Search results for "ambivalence"
showing 10 items of 58 documents
Regional Powers as Leaders or Rambos? The Ambivalent Behaviour of Brazil and South Africa in Regional Economic Integration
2013
The behaviour of regional powers towards their own regions is often volatile in the developing world, which leads to unstable integration processes. This article argues that this volatility is due to limited intra-regional gains from regional integration in developing regions, which implies that the behaviour of regional powers is constrained by extra-regional economic interests. When regional integration is not in conflict with extra-regional interests, regional powers provide regional leadership. However, when extra-regional interests are in conflict with regional integration, regional powers become regional Rambos. This argument is illustrated with the two examples of Brazil's behaviour …
Working in a boom-town: Female perspectives on gold-mining in Burkina Faso
2009
Abstract In Burkina Faso, informal mining camps attract girls and women from rural areas because they offer a variety of income generating activities and access to urban consumer goods. Moreover, migration to the mines also allows for a different life-style and greater personal freedom. On the other hand, by going to the mining camps, girls and women risk acquiring a bad reputation in their communities because they are suspected of having illicit sexual relationships. In fact, relationships with gold miners and the material benefits connected with them are among the lures of the gold mines. Thus, from a female perspective migration to the gold mines is fraught with ambivalence, which is exp…
The Representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Twenty-first Century Russian Media
2013
The aim of this study is to investigate the representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in contemporary Russian media discourse. Attention is paid to Gorbachev's social roles and activities as well as his personality, as presented in Russian news texts. The empirical data were collected over the period from 2000 to 2009 from seven major Russian newspapers. According to these data, a dual relationship to Gorbachev exists: in the West he is an honoured politician with a high profile, whereas in Russia the attitude towards him is ambivalent. In most texts he is represented as a once important political actor.
Detraditionalization, Hyper-consumption and Ambivalence
2015
During the past 20 years, European football has witnessed an intense change process that has radically transformed some of its main structural characteristics. This process is related to the same tendencies that have affected other aspects of social and economic life in western societies, such as the communication technologies revolution, the progressive rationalization of work, the increase in migration, the commodification of human activity, and the development of social and economic globalization processes, to name a few of the most relevant changes. These trends are usually thought to have had a strong influence on the recent evolution of football, giving rise to a redefinition of its c…
‘My life has changed, but his life hasn’t’: Making sense of the gendering of parenthood during the transition to motherhood
2011
A narrative approach to the study of the gendered nature of parenting acknowledges that different kinds of cultural narratives surround the couple relationship and parenting. This narrative study illustrates the process of the gendering of parenthood from the points of view of seven Finnish first-time mothers. The data were obtained from 28 in-depth longitudinal interviews. Two main narratives were found: a turbulent transformation and a smooth transformation narrative. The turbulent transformation narrative demonstrates how the transition to parenthood may lead to biographical disruption in first-time mothers’ lives. The contradictory cultural narratives of intensive mothering and shared …
European Academic Identity
2018
This chapter argues that neoliberalism, through its bureaucratically led reform frenzy, produces not only identitarian uncertainty amid a politically relatively unorganized academe but also a scientifically legitimized ambivalent discourse that confuses more than clarifies the mission of the university and research. Resistance to neoliberalism is variable. More resistance can be observed from the humanities and the social sciences, from countries in whose self-image globalization plays a modest role, from individuals operating uniquely in their national contexts while less resistance will be found from those disciplines that are linked with economic development, business, or the internation…
Souffrir en musique
1994
Suffering to Music - Although, in its relation to suffering, music is generally reputed for possessing therapeutic virtues, several iconographie and written sources dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries attribute a harmful influence to music. This ambivalence was based on the correlation between the intensity of suffering and that of the sonorous quality of musical instruments, which in the Middle Ages were divided into two great families in accordance to the sound volume they produced. Consequently it was according to their high and strident or low and soft sonorities that the instruments were thought to act on suffering, either amplifying it or alleviating it.
Challenging Challenge: The Ambivalent Impact of Challenge on Intrinsic Motivation Effectiveness in Digital Co-Creation
2017
While most literature on co-creation shows a consistently positive impact of challenge on motivational processes, the authors of this study examine situational ambiguous effects. Consequently, the exalted status of challenge in practice and research is called into question. This research combines psychological needs inferred from Self-Determination Theory with challenge derived from Flow Theory to explore direct and interactive effects on motivation and participation in digital co-creation. As an example of concrete consumer innovation the authors applied the concept of Threadless in order to test propositions for co-creation settings. Threadless is a real online platform that calls up for …
”Aika on kaikkein haurain pinta”
2016
“Time Is the Flimsiest Surface.” Affective Distance and the Weight of History in Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude
 This article examines the linkages between personal and political history and their relationship to the experience of time and a ective distance in Yiyun Li’s (b. 1972) novel Kinder an Solitude (2014). The method of analysis is a combination of close reading with a specific focus on affective distance, and a historically contextualizing approach. In this article, the notion of affective distance refers to an individual level psychic and emotional experience of estrangement, loneliness, and temporal and spatial discontinuity. The manifestation of a ective distance in Li’s no…
Ambivalent English : What We Talk About When We Think We Talk About Language
2020
The ambivalence of English manifests itself in the discourses that surround it. English may be a resource and consume resources; it empowers and oppresses. The dichotomous discussion around the usefulness or dangers of English as a “global” or “world” language erases problematizations of the layered societal implications of English in localised contexts. English needs to be analysed not (only) as a language but (also) as the ideologies and societal structures intertwined with it. We examine English in two higher education contexts. Our first case deals with the so-called Accent Reduction courses offered for international students in US universities. The second one analyses English as a lang…