Bringing Nanda forward, or acting your age in The Awkward Age

Henry James’s 1899 novel, The Awkward Age posits the adolescent girl’s movement forward into the future as an acute problem for the fin-de-siècle. The novel’s titular pun equates the awkward, individual, in-between time of adolescence with the awkward, collective, in-between time of the fin-de-siècle, leading us both towards the turn-of-the-century ‘invention’ of the modern adolescent, and towards James’ exploration of the culturally constructed nature of age as an identity category. The conflation of individual ages with historical ones is significant; James’s novel appeared on the cusp of a new century, at a moment when adolescence was in the process of being consolidated as a modern identity category by medical authorities, educators, and psychologists. The novel’s deploying of technologies such as the telegraph and the photograph, that mediate presence, speed time up, slow it down, and freeze it, posits the adolescent girl as cognate with modernity; both of her time and ahead of it. In the novel, adolescence is an awkward, unnerving presence, and a significant absence: an identity in the process of being formulated, and an age category to come. In this article I explore the ways in which the rhetoric of modernity that resonates throughout the book relates to the awkward age of the adolescent. If we refocus our attention on age in The Awkward Age, we can begin to see the ways in which age itself becomes a creation of James’s, a staging of possible relations (sexual, conversational, economic, theatrical, performative, even utopian-collective) between older and younger interlocutors who swing between being ‘adults’ and ‘children,’ with the fin-de-siècle invention of the adolescent as a hinge for this process

Wait Up!: Attachment and Sovereign Power.

Sociologists and feminist scholars have, over many decades, characterised attachment as a social construction that functions to support political and gender conservatism. We accept that attachment theory has seen use to these ends and consider recent deployments of attachment theory as justification for a minimal State within conservative political discourse in the UK since 2009. However, we contest that attachment is reducible to its discursive construction. We consider Judith Butler's depiction of the infant attached to an abusive caregiver as a foundation and parallel to the position of the adult citizen subjected to punitive cultural norms and political institutions. We develop and qualify Butler's account, drawing on the insights offered by the work of Lauren Berlant. We also return to Foucault's Psychiatric Power lectures, in which familial relations are situated as an island of sovereign power within the sea of modern disciplinary institutions. These reflections help advance analysis of three important issues: the social and political implications of attachment research; the relationship between disciplinary and sovereign power in the affective dynamic of subjection; and the political and ethical status of professional activity within the psy disciplines.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10767-014-9192-

Sports psychology in the English Premier League: ‘It feels precarious and is precarious’

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.This article gives a rare account of the working life of a sports psychologist in the English Premier League (EPL), the elite division in English professional football. It shows how members of emerging professions such as sports psychology are a new precariat. Martin is more successful than many sports psychologists, but his job security is dependent on his continued ability to navigate managerial change: using his skills as a psychologist in the defence of his own employment but simultaneously keeping the (potentially sensitive) ‘psychology’ label of the work he does hidden until circumstances are propitious

Flexural Strengthening of Reinforced Concrete Beams using NSM GFRP: Assessing Key Parameters

The structural integrity and longevity of Reinforced Concrete (RC) beams are critical to modern construction, influencing safety, usability, and maintenance costs over time. As civil engineering endeavors to meet the challenges posed by aging infrastructure and evolving usage demands, rehabilitating and strengthening RC structures have become essential practices globally. This research focuses on a prevalent yet innovative method of enhancing RC beams: the application of Near Surface Mounted (NSM) Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) bars. GFRP is increasingly favored in structural engineering due to its superior properties to traditional materials. These include high tensile strength, resistance to corrosion, lightweight nature, and long-term durability. Among various reinforcement techniques, the NSM application of FRP stands out. This method involves embedding FRP bars or strips within grooves cut along the tension side of concrete beams. This technique not only enhances flexural strength but also preserves much of the original structural aesthetics and integrity. The core objective of this research was to comprehensively understand how various parameters affect the flexural strengthening capacity of RC beams strengthened with NSM GFRP bars. An experimental program was designed, encompassing testing of twenty-two RC beams under controlled conditions to isolate and evaluate the impact of several key factors: the diameter of GFRP bars, their bonding length, the number of bars used, the techniques employed to enhance bond strength, the placement of bars within the concrete matrix, and the type of groove-filler material utilized in the grooves. The research’s findings highlight the critical nature of GFRP bar diameter and bonding length in enhancing beam performance. Specifically, larger bar diameters (12 mm and 16 mm, adopted herein) significantly increased the beams\u27 load capacity, demonstrating a clear correlation between bar size and structural resilience. Conversely, smaller diameters (8 mm) were less effective, offering minimal improvements, which underscores the need for appropriate sizing in planning retrofit projects. Bonding length emerged as another crucial factor, with results showing that beams adhering to the American Concrete Institute’s (ACI) recommended bonding lengths could fully utilize the GFRP bars’ tensile strengths. Inadequate bond lengths led to reduced load capacities and sudden failures, emphasizing the importance of precise calculations and adherence to established guidelines. The study also explored the effects of increasing the number of GFRP bars. While intuitively thought to improve strength, the benefits were marginal when the bond lengths were not optimized, suggesting that the quality of installation often outweighs quantity in composite reinforcement. Furthermore, the research investigated bond enhancement techniques such as mechanical anchoring and the use of epoxy groove-filler. These methods were found to improve bond strength and delay failure modes, yet they could not fully compensate for the deficiencies in bonding length. The NSM technique, which incorporates additional mechanical or adhesive interventions, provided slight performance improvements. However, the ultimate efficacy of beam strengthening remained heavily contingent on correct adherence to bonding specifications. In conclusion, this study not only substantiates the efficacy of NSM GFRP bars in enhancing the flexural performance of RC beams but also delineates the critical parameters that govern the success of such interventions. The insights garnered here pave the way for further research into refining bonding length equations and enhancing predictive modeling through advanced techniques like numerical (finite element) analysis. This will enable engineers and designers to more accurately predict outcomes and design more effective RC beam strengthening strategies, ultimately leading to safer, more durable structures

Soy Ingestion in Patients with Estrogen Receptor Positive Breast Cancer

Soy is a compound that is often touted for its potential health benefits, including for its potential ability to prevent particular types of breast cancer. However, many researchers and medical providers present evidence that reveals the harmful effects that soy may have on various types of breast cancer, namely estrogen receptor positive breast cancer. The latter group of researchers argue that soy chemically mimics estrogen and therefore has similar “feeding” effects on estrogen receptor positive breast cancer. As two very distinct groups of evidence exist regarding the potential benefits and harm of soy ingestion in patients with estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, this PICO evaluation will examine the problem at hand in an attempt to draw an educated and evidence-based conclusion with regard to the effects of soy consumption in these patients

Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes

Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare). Increasingly, these activities include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, notably through the imposition of positive affect. Labour on the self in order to achieve characteristics said to increase employability is now widely promoted. This work and the discourse on it are central to the experience of many claimants and contribute to the view that unemployment is evidence of both personal failure and psychological deficit. The use of psychology in the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics. This paper describes the coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions and considers the implications of psycho-policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets. We draw on personal testimonies of people experiencing workfare, policy analysis and social media records of campaigns opposed to workfare in order to explore the extent of psycho-compulsion in workfare. This is an area that has received little attention in the academic literature but that raises issues of ethics and professional accountability and challenges the field of medical humanities to reflect more critically on its relationship to psychology

The queer commons: introduction

Ideas and practices of “the commons” have been urgently explored in recent years in attempts to forge alternatives to global capitalism and its privatizing enclosures of social life. Contemporary queer energies have been directed to commons-forming initiatives that sustain queer lives otherwise marginalized by heteronormative society and mainstream LGBTQ politics: from activist provision of social services to the maintenance of networks around queer art, protest, public sex, and bar cultures. However, such instances of queer political action and imagination have rarely been recognized within extant discourses of the commons. This introduction sets out differing genealogies of thought within scholarship on the commons and, building on the work of the performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz, it asks how, if at all, it is possible to theorize a queer commons

She’s Having an Episode: Patricia Williams and the Writing of Damaged Life

About a work as intense and theatrical as this one, it might be odd to claim that On Being the Object of Property struggles with exemplarity by dedramatizing narrative into episode, epic into moment, and structure into gestures that convey intensities of need for the world to be a certain way. But this diminishing process—the episode as cooling chamber—is key to the work’s aesthetic, political, and ethical ambition to give subordinated bodies in the  present a shot at not having the past reproduced in the contemporary nervous system. The interruption by aesthetic virtuality, by counter-form, is key to her strategy—not method—here. (It is not a method insofar as it is inimitable, not-prescriptive, and creative.) But the essay is not only affirmative about the process of aggressively remediating the world. For the labor of imagining a way to build a better good life out of the space of converged negativities and tender attachments is terribly costly, affectively. “As if a slaved or owned psyche could ever be reconciled with mental health,” Williams writes with dry, ironic flatness, noting additionally that cohabiting with her knowledges induces “a schizophrenia of biblical dimension . . . with all the baggage that that connotes.