Search

Copyright of Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World is the property of Societe des Anglicistes de l Enseignement Superieur and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents accounts of four UK doctoral students' engagement in a Higher Education Academy project which used digital video (DV) to promote reflexivity on their doctoral journeys. Proceeding from participants' accounts of the production of their videonarratives, the article analyses the relations between doctoral research, reflexivity and the use of DV, and their articulation in different ways by the participants. As an 'assemblage', the written form of the article aims to evoke both the collaborative design of the project, in that it is constructed as a multivocality, a series of 'plateaus', and also the multiple, shifting and always in-process nature of identity, immanent in each individual's account. The accounts address how epistemological, ontological and ethical considerations are articulated within visual and vocal re-presentations of the self in the individual videonarratives. Each narrative both does (and does not) resonate with the other narratives and each offers insights into the specificities of particular doctoral journeys. In experimenting with this form of presentation, we aim to bypass traditional accounts of research 'findings' as a form of transparent knowledge production and, instead, work within a mode of representation which seeks to acknowledge the 'masks of methodology'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper begins with the recent interest in what Mbembe has called ‘necropolitics’: the politics of the distribution of life and death by modern sovereign states. The necropolitical works through the production of spatialities, visualities, and bodies that are classed, racialised and gendered in particular ways. The paper explores a series of such productions in its discussion of the British press coverage of the bombs that exploded on London’s public transport system on 7 July 2005, and in particular the photographs used by the newspapers. It argues that the newspapers pictured bodies as gendered and racialised, with the former fixed and visible much more clearly than the latter. It further argues that the newspapers differentiated between various bodies by assuming that a certain sort of care was deserved only by some of those involved in the bombings. Finally, the paper examines how the coverage worked to place the readers of the newspapers in a specific position in the necropolitical order of power as citizens who care only for certain people, and in a particular way. The paper concludes by considering the implications of that specific caring for contemporary necropolitics and its visualities and spatialities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]