past sources of shame, then there is also the possibility for pride to be found in maintaining some core of value. Historical examples of connections between pride, fear and scapegoating can serve as a useful reminder of this points, as well as suggesting the potential for a cultural history of pride. For example, in Bourke’s (2005) cultural history of fear there is an account of reactions to a crowd disaster in the east end of London during an air raid in the Second World War. Bourke notes that many of the individuals refused to acknowledge that ‘we did this to ourselves’. Instead various ‘others’ were blamed for the resulting deaths in a narrative that maintained a view of proud British civilian resilience.

Conclusion

A consistent thread in this critical psychology of pride has been individual experiences and expressions of proud feelings against the background of broader linguistic, social and cultural forces. Examples of theories and research on pride were explored in order to avoid any tendency to apply general accounts of self-conscious emotions or notions of class, race, gender and nation to an under- standing of proud feelings. An initial Wittgensteinian critique of Darwinian biological and cognitive-individualistic theories was provided, and early accounts of pride’s ‘embodiment’ were explored. Darwin’s elevation of shame and devaluation of pride was highlighted as a seminal point in the subsequent failure to address pride adequately in psychological theory and research. The critique of contemporary psychological studies indicated that many ignore important social, linguistic, performative and relational features of pride. Dual challenges were identified for individual and collective accounts of pride. Accounts of the individual should integrate dialogical approaches to self with recognition of embodiment that can lead to relatively automatic feelings and dispositions (i.e., reac- tions which have features that are difficult to control and which can also be experienced as ‘surprising’). Accounts of collective proud feelings need to highlight how self-regulation of healthy and unhealthy pride are constructed, including an analysis of the ideologies and social forces that facilitate, reinforce, undermine and reconfigure emotional experiences of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Notes

See Sullivan and Strongman (2003) for an extended conceptual-discursive account of vacillating and mixed emotions which uses pride as an example. The analysis builds upon remarks by Wittgenstein to challenge cognitive-appraisal theories and applies these ideas to the conceptualisation of psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder.

However, Tracey and Robins (2004b) have argued on the basis of experiments using posed photographs that pride might still be rendered a universal emotion because there is a natural expression (i.e., expanded posture and raised arms).

There seem to be two major difficulties for the development of a thorough Vygotskyan or sociocultural theory of pride and self-conscious emotions. First, there is very little in Vygotsky’s developmental writings about feelings and emotion, although the potential is implied at the end of Thought and Language. It is important to note here, however, that the author has not read Vygotsky’s writings on Spinoza. Second, the research focusing on public, private and inner speech tends not to examine the crucial role of feelings and feeling language. Twos exception are work by Reissland and Harris (1991) which appears to have been ignored by cognitive and developmental psychologists. More recent work by based on Wittgenstein and Vygotsky has the potential to contribute to a new understanding which is linguistic and relational (see Carpendale and Lewis, 2004). However, such work must still include and require considerable work to be conducted around how ‘automatic’ emotion reactions are private and ‘condensed’ forms of previous internal and external conversations.

National pride is often thought to have two overlapping components: the nationalism component is regarded as a predictor of out group prejudice and can be constructed in a ‘banal’ manner (Billig, 1995) whereas patriotism seems to be mostly positive and tolerates a range of feelings about other groups (de Figueiredo Jr. and Elkins, 2003). Using traditional empirical social science techniques, the latter authors concluded that while both nationalists and patriots ‘are alike in their deep esteem for the nation’, nevertheless it is the patriots who ‘tend to be tolerant and generous towards nonnatives’ (p. 187). The difference, very broadly, appears to be in the way that nationalists view their country as above all others which creates the space for feelings of victimisation.

A further reminder of Wittgenstein’s (1958) relevance here is his general criticism that methods in psychology and conceptual issues of fundamental importance often pass one another by. In this case, a Wittgensteinian philosophical perspective which engages with psychological theories and recognises important methodological limitations can do much to move forward our understanding of pride; despite claims that methods and theories inspired by realism are more likely to create insights about the real individual and collective forces responsible for particular word choices, narratives and symbols.

Transcript with discourse analysis notations produced from files available at http://www.usopen.com/2005/news/interviews/campbell_sun.html

There would appear to be considerable potential to produce a cultural and critical account of pride that examines features of the experience and expression of such collective emotions. For example, a careful examination and extension of Frederickson’s (2003) broaden and build psychology theory of positive emotion.

In the third section of the paper, some of the issues surrounding subsequent shameful and prideful events will occur. These could be considered in quite narrow terms as the effects that sequences of major negative and positive events can have in narratives of nations for public consumption as well as how these . For example, Probyn (2005) describes the events in Australia some three years after the reports on the removal of Aboriginal children and the ongoing political and moral ramifications (described mainly as ‘very public expressions of shame’): Not long afterward, while those feelings still simmered, the celebration of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney provided another distilled moment of public feeling. It came to a head when the Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman won a gold medal for the 400-meter race. As she ran her lap of honor wrapped in both the Australian and the Aboriginal flags, the nation cried with joy. (p. 6). Several interesting points are worth making here. Cathy Freeman seemingly placed the interests of aboriginal peoples of Australia above all Australians when she ran a victory lap at the 1994 Commonwealth Games with an aboriginal flag. At the time this caused some heated reactions as well as support for her actions.

9. An important grammatical reminder here with regard to identity is that we are not only ‘proud of ’ ourselves or others but also ‘proud to be’ a particular identity or identities. Interestingly, the tautological nature of much South African pride ‘I am proud to be who I am’ which does not identify characteristics or ideals is a form of pride that seems to avoid any type of justification (Steingo, 2005). Steingo bases this analysis on ‘a set of ideas or expressions that occur with remarkable frequency in conversation, written texts, TV and radio broadcasting’ (p. 198), but it is possible that this discourse is based upon a notion of the ‘right to pride’ as so fundamental that no justification is required.

I have not written about feminist accounts of pride and shame possibly because, as Probyn (2005) implies, I have been shamed into silence.

It would have been possible to explore many other examples of pride. There are useful critical accounts of emerging pride in South Africa (Steingo, 2005), the relationship between pride and multiculturalism in Britain (Fortier, 2005), and nationalism in China (Gries, 2004) or the need for critical work on the links between patriotism and a politics of fear in US foreign policy. Moreover, the international ‘league tables’ of pride give very little indication of these facts can be read (see Smith and Kim, 2006), except perhaps to indicate how normative expressions of collective national pride presently are. These international comparisons seem to mark out some nations either as lacking a ‘national self-esteem’ or the confidence to compete and achieve internationally, rather than being ‘humble’ or avoiding self-aggrandisement. In addition, the questions are often very simple and the standard criticisms of quantitative survey research apply: namely, what do the numbers actually mean?

NewsMavens shows how different the world looks when women choose the news

The notion of what does and does not constitute “news” is a highly subjective one – but growing evidence is emerging to suggest that women and men prioritise stories differently.

For the past two years, an international news website titled NewsMavens has been examining how news agendas might change if only women, and not men, were dominant in making the key calls on which stories are given highest profile and how those stories are angled. It identified a fundamental difference in perspectives between the genders.

“Men have a tendency to look at the top of the pyramid, at the big players both in business and politics, the power players who make the decisions that affect the rest of the world,” says Zuzanna Ziomecka, head of NewsMavens. “What women bring is a look at what happens lower down – the consequences of those decisions and how they affect people on the street.”

The NewsMavens project, which has been backed by Google and its Digital News Initiative fund, has grown to a team of 30 female journalists representing countries from all over Europe. It has support and partnerships with many large European news brands, including Italy’s La Repubblica, The Irish Times, Spain’s El País, and Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, where Ziomecka is based.

For two years the women journalists have been creating “an alternative front page” by identifying and republishing the stories from across Europe that most resonate with them, and then monitoring how those issues are received by an online audience which is 90 per cent female.

Adriana Petriczko, who worked on social media for NewsMavens, suggests a possible link between traditional news values and divisions in society. “The general mood in male-dominated newsrooms is treating news as sport and looking for the clashes and conflicts and competition,” she says. “The kind of news that our curators were selecting was more about what is behind the clashes – the personal stories and trends. Speaking generally, male-dominated newsrooms are looking for who said what against whom – it’s not very productive and it causes tensions.”

NewsMavens found that readers responded profoundly to stories that showed a systemic failure of women, such as a Dutch Christian organisation that forced 15,000 women into unpaid labour, or the legal loophole that allowed five Spanish men who gang-raped an 18-year-old woman to be charged only with sexual abuse because of a lack of evidence of violence.

Ziomecka says that rape stories had a “disproportionate impact” on reader traffic. “In most countries there is a huge discrepancy between the number of instances of harassment and the number that get reported to police. Most women know that.”

In its “FemFacts” column (a sub-project supported by the European Commission), NewsMavens highlights examples of mainstream media prejudice in coverage of women; such as a Croatian mother accused in the press of spoiling her daughter’s wedding by bringing charges against the estranged husband who slapped her at the ceremony; or the way media took its angle for covering the killing of a 22-year-old British woman in a Swiss hotel this year by endorsing the suspect’s claim that the death resulted from a “sex game gone wrong”. Ziomecka says: “We are looking for slant, misrepresentation, manipulation of facts, stereotypes.”

NewsMavens ends as a project at the end of this month, but it has inspired a European network of female journalists who will continue to report on specific issues on a pan-Continental basis.

This approach is important, Ziomecka believes, in showing how apparently localised issues – such as obstetricians performing gynaecological procedures without anaesthetic – might be shown to be part of a European problem. “The potential of surfacing macro-continental trends is a goldmine,” she says. One of the things we don’t do in the European Union is we don’t share enough. We don’t share mistakes we have made to help other members of the EU avoid them.”

NewsMavens raises questions over the need for both improved gender balance in newsrooms and greater consideration of the interests of the female news audience.

A starting point for the project was a critical piece of work by The International Women’s Media Foundation, titled Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media. The 2011 study found that only 27% of top management jobs and just 36% of reporting positions were held by women.

Ziomecka had the idea for NewsMavens and was supported by Jerzy Wójcik, publishing director of Gazeta Wyborcza, a progressive Polish daily created 30 years ago, following the overthrow of communism. Ziomecka was head of digital for the paper’s women’s supplement, Wysokie Obcasy, which covers current affairs and social issues from a women’s perspective. “We thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to give Europe a women’s perspective on current affairs as well – that’s where the idea was born,” she says. The plan was championed by Ludovic Blecher, now head of innovation for the Google News Initiative. “Although the idea was mine, and the project is peopled almost exclusively by women, the key people who made it possible were men.”

Building the pan-European project was not easy. “It was a hard sell – I was no one and there was no telling what the project might turn out to be,” says Ziomecka of her “mail-bombing” attempt to use emails to attract interest from potential media partners. She especially struggled in the UK, despite numerous approaches to The Guardian. She had more success after producing a personal video for social media, directed at senior women in the media. “That turned out to be a much more scalable and easy way to find partners.”

During its lifespan, NewsMavens changed to meet the demands of its readers, she says. “We started out as a general news portal that was narrating current affairs from a women’s perspective and then after the first year we pivoted towards women’s issues because that’s what our readers were gravitating towards – we saw this very clearly in the statistics.”

At the project’s conclusion, it will produce two reports. The first, reflecting the interests of readers, will be a “feminist road map” of Europe, identifying the “hottest topics and biggest challenges for women in every country” and citing key individuals and organisations working to create change.

The second, informed by the FemFacts scheme, will assess the scale of media misrepresentation of women in Europe, including a section for media on “mistakes to avoid”.

The significance of the NewsMavens initiative partly depends on whether the concerns it highlights are shared by a broader and more conservative female demographic than that at the heart of this project. Ziomecka says a number of contributors had “a mission-based focus on women or minorities”. Readers who came to the site were attracted to stories on marginalised groups, including Roma communities and parents of children with disabilities. More work will be needed to see if these subjects are of greater interest to female audiences in general.

Ziomecka was frustrated that NewsMavens readers did not make more effort to read stories from outside their own borders. “The public interest in countries that they have never visited or don’t have friends from is very low.” But this parochialism demonstrates the opportunity for media to pursue NewsMavens-type schemes in their own territories. The project is also a stepping stone to examine coverage of news specialisms, from business to sport, all of which might be viewed and prioritised differently from a female standpoint.

“Women feel that their perspective is underrepresented and that the stories they find compelling are hard to dig out and not being told in the way they would like to see them told,” Ziomecka insists. “Giving women space and support in surfacing these topics would be beneficial for just about any media organisation that tries it.”

Ian Burrell’s column, The News Business, is published on The Drum each Thursday. Follow Ian on Twitter @iburrell

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Time and Progress

Time and progress have both recently become increasingly debatable topics, specifically regarding their intrinsic links and discordant relationship. There is lots to be said about how they behave, both above and below the surface. This essay will examine how the two terms behave, both in relationship to each other as well as their perceived qualities; that being, the notion of time-space compression, spaciotemporality, and the continued trajectory of postmodernity, including the heightened importance of appropriation, in relation to the work of Richard Prince.

To begin with, one must understand the definition of both terms. Oxford dictionaries define ‘time’ as follows; “The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” - Stevenson, A. (2010). Oxford dictionary of English. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. This particular definition is intriguing because of its secondary use of the word, ‘progress’, contextually describing existence. It is clear that the English Oxford Dictionary holds strong modernist views, quantifying progress through time, as to suggest that we as a society, are consistently progressing as time passes us, with no deterioration or counter-progression taking place at any point. Perhaps the reason for this over-simplification of what is a far more complex term, is a result of the clear correlation between time and progress, evident through technological advancements. However, this fails to consider that correlation does not equal causation. To counter this, an example of a disadvantage of postmodern society might include the introduction of nuclear weapons. It is difficult to classify this as progress, as defined by the English Oxford Dictionary.

Time is perceptual. It is not a fixed concept. it is relative to interpretation, and speeds up and slows down accordingly. This is why quantifying it through minutes and hours is in many ways a redundant practice. This only allows us to map out the past and future, like coordinates on a globe. Jorge Luis Borge (1970) states, “Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.” The Oxford English Dictionary fails to take into account either of these two very important factors; relativity, and time’s discordant relationship with progress.

After questioning the relativity of time, one must consider if the same rules apply to progress. What one person might describe as progress, another might not. The English Oxford Dictionary defines progress as follows; “Forward or onward movement towards a destination.”. The use of the term ‘destination’ assumes a finishing point, which again, is a relative concept. This fails to take into account that what might be one person’s destination, might not be consistent with many other people.

Taking for instance, the shift from Realism into Postmodernism, we can appreciate that it allowed society to develop individual nuances through beliefs, and challenge the sweeping assumptions and generalisations that are perpetuated through Modernism. Postmodernism developed a new epoch of art and media that catalysed individual expression and identity. However, one might argue that this deconstruction of governing conceptualisation and perpetuation of increasingly significant individual expression has consequently led us down a path of narcissism, cynicism, and ultimately isolation. “Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy.” Wallace D, (1996) Infinite Jest. One must question if this is progress, a cultural shift, or even a step backwards.

You can see this transition through portraiture, well before the invention of photography. Whilst the intention of art was to present reality in its truest replication, the art ecosystem stagnated. Take one of the most famous and influential painters from the 17th century; Rembrandt, who was one of the great leaders in the renaissance era. Rembrandt understood light in a way that no other painter did. Rembrandt would argue that the most accomplished painters would be those who were capable of replicating reality in the most mirror like fidelity. However, moving on some years, where abstract works began to emerge, you will notice a shift in intent. No longer is the need for replicating relevant. That job has been made redundant by photography, Instead, postmodern influences push art into adopting notions such as semiotics, and tackling lazy assumptions once relied upon.

There are two main philosophies regarding the movement of time, each relevant, borrowing from each other in some way or another. We start with absolute time, which as the name suggests, dictates time as a linear, 2d structure. It acts only as frame upon which we plan events and record history. “Absolute space is fixed and we record or plan events within its frame.” Harvey, D. (2005). Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Stuttgart: Steiner, p.94. It is perhaps the most common way that time is viewed. It is currently 10:43am on Tuesday 1st May as I write this, and I know for a fact that offering this information is an accessible way for anyone to visualise exactly how long ago it was, in relation to their position in time. Absolute time also introduces the ability to recall information; I could ask you where you were and what you were doing at this time, and perhaps with the help of a calendar, you would be able to give me an accurate response. However, if I were to ask how long ago this feels, I danger confusing absolute time to one of relativity, because the latter is entirely subjective, whilst the former is not.

The next main structural philosophy regarding time is variation, or relativity within time. This theory addresses the fact that time is experienced at different speeds, depending on the individual. One of the most influential minds denouncing relativity was Einstein, who believed that all forms of measurement depended on the frame of reference of the observer. "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."  Einstein A. This premise is referred to as spaciotemporality.

One of the major contributing factors to the relativity of time, is time - space compression, which dictates how as technological improvements are made, space grows smaller. The introduction of global telecommunications, faster transport, and most notably the internet, means that now, sending a message to someone halfway across the world, no longer requires weeks of foot travel, and can now instead be sent virtually instantaneously via text, email, or any one of the many social medium we now heavily rely on. “As space appears to shrink to a global village of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies - to use just two familiar and everyday images - and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is, so we have to learn to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spacial and temporal worlds” Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. (p.240).

The interpretation of time also depends on the volume of events that occur within a timeframe. The experience of boredom is only encountered once the body is deprived of sensory stimulation, which causes the experience of time to elongate. On the other end of the spectrum, keeping levels of sensory experience up, catalyses its passing. However this is only short term. Long term side effects of experiencing boredom causes the complete opposite effect. This is the main reason as to why adults in their 50’s, feel as though time passes them faster than whilst we were younger. This causes us to value the time we have more while we have less of it, and to treat it more like a commodity. “The findings support the contention that depressed affect produces a subjective slowing of time” John D. Watt, (1991). Effect of Boredom Proneness on Time Perception. Vol 69, Issue 1, p.323 - 327.

This leads the question of how these state of affairs intend to progress. One of two things might happen. Firstly, stagnation occurs, through technological superiority; technology has advanced so far that it becomes impossible to travel any faster through space, and thus no more progress is made. One must question whether time - space compression will continue in the same trajectory, and what a future world might look like if this were to occur. One must entertain the idea where everything is experienced simultaneously and instantly, all at once. It is difficult to fathom such an idea, however it remains relevant for the duration of this potentially worrying trajectory.

Time can also be broken up into categories based on influences regarding art and media. The phrase, ‘Avante Garde’ is commonly used to demote what is ‘new’, or ‘original’.  Cambridge dictionary defines the expression as “The painters, writers, musicians, and other artists whose ideas, styles, and methods are very original or modern in comparison to the period in which they live, or the work of these artists”. Cambridge University Press. (2008) Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Derived from French terminology, ‘Avante Garde’, or ‘Vanguard’ in English, refers to the part of the army that is positioned ahead of the others, with the intention of breaking through the resistance of their adversaries. This aids in defining its current use, that being a style in which artists of all media platforms use which is considered new and original. Artists who use this tactic intend to ‘break through’ mainstream tropes in order to create something new and thought provoking. These works often stir controversy, however successful works are later on appreciated for their contribution to whatever field of media they belong to.

An example of a controversial and ‘Avante Garde’ creation might be Richard Prince’s ‘Malboro Man’ piece, where he took photographs of the Marlboro cigarette campaign by Sam Abell, subsequently selling it for over one billion dollars at Christie's New York in 2005. It was the most a rephotograph had ever been sold for. This is considered ‘Avante Garde’ because of the way that Prince changed how photography and its relationship with art was viewed. By re-appropriating an existing photograph, Prince essentially destroyed the idea that duplicates hold less value than the original, challenging ideas of context, and what makes art art. Prince was one of many different artists who explored context and appropriation, alongside people such as Warhol and Duchamp. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed” Sontag S (1977) On Photography.

In conclusion, both the terms, ‘time’ and ‘progress’ are absolute and relative depending on their context and individual preference. Both are relevant yet not mutually exclusive. Progress on the other hand is entirely relative, and is conditioned upon individual beliefs and morals. It assumes a destination, yet remains fluid through individual interpretation.

References

Cambridge University Press. (2008) Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Einstein A Geographical Development. Stuttgart: Steiner, p.94. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. (p.240). Harvey, D. (2005). Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Jorge Luis Borge (1970) Sontag S (1977) On Photography Stevenson, A. (2010). Oxford dictionary of English. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wallace D, (1996) Infinite Jest

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The Positive Psychology Movement – Why It Isn't What it Sounds

By: Blondinrikard Fröberg

Heard about ‘positive psychology‘, but brushed it off because you are a realist? Or it sounded a bit too ‘shiny happy people’ to take seriously?

The name of positive psychology is misleading. Read on to learn the misunderstandings about the positive psychology movement that might be stopping you from accessing it’s useful tools.

7 Myths About Positive Psychology 

1. Positive Psychology is just positive thinking in disguise.

A movement created by psychologists, they weren’t thinking about mainstream concepts like ‘positive thinking‘ when they came up with the title, but, well, the rather serious science of psychology.

Positive psychology was so named to make a clear point about the state of psychology at the time, and what was needed to forward the field.

Post World War II, psychology increasingly became focussed on the ‘disease model’ – on what was wrong with people. The idea of researching the power of what goes right in life, and what helps us flourish, had been lost by the wayside.

Positive psychology challenged the unspoken idea in psychology that only negative experiences were useful. It was formed to help bring back the concept that we can find meaning and progress in life from looking at what is going right. It was time to examine the tools that help rather than hinder us, such as as creativity, spirituality, resilience, courage, nurturing our inner genius, and hope for the future.

2. The positive psychology movement ignores real human suffering.

By: Nams82

Despite the way it sounds (or despite some practitioners who might have veered off from the true aims of the positive psychology movement), positive psychology does not at all suggest we ignore noticing what needs repair in our lives, workplaces, and societies. Rather, it suggests we also focus on how to build what works, and grow the positive qualities that support us. 

We need to look at both weaknesses and strengths to learn how we can best function as individuals and as societies.

3. Positive psychology is just another ‘New Age’ technique.

As a branch of psychology, the positive psychology movement is very much about marrying measurable science and research methods to human nature. The various branches and topics of positive psychology are now the some of the most heavily researched in the field.

The main founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, is furthermore openly anti New Age and obsessed with evidence. He is known for finding even the humanistic movement, a mid-20th Century precursor for the positive psychology movement, as useful but too lacking in research and evidence.

4. Positive psychology is a new movement that will not last.

The idea of a psychology that focuses on what works over what goes wrong is not at all new. The positive psychology movement merely carried on ideas that have been around a long time.

Before World War II and the shift to a focus on mental illness and how to treat it, psychology was already researching positive topics. This included things like how to make life productive and fulfilling, and how to be a better parent. And one can look to Carl Jung himself as the leading ‘ancestor’ of positive psychology, with his heavy focus on finding meaning in life. Plus, both humanistic therapy and existential therapy planted seeds for what would become the positive psychology movement.

5. Positive psychology is outdated – just the 1960s all over again.

By: Joris Louwes

Positive psychology is very much a product of the end of the 20th century in America. The booming economy of the 1980s that led to a  self-centred free for all, followed by negativity and doom about the next millenium bolstered by wars and epidemics like AIDS.

If anything the rise of positive psychology was eerily timely, giving us all useful tools and a new way of seeing human resilience in the face of an era that would see the rise of terrorism and the fall of trust in governments.

6. Positive psychology is just a personal thing for individuals.

Positive psychology is a science that goes far beyond the individual. Positive psychologists are heavy involved in helping enterprises and organisations be healthier places for employees, as well as researching things like parenting methods that lead to balanced children and how communities can thrive.

7. But positive psychology could never help someone like me, I’m too depressed!

One of the main things positive psychology has shown is that happiness and wellbeing are not ‘for other people’ but things that can be taught and learned, no matter where you are starting from.

Interested in trying a therapy that is influenced by positive psychology? Harley Therapy connects you with experienced and empathic therapists offering solution-focussed brief therapy (SFBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). 

Have a question about the positive psychology movement we haven’t answered? Post below in the comments box. 

Task 2 and 3- The event and community sports development

Task 2 and 3

This task will examine the event and how it went. It will also discuss what community sport development issues we as a group discovered and how we dealt with these so that the event we put on was fair and accessible to all. Community sport development looks at creating a fair and equal field for all participants in sport, and looks at topics such as equity, gender equality, disability and other barriers such as location. These all came apparent in the early planning stages and will look at how our event dealt with each of these through the event.

As stated earlier the group decided to conduct a teamwork in sport with a local youth club. This session would be done through taking a football coaching session and linking it to communication and teamwork activities. The youth zone is a place in the centre of the town and puts on open and free activities for all children up to 18 years of age. This was developed as a way to keep children entertained outside of school hours and keep out of trouble. Therefore, Youthzone is used as a drop in centre where anyone who wants to partake in an activity can do.

Keeping this in mind the session there had to be planned as very inclusive so that anyone that may turn up was able to access the session the same as anyone else. This included boys and girls who may well have special needs which would need to be taken into consideration. This was one issue that we had no control over as it would be a case of who would turn up on the day. The planning would also need to be something that both girls and boys had an equal chance with. This would take more of a role later on when looking into how the session was grouped. Dashper and Fletcher (2014) reinforce this by strongly stating that inclusion of all members of the community is paramount in bringing more people into, not only taking part in sport, but continuing playing sport throughout their lives. They continue by suggesting that a coach needs to get rid of notions that certain sports are only suitable for certain genders and that other genders cannot participate. This is why we chose a sport in Football that is becoming a lot inclusive with the success of women’s football breaking through to the mainstream.

We decided to do two games that would develop communication and teamwork and then be able to link those into a match situation later on in the afternoon. This is something we as individuals use in sessions that we take and thought it was the best course of action. We also decided that adding an element of competition into the session would keep it fun and engrossing for the full duration of the session.

The group was made up of 12 participants between the ages of 11 and 14 and were a mix of boys and girls (10 boys and 2 girls), from a range of backgrounds. This means that we had a nice spread of participants. However this meant that we had to make sure to treat all participants equal. This again linked into the issue of equity. Meier (2005) suggests that coaches need to push girls just the same as they do boys and treat them as an equal footing, so that it becomes more of social norm for more girls to take part in sport and therefore develop at a faster rate than they do now.

As stated above, the session would be divided into two skill building activities to be transferred into a game situation later. To warm up we decided to play noughts and crosses. The group was divided into four groups of three and two grids was made out of hoops. The aim of the game was to work as a team to create a line of three. The group would need to use good communication skills and team work to strategically place the bibs to win.

The second game was called havoc and linked brought football into the session. The aim of the game was to score a goal in attack or work as team to defend your team’s goal to stay in the game. The pitch was divided into a square and each team was given a goal with the ball placed in the middle of the pitch. Each member of the team gave themselves a number they would represent that number through the game. The coach would shout out a number and that person would try and win the ball from the centre and score in one of the other goals. The rest of the team would defend their own goal. Only the person whose number was called could attack. If a goal was scored, then the team that conceded was out. This therefore began to get the teams talking to each other about which goal would be aimed for and who to try and eliminate, but also how to defend as a unit.

All of this would be taken into the final match situation. The teams where joined together to make a six a side game. Good communication and teamwork was rewarded throughout and the focus of the session was repeated so that each participant was aware of what we were looking for. When the session had finished, we took feedback from both participants and staff to see how successful they thought the session was. All members of the group really enjoyed the session. The staff also commented how they would use some of the activities themselves in future sessions.

There was many sports development issues in which we had to consider when taking the session especially with the mix of children that we had. There was sensitive factors when dealing with lots of children from different background, ethnicities and gender all in one session together. This became even more apparent when dealing with children who were under 18 with lots of precautions needed to be taken into account.

These were highlighted in the risk assessment that we produced. Safeguarding and anonymity of the participants was paramount and keeping the children safe was the highest priority for us as a group. Each member of the group needed to produce the DBS certificates to the Youthzone management so that they knew that we had no previous criminal records. The safety of the children also came into account when we wanted to take photographic evidence of the session. Each member had to fill out forms previously to say whether it was ok for us to take photographs with them in it. If they signed no then we had to make sure that these children were kept out of any photos taken. However this was not an issue as all parents were happy to let them partake. Another safe guarding issue was to keep all children’s details private and away from the assignment. This was for anonymity reasons and to keep the children safe and away from any harm. Garratt, Piper and Taylor (2013) add to the importance by suggesting that safeguarding is just as important for a coach as it is the participants. Safeguarding can protect as much the coach as it can the participant and rigorous following of safeguarding procedures can defend a coach and prevent any risk that may befall.

As this was a mixed gender group, we had to keep the activities friendly and suitable for both male and female participants, but also make sure that the group was kept balanced and equal. For example, it would be unfair and unethical to have a team of girls, two teams of white boys and a team of Asian boys. The group made sure that no bias was made in the way the teams were made up. A simple division through counting was done to avoid any issues.

Another issue was to be sure to be ready with any health and safety problems which may occur. To be certain, we made a risk assessment of the venue before we took any session so that we could judge what problems could arise before it happened. This was wrote up and any problems was highlighted so each group member knew and was aware of any potential hazards which could occur. As this was a session which did have a match situation, there was also the case of potential injury. Pickard, Tullett and Patel (1988) stress the importance of preparing first aid by finding that only 2% of injuries needed to be treated in the hospital, which could not have been treated on site by first aid marshal.To combat this, two members of the group were nominated as first aid officers to go alongside the officers in place at the Youthzone.

In conclusion I believe that the session was a huge success in the feedback we received from both the Youthzone staff and children who participated. The session was planned in regards to an understanding of the area, the purpose of the Youthzone and with regards to the children that attend the sessions. The session that was supplied was fun, simple and most importantly inclusive to all those that wanted to play a part in it.  The group worked well in delivering the session and made sure that each participant got as much out of the session as the others in the group. This was a major reason to why each child gave positive feedback in the end.

   The List of References

 Dashper K, Fletcher T (2014). Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Sport and Leisure, London: Routledge.

Garratt D, Piper. H, and Taylor B (2012), ‘Safeguarding’ sports coaching: Foucault, genealogy and critique, Sport, Education and Society Volume 18, 2013 - Issue 5

Meier. M (2005) Gender Equity, Sport and Development, Swiss Academy for Development: Biel.

Pickard. M.A, Tullett W.M and Patel A.R (1988) Sports Injuries as Seen at An Accident and Emergency Department, Scottish Medical Journal