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Historically, obituaries were created as news items and published in print media with the intentions of informing an audience of public hangings or similar sensational deaths. Over the years, obituaries changed in form to become a way of publicly notifying audiences of one’s life upon their death, focusing more on biography and familial structure than sensation. However, with advancements in communicative mediums, including the increased popularity and easy accessibility of the Internet, traditional understandings of the term ‘obituary’ are challenged to include all forms of media publications that draw on elements of sensation and biography. The combination of this new, inclusive definition and the increasing popularity and advancement of technological mediums has republicized deceased celebrities as marketable and profitable brands that rely on subject formation through media and participatory fandom. However, the branding of celebrated, deceased figures through processes of social subjectification often remains embedded within cultural texts. As a result, audiences are often unaware of their ability to shift or influence identities of the deceased, and their fandom becomes the target of alternative messages embedded in sites of obituarization. By applying Marshall McLuhan’s theory of technology as an extension of human consciousness in addition to Roland Barthes’ theory of mythologisation when examining Michael Jackson’s 2009 death, this thesis explains how the subject formation of deceased individuals becomes so powerful and globalized that their death becomes a positive and beneficial occurrence with regards to the profitability and marketability of their brand. Therefore, the subject formation of celebrated, deceased figures is a fragile process that is altering how North Americans mediate the culture surrounding death and dying. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-08 22:49:48.239

In A Question of Power, Bessie Head presents the production of the subject by using the postcolonial novel as a form of constructivist action against colonialism. Arguing against the compartmentalization of the postcolonial novel as merely literary aesthetic, Head instead presents the novel as a form of political literature, offering intricate details of the manifestation of subjectivity and representations of the liminal subject in decolonizing states through the replication of formal colonial powers in informal social institutions.

The overall goal of this project is to examine the niggarization of urban, Black, male bodies in the Unites States. We show how the niggarization of urban, Black, male bodies is the internalization of aspects of white-power structures by using a methodology that historically tracks and situates the nigga personality-type as related to and maintaining historical power structures that function as objectifying and internalizing mechanisms of the urban color-line, producing socially Black males as inferior “others.” Further, we provide a theoretical account of the historical emergence of the nigga personality-type within Black popular culture, in the 1970s, as a moment of the concealment and internalization of features of white-power structures. This project is important because objectifying and internalizing mechanisms of the “post-civil-rights” era urban color-line continue to produce socially Black males as inferior “others,” especially the disposability of lower-class, urban, Black men. Thus, we urgently need more effective strategies of resistance and struggle than that offered by the nigga personality-type in order to fight for a deeper American Democracy committed to racial justice and the dismantling of the urban color-line for the well-being of Black men.

By drawing upon aspects of critical geography to explore three writers' representations of urban space and subject formation, American Ethni/Cities develops and advocates for a new methodological approach to the study of literature. Predicated on theories devised by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Gil Valentine and other geographically-minded thinkers, this spatially conscious literary practice has the potential to enhance one's understanding of literary texts, power dynamics, identity construction, and the spaces one inhabits. Each of the chapters comprising this study aims to demonstrate what this interdisciplinary partnership between geography and literature can reveal. By focusing on Cahan's representation of Jewish immigrants living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Wright's depiction of black migrants adjusting to life in the industrial North, and Baldwin's exploration of masculinity as a socio-spatial construct, each respective case-study draws attention to the relationship between spatial production and subject formation. The overarching hope of American Ethni/Cities is that others will find this inter-disciplinary partnership productive and will subsequently make it their own, thereby producing even greater understandings of how power works in the spaces we read about, create, and inhabit in our own daily lives.

This thesis will undertake a study of contemporary political subjectivity by investigating the manifestations of various pathea found in contemporary politics. In examining how political impotence and indifference are cultivated through (neo)liberal subject formation, it argues that contemporary neoliberal subjectivity is constituted through the pathos of distance found in the gap between the impotent liberal subject and the imaginary, universal ideal subject articulated by liberalism. Through close readings of Wendy Brown’s writings, I explore her work and engage with her formulations of contemporary political subjectivity. Specifically, I will analyze the impotent subject constituted by the pathos of ressentiment, the vulnerable subject constituted by the pathos of walling, and the tolerated subject constituted by the pathos of difference in order to trace the relationships between the various pathea and the subjectivities that they construct. / Graduate / 0615

In this theoretical study, I apply a historiographical approach to examine the development of the Anthropocene as a concept and its use across disciplines and through time. Using a synthesis of the literature of the Anthropocene, I uncover eight “hidden” narratives that are embedded within its discourse, and further link these to European humanist thought and the creation of subject and Other. I use these narratives to inform my intersectional analysis, wherein subjects are formed through the interplay between identity construction, symbolic representations, and social structures. These levels provide a framework with which to examine subject formation, with a special focus on the dimensions of coloniality, class, gender, and race within the discourse of the Anthropocene. By applying an intersectional perspective, I discuss who the subjects of the Anthropocene are presented as and how they are created. Finally, I apply posthuman perspectives to discuss how and why subject formation must be made more complex. I argue that subject formation in the Anthropocene must better adhere to relationalities between humans – as well as between humans and the more-than- human world – if we are to effectively envision alternative trajectories away from the current ecological and social crises that define this time of environmental change.  The main contributions of this study are thus: (1) a review and synthesis of literature on the Anthropocene, (2) an identification of eight narratives that are embedded in the discourse surrounding the term, and (3) an analysis that applies intersectional and posthuman perspectives to subject formation within the discourse of the Anthropocene.

This essay is one part of my Bachelor's degree project, the other part being the work LOOPAR that was premiered in January of 2021 at Stockholm University of the Arts. The text expands and articulates the thinking processes and conversations in relation to the work. The aim of the text is to acknowledge and reflect the thoughts around the work with other people, dancers, and thinkers, and to scrutinize the main questions of the work: How can we think of repetition in relation to subject formation? And how does repetition and looping construct and affect world making? The essay begins by introducing the main concepts of the work such as 'performativity’, ’subject’, ‘storytelling’, ‘branding’, ‘repetition’ and ‘looping’. In the text, loops can be seen as actions, habits, repeated thinking processes, understandings of norms or different kinds of interactions, which change and transform our perception and understanding constantly about ourselves and the world we live in through persistent repetition. The essay observes how our experiences of ourselves and the world are affected by multiple contexts and felt-sensed experiences and interactions. It further explores the potentialities to decentralize the focus of the individualistic point of views of world making and it moves towards relational ways of thinking. The main references and conversation partners to many of the topics discussed in the essay are Argentine feminist philosopher and activist María Lugones, American professor of Feminist studies, Philosophy and History of Consciousness with a Ph.D. in Physics Karen Barad, and American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. Further the essay reflects the work and methods used in praxis in relation to the thinking processes introduced in the text. At the end the essay asks the two following questions: How we can practice active consciousness and responsibility towards a subject’s positionality and interactions in dancing? And how can dancing together and alone be understood as entangled and overlapped?

<p>This study is concerned with subject formation in the fiction of contemporary postcolonial authors Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. In contextualised readings of a total of nine works – Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005); Vera’s Without a Name (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998), and The Stone Virgins (2002); Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993), Turner (1994), and A Harlot’s Progress (1999) – it explores thematic and formal aspects of the subject’s constitution in the texts. Investigating the representation of material and discursive traces that constitute the individual, this study has a double aim. First, it describes the particular historical formations that mould the individual in the different texts. Second, it investigates the tactics used to imaginatively upset these formations in order to present new and more enabling modes of being.</p><p>Gurnah’s fiction depicts the intricate meshwork of social codes, emotions, and narratives that shape subjectivity in a highly unstable and cosmopolitan social reality. His novels repeatedly thematise cultural disorientation, migration, and the efforts of establishing a minimum of social and narrative stability in the form of a home. The chapter reads Gurnah’s fiction against a background of Zanzibari history and diaspora and suggests that various forms of “entanglements” paradoxically provide the means to pull the subject out of states of anxiety and alienation into more viable states of being. Vera’s novels engage a powerful Zimbabwean discourse on history, and the psychic and bodily wounds that result from its violent impact on the subject. Set at moments of special and contested historical importance, her novels address the exclusions and silences of this discourse in order both to assess its effects and the possibilities of imagining alternative versions that would allow other modes of subjectivity. These possibilities are manifested, thematically and textually, through an improvisational form of “movement,” geographical, linguistic, and musical. Dabydeen’s fiction investigates the textual dimensions of identity and its connections to larger cultural archives of tropes and languages. Focusing on the constraining yet constitutive impact of various modes of colonial and racial rhetoric, his literary texts display a manipulation of textual elements from these archives that approaches a re-conception of the subject. To describe this manipulation of English and Caribbean sources, thematised and dramatically staged in his fiction, I am using Dabydeen’s own phrase, “creative amnesia.”</p>

Sport has been increasingly recognized in social policy as a means of steering social change and as a method for responding to diverse social problems. The present study examines how rationales of social change are formed through ‘sport as a means of responding to social problems’. Four research questions are posed: (1) How is it that sport can be thought of and articulated as a means of responding to social problems? (2) How are sport practices assumed to operate as a means of responding to social problems? (3) How are social problems represented when sport is promoted as a means of response? (4) What conduct, subjectivity and citizen competences are shaped within this regime of practice? The study focuses on the government of subjects’ conduct, the formation of community and delineation of domains subjected to social change. The gradual shifts in the governmental rationality of the Swedish welfare state provide a framework for the study. Two kinds of empirical material are investigated. Initially, scientific knowledge is analysed; after this, a sport-based intervention, conducted in cooperation between a social entrepreneur, municipality and local sport clubs, is examined. In relation to scientific discourse, research on sport for social objectives would benefit from more theoretically driven constructionist perspectives related to welfare state transformations. In scientific discourse, rationales of social change in sport are conceived of as individual attainment of skills, competences and powers that are presumably transferable to other social spheres. Such discourse represents problems as individual problems. With respect to the sport-based intervention, individual change is promoted by representatives of the social entrepreneur in terms of providing subjects with motivational powers, which are shaped by role models and applied in “choosing the right track”. By representing problems as risks, avoidance is formed as an individual opportunity. This positions subjects as being responsible for their own welfare and inclusion. Municipal policy makers view the intervention as a way to form community and social cohesion in response to tensions in society. They present sport (and the social entrepreneur) as a way to mobilize and activate civil society – which is associated with the potency of voluntarism, authentic leadership and personal relations based on common identity. Consequently, responsibility for responding to social problems is spread and elements of de-professionalized social work are imposed. To conclude, sport is conceptualized as a means of responding to social problems because sport practices are associated with individual agency and with an active civil society and moral community. The technologies and rationality of social change point out ‘the self’, ‘the community’ and ‘the place’ as locations where social change is possible, rather than the whole of society. For instance, the technologies of social change are based on activation and responsibilization of ‘the self’ and of ‘the community’. These rationales of social change are based on a critique of welfarist governmentality and of the idea of governing from ‘the social’ point of view. Arguably, such discourse obscures more profound social reform. The study provides some empirical explorations illustrating how a range of tendencies and mutations in the governmental rationality of the welfare state and of social work are  manifested in ‘sport as a means of responding to social problems’. / De senaste åren har idrott alltmer kommit att betraktas som ett socialpolitiskt verktyg med förväntningar om att åstadkomma social förändring och bidra till att lösa sociala problem. I den här avhandlingen undersöks hur den sociala förändringens rationalitet formas i relation till idén om ’idrott som en lösning på sociala problem’. Detta görs genom fyra frågeställningar: (1) Hur har idrott blivit möjligt att betrakta som en lösning på sociala problem? (2) Hur förmodas idrott i praktiken fungera som en lösning på sociala problem? (3) Hur representeras sociala problem när idrott lyfts fram som en lösning? (4) Vilken typ av uppförande, subjektivitet och medborgerliga färdigheter fostras genom att använda idrott som en lösning på social problem? Särskilt fokuseras på styrning av individers uppförande, skapande av gemenskap och sammanhållning samt gränsskapande kring vilka domäner som kan utsättas för förändring. Undersökningarna relateras till mer övergripande förändringar i den svenska välfärdsstatens styrningsrationalitet. Två empiriska material har undersökts: dels den vetenskapliga diskursen, dels olika företrädares beskrivningar av en idrottsbaserad välfärdsintervention för unga i risk för problem och exkludering, en verksamhet som sker i samverkan mellan en social entreprenör, kommun och föreningsliv. Avhandlingen pekar på vikten av teoretiskt driven forskning med konstruktionistiska perspektiv relaterade till välfärdsstatens och socialpolitikens förändring. I den vetenskapliga diskursen lyfts social förändring fram med avseende på individuell förändring genom tillägnande av färdigheter som antas kunna användas även i andra sociala sammanhang. Denna förståelse iscensätter de adresserade problemen som individuella problem. I idrottsledarnas beskrivningar av den sociala interventionen kan ungdomar motiveras individuellt, bygga självförtroende och självkänsla, genom att identifiera sig med positiva förebilder och ledare. Detta blir viktigt för att kunna ”välja rätt väg i livet”. Genom att framställa problem som risker blir de möjliga för individen att undvika. Detta positionerar ungdomarna som själva ansvariga för sin välfärd och inkludering. I politikernas beskrivningar lyfts idrotten fram som ett sätt att skapa gemenskap och sammanhållning som ett svar på spänningar och oro. Genom idrotten (och den sociala entreprenören) kan man mobilisera civilsamhällets föreningsliv vilket associeras med frivillighet, autentiskt ledarskap samt personliga och moraliska band baserade på gemensam identitet. Därmed kan ansvaret för att hantera sociala problem spridas mellan olika aktörer, något som även kan bidra till informalisering och de-professionalisering av det sociala  arbetet. Sammanfattningsvis kan idrott konceptualiseras som en lösning på sociala problem därför att dess praktiker associeras med individuell aktivering samt med ett aktivt civilsamhälle som bygger på moralisk fostran och gemenskap. Den sociala förändringens teknologier och rationalitet pekar ut ‘självet’, ‘gemenskapen’ och ‘platsen’ som de domäner där förändring bedöms vara möjlig. Den sociala förändringens rationalitet bygger på aktivering och ansvarsgörande av ‘självet’ och ‘gemenskapen’. Styrningsrationaliteten bygger på en långtgående kritik av välfärdsstatens sätt att styra där samhället i sin helhet betraktas som målpunkt. Genom sådan diskurs skyms mer genomgående samhällsförändringar. Avhandlingen utforskar empiriskt och illustrerar hur en rad tendenser och mutationer i välfärdsstatens styrningsrationalitet och i det sociala arbetet kommer till uttryck genom ‘idrott som en lösning på sociala problem’.