Michael Orsini & Sarah Wiebe (University of Ottawa)

Feeling "Rules": From Institutions to Emotions in the Study of Autistic Activism

 The study of contentious politics has been influenced heavily by approaches that take as axiomatic the important structuring role of institutions in shaping movement strategies and the policy outcomes that flow from these. The most influential of these approaches, political process theory, pioneered by Tarrow (1996) and McAdam (1996), sought to capture how the political opportunity structure - features of the external political environment often outside of the direct control of movement actors - can encourage or discourage movement actors from engaging in collective action. These approaches have filled an important gap in a literature that was too often squarely focused on social movements as irrational outbursts of time and space. An overwhelming emphasis on the rational features of collective action, however, has frozen out of discussion the role of emotions in framing, nourishing and sometimes structuring social movement claims and policy outcomes.  A growing body of literature has begun to make up for this neglect in the literature. I explore the "emotional turn" in social movement analysis by drawing on a comparative analysis of activism in Canada and the US in the area of contested illnesses such as autism and multiple chemical sensitivity.

Angelika Sjöstedt Landén (Umeå University)

This paper explores how emotions become intertwined with processes of identification. This is studied through interviews with employees at a work-place moving from Stockholm; the capital of Sweden, to Östersund; a small town in the northern inland. The time of the move was seen as an uncertain period by many of the employees, and they talked about how new social patterns were formed at the work place. Emotions thus figured in articulations that constructed social groupings within the work place and justified subject's belonging to either of these groups. These work-related groups were in turn associated to geographical places relevant to the relocation of the workplace. I therefore want to look closer into the relationship between place and emotion in order to understand how places become 'marked' with different status through referring to emotions. Preliminary findings show how such (emotional) differentiations of places may become part of how subjects understand, for example, work markets and living conditions in different places. This could in turn have an impact on what subjects perceive as possible work life choices.

Bel Parnell- Berry (University of Hull)

The discipline of interpretive policy analysis recognises that despite the implied link between policy drafting and implementation, in practice little actually holds these two processes together. Especially in the field of social policy, where dilemmas of how to implement a document into community life may be of an ethical nature, personal interpretations play a large part in how policy documents are acted out by implementers (Yanow, 1996: 24).  Certain policy dilemmas may involve conflict between personal ethics and organisational ethics, as well as the various ethical values of different groups within the community that is to be affected (Bellah, 1987: 366).

One such area is policy involving the Travelling community, where focus is on the relations between the local authority, its planning and land policy towards this community. Across Europe, for centuries, questionable measures have been taken by governments against traditional Romany or Gypsy ways of living with the argument of protecting society and therefore making an ethical choice (Liegeois and Gheorghe, 1995: 8). However, policies and legislation that banished gypsies, had them put in prison or executed or simply made them (rather than their way of life) illegal, eventually became less socially acceptable (Liegeois and Gheorghe, 1995: 10). Instead there was pressure to assimilate Travelling and Gypsy communities with settled communities (Liegeois, 2005: 180). This pressure has been referred to as a method of eradicating their culture - a form of ethnic cleansing (Hawes and Perez, 1995). 

As researchers we can study the personal values of individuals from the way they interpret certain texts and from the decisions they consequentially make. Ethnographic methodological approaches can aid us in investigating these interpretive processes, firstly by providing the researcher with the tools necessary to understand a group's cultural and/or ethical values and also providing an insight into how these values would be applied in certain social scenarios, when faced with particular dilemmas (Russell, 1996: 2 and Thomas, 1983: 478).   

In this paper I will demonstrate how I have been and will continue to use ethnographic methods in order to explore these issues. The use of semi-structured and conversation interviews are being used within local authorities and the Traveller Gypsy community to gain an understanding of conflicting ethical values and how this can relate to views of citizenship and lifestyle choices. Additionally, I have been analysing the language of policy documents and some news articles from local media coverage in order to explore the way individuals articulate about the Traveller Gypsy community, their way of life and their expectations of the way policy should be implemented in this area. Finally, I have been studying 'built spaces' - local authority caravan sites that are designed and built by local planning organisations in order to investigate how individuals interpret their values from the page and implement them into real life. This part of the research will also explore the effects that this individual, interpretive process has on the many individuals that make up Traveller Gypsy communities.  

Bernard Lamizet (Institute of Political Studies, Lyon)

 Interretation and identification in Politics: Modalities of the identification in politics(policy) and elaboration of a metalanguage

 We shall name here « identification » the whole complex process during which we elaborate the identities, and establish ourselves as political actors, at the same time by the appropriate elaboration of a speech, by the implementation of recognizable symbolic practices and by the elaboration and the implementation of strategies and practices appropriate to identify us in the political space.

 The concept of identification indicates the process of elaboration of the identity of an actor, as well as the transformations processing of which this identity will be the object during history.

 The interpretation indicates the symbolic process by which the subject appropriates a representation by giving it a meaning, possibly multiple, and by integrating it, in this way, into the political culture which he bears, and which defines its political identity.

 The political identification consists in the elaboration of an identity established on a relation between subjectivity and membership, and shown in symbolic expressions implemented in the public place. The political interpretation consists in the recognition, the formulation and the implementation of a mediation between the singular and the collective. This mediation bases itself on the recognition of the meaning. The political practices and the commitment base establish themselves on a constant dialectic between the relation to the other one in mirror and the political confrontation to the others.

 The interpretation and the identification articulate the one in the other one in a complex political process which we can analyze in five points, the display of which will be the object of the proposed communication.

 1.         The interpretation of the speeches articulated in the identification of their authors

 To interpret the speech, in politics, consists in identifying the author. It is advisable, here, to distinguish three different functions. The énonciateur is the actor who gives his existence to the speech by registering it, orally or in writing, in the public place. The author is the political actor who signs the speech, i.e. the actor who gives his institutional dimension to the speech, who places the speech in the political space. The destinator is the political actor in the name of whom the speech is expressed, the actor whom represents the speech, to whom the speech gives a symbolic existence.

 2.         The interpretation of the political practices conceived as expression of a political identity in the public place

 To interpret the political practices consists in recognizing the identities which implement them in the public place, the identities which give their institutional dimension to the political practices. The political interpretation does not limit itself to the clarification of the meaning, as the interpretation of the common facts of communication and statement: it also consists in identifying the actors who implement them and the political and institutional strategies which they join and who give them their political consistency.

 3.         The relation between identification and interpretation as elaboration of a political system of statement

 The political statement is a particular mode of statement which articulates political identity of actors and meaning. The institutional identity of an actor and the stakes in power and in membership which expresses its symbolic activity are swown by the identification. The meaning of a speech or a symbolic practice of representation expresses a relation in the political imagination (utopia or fear) and in the reality of politics (expression of a law or a constraint). It is revealed by the interpretation.

 4.         The articulation of the identification and the interpretation in the evaluation of the political practices

 The evaluation of the political practices is a practice which has always existed under several forms. It can involve the vote or the election, but it can also involve processes of evaluation implemented in the political logics of management and validation of the activities of institutions and the political actors. It finally can involve processes of legitimization by which a practice is assumed by an actor or an institution. The identification and the interpretation are articulated in these processes of evaluation, by creating the link between the identity of the actors, the logic of the political strategies and the meaning of the speeches and the representations.

 5.         The facts of censorship as institution of a regulation of the interpretation and the identification

 The censorship consists in the expression of a judgment of validation or invalidation concerning an actor's political practice or an activity of an institution. The censorship consists in the articulation of the identification, the interpretation and the implementation of a power. It is the relationship in the power which marks the specificity of the activity of the censorship in the field of the practices of regulation of the political space. The censorship consists, in particular, in excluding certain symbolic practices by striking them of illegality by virtue of the power exercised by the actor who implements it.

 This communication will propose concepts elaborated in the other fields, in particular in the works on political semiotics and on the political mediation..It) will bend over present situations of articulation of symbolism and of the imagination (in particular about Iran) such as they are presented in mass media, so as to seize the way, in the public place, the media propose modes of expression and interpretation of politics. 

Anna Durnová (University of Lyon)

Reconsidering the practice of policy analysis: intimacy of dying

The recent agenda of poststructuralist policy analysis has shown to which extent interpretive methods can uncover the underlying (and often hidden) aspects of policy practices. I suggest a new way of studying theses practices by arguing that meanings are not simply there but that they are negotiated within a governing framework shaped by emotions. Emotions function as governing triggers of respective policies and intervene also as interpretive elements. How do we asses the in the practice of policy analysis?

Against the experience from the qualitative research within policies on inpatient dying care I investigate principles of analysis emphasizing interpretation and acquisition practices that are generated by emotional situations. I aim to illustrate how current policy analysis can respond to the challenge the emotions make to the practice of analysing such policy practices. I identify "intimacy of dying" as a substantial political power that influences the respective negotiation of practice of inpatient dying care and that involves both; financial and technical possibilities on the one hand and the social and emotional involvement of the affected persons on the other hand. I understand therefore intimacy as a consideration of emotional knowledge that lies behind power relations and systems of acquisitions that generate policy practices.

I observe the practice of analysis that results from these assumptions. I embed the pragmatic approach to emotions - that conceives them as judgements of values building regimes of justifications - into the concept of "politics of intimacy". Politics of intimacy is understood as a regime of governing of emotions and through them and involves a re-consideration of the analysis procedure itself.