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This article examines how working-class activists challenged and overcame political fear narratives during the anti-water charges campaign in Ireland (2014–2016), with specific focus on the ‘sinister’ narrative, an attempt by the government and its supporters to frame working-class protestors as violent, irrational and extremist. Rather than subscribing to the position that political fear is ubiquitous or the reflection of a general societal malaise, this paper follows Jeffries’ argument that political fear is mediated, contested and contradicted. While political fear operates most effectively when targeting expectations for normal living, it is these same expectations that offer fertile ground for opposing fear threats. Drawing on interviews from activists, this paper shows how the ‘normal living’ becomes a key context in which ‘deviance framing’ around class and gender can be reappropriated/reframed by activists, particularly through the deployment of counter spectacles and through the reframing of what constitutes legitimate emotional responses to government-initiated fear threats. Finally, while political fear can have an individualising effect, this paper demonstrates how subjective and individual acts of transgression are mediated through a collective and community lens as the crucial element in overcoming political fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to conduct an embodied and situated aural analysis of what silence in Northern Norway is about, with the aim of bringing forward the background noise. The paper brings together theories on construction of the rural, time-space relations, soundscape ecology, and on affect and power, and it merges academic traditions about how to communicate findings from non-visual biased studies. This interdisciplinary framework provides a novel structure for both analysing material and communicating findings from embodied studies of listening out. The study found that silence in Northern Norway is about not listening to the economy of scale, to the commodification of the natural conditions and the suppression of lifestyles and territory. The paper illustrates how power is an inherent part of listening and how listening is a practice that is enacted to create emotions that are associated with a specific time-space relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper begins with a critique of orthodox renditions of the social unconscious which (a) retain divisions between a personal sphere and a social sphere, and (b) which are said to be in conflict with each other. The ways in which these are instituted in various psychoanalytic and group-analytic theorizations are briefly delineated. Next, the two versions of the social unconscious (an orthodox and a radical) that are found in Foulkes are described. Elias's notion of process reduction is then used to deconstruct the philosophical basis of the orthodox version of the social unconscious. The thoughts of Radical Foulkes are extended by drawing on Elias and Matte-Blanco, bringing the notion of power into the theoretical schema. This is followed by an examinantion of the impact of the notion of power on Foulkes's conception of the communicational field. Finally, the article describes the consequences of the impact of power on the construction of the psyches of individuals as well as interpersonal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]