Familiar strangers: facework strategies in pursuit of non-binding relationships in a workplace exercise group

This chapter reports on the interaction dynamics of a workplace exercise group for beginners. Dramaturgical stress occurred here as individuals who already knew each other as competent colleagues felt embarrassed about encountering one another in this low ability exercise group. To resolve this role conflict, participants sought to define themselves as familiar strangers (which they were not) through minimal interaction in non-binding relationships. This was achieved through three types of facework strategy: not only the defensive and protective kinds that Goffman identified as saving individual faces, but also collective strategies, which sought to repair the face of the whole group. Paradoxically, therefore, in attempting to deny their “groupness,” these actors actually displayed and reinforced their solidarity as a performance team

Critical Intersections and Comic Possibilities: Extending Racialized Critical Rhetorical Scholarship

Communication scholars conducting work on race must engage work from complementary critical communities to bolster their own critiques and further advance progressive racial coalitions. Critical, rhetorical scholarship and Critical Race Theory (CRT) share principle aims that provide significant ground for interdisciplinary racial projects. Together, these interrelated disciplines can find reinforcement in comedic discourse. This essay locates racial comedy as a space for transformational critiques. More specifically, the author argues that critical rhetorical scholarship and CRT taken jointly can illuminate parallel comic discourses and advance their important correctives pertaining to race and racism

Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy: Subverting Hegemonic Racism

This essay identifies emancipatory racial humor as a disarming critical public pedagogy that confronts racial hegemony. Acknowledging the interpretive quandaries of humor and the possibilities of racist humor, this essay tells an often overlooked story of the comic “heroes” who struggle against dominant racial meanings, power relationships, and identity constructions. The essay analyzes the pedagogical possibilities of critical humorists who creatively confront hegemonic racism and whose work participates in critical projects of social, political, and cultural transformation. Such emancipatory racial humor serves as a critical public pedagogy that exposes dominant public pedagogies, injects counternarratives into the struggle over hegemony, and subverts naturalized racial meanings and privileges

Critical Race Humor in a Postracial Moment: Richard Pryor’s Contemporary Parrhesia

Racial truth-telling becomes a difficult project given the current sociopolitical context that privileges postracialism and neoliberal individualism. Critical race humor, however, remains a public and popular discourse where people not only speak but also engage powerful racial truths. This article presents critical race humor as a contemporary form of parrhesia, or frank and courageous criticism. As a critical practice, parrhesia resonates with tenets of critical race scholarship and critical communication scholarship. Using the truth-telling comedy of the late Richard Pryor as a case study, this article suggests that critical race humor could be understood as parrhesia for our time. Moreover, critical race humor as a form of public pedagogy might provide people with the skills and habits of thought necessary to think critically about and transform racial knowledge and reality

Exploring sustainable technical alternatives for Dutch dairy systems by integrating agro-economic modelling and public preferences assessment

Theoretical discussions on the joint consideration of multiple (economic, social and environmental) functions when assessing the sustainability of human actions are increasing. However few studies exist that integrate the social demand for multifunctional agriculture in the evaluation of the sustainability and the global welfare of society. This paper presents a methodology to answer to these questions: Which are the social demands for the multiple functions of agriculture and how can they be quantified?; Which are the feasible technical alternatives of land management to satisfy these demands?; What is the value of the land use alternatives according to social preferences and which alternatives optimally satisfy the social preferences?. The net utility of alternatives for society, and therefore their sustainability, will be measured as the sum of market and non-market net changes compared to the current situation. The proposed methodology combines economic valuation, integrated modelling, stakeholder analysis, and multi-criteria evaluation. In particular, different multi-criteria methods (QFD/ANP) and agro-economic modelling and optimizing tools (Landscape IMAGES) were used. The methodology will be fully illustrated through the case study of dairy farming landscapes in the Northern Friesian Woodlands, The Netherlands. Results show that for the case study it is possible to change current farming techniques and achieve more sustainable farming systems. The more sustainable alternatives are beneficial for farmers, obtaining higher gross margin, and for government, decreasing the current levels of subsidies in agri-environmental programs. Even current environmental restrictions can be slightly relaxed without compromising social demands to the analysed Dutch dairy farming systems.Land-use planning, public preferences, agro-economic models, Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,

‘Stepping away from the computer and into the sweats': The construction and negotiation of exercise identities in a Norwegian public company

While research has found that a developed exercise identity enables individuals to view exercise participation as self- reinforcing, the social barriers to such exercise identity development and participation have not been fully addressed. The subsequent aim of this study was to explore some of the social complexities at play in terms of how company employees construct and manage their exercise identities within a work place setting. A case-study method was used to address the research issue over a nine-month period. The case to be studied included a sample of 72 employees from a Norwegian public company who participated in an on-going work-based exercise programme called ‘Exercise for all’. The principal means of data collection comprised participant observation, individual interviews and exercise logbooks. The data were subject to inductive analysis. The primary barriers to exercise participation included high levels of social comparison in a competitive working context, particularly in relation to ‘competent colleagues’, and feelings of guilt associated with partaking in ‘recreational’ activities during work hours. Strategies engaged with to overcome and negotiate such obstacles included justifying participation through a health-related discourse, and constructing a more distinct ‘worker-exerciser’ identity

Invasion of a Virulent Phytophthora infestans Genotype at the Landscape Level; Does Spatial Heterogeneity Matter?

Proper landscape-scale deployment of disease resistant genotypes of agricultural crop species could make those crops less vulnerable to invasion by resistance breaking genotypes. Here we develop a multi-scale, spatiotemporal model of the potato late blight pathosystem to investigate spatial strategies for the deployment of host resistance. This model comprises a landscape generator, a potato late blight model, and a suite of aerobiological models, including an atmospheric dispersion model. Within individual growing regions, increasing the number of host genotypes caused the greatest reduction in epidemic extent, followed by reduction of the proportion of potato in the landscape, lowering the clustering of host fields, and reducing the size of host fields. Deployment of host resistance in genotype mixtures had a large effect on disease invasion. The use of space as an isolation barrier was effective in scenarios involving two distinct potato growing regions. It was possible to completely eliminate the risk of epidemic spread from one region to another using inter-regional separation distances ranging from 8 to 32 km. The overall efficacy of this strategy was highly dependent, however, on the degree of spatial mixing of potato genotypes within each region. Deployment of host resistance in genotype mixtures in both regions served to reduce the overall level of incidence in the landscape and the inter-regional separation distance required to eliminate relevant levels of between-region spread of diseas