A Phoenix
Biographic Data
| ID | 7812 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Phoenix |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Phoenix |
| SIGNATURE | PHOENIX A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5382-8918 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 569 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Working to understand …
This paper developed from a keynote talk and discussion at the Annual RGS-IGB conference 2023. It draws on both authors’ work to examine how children work to understand their lives, identities and futures during global polycrises, particularly COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd in the US during the pandemic period. COVID-19 served to illuminate children’s geographies in both the global interconnectedness of children’s lives and the ways in w…
Accounting for ourselves and others
Bhekizizwe Peterson’s interdisciplinarity was wide ranging and displayed his easy familiarity with the Arts, Social Sciences and Philosophy. The breadth of his interests and oeuvre make him genuinely psychosocial, interested, for example, in psychoanalytic issues of mourning and melancholia and bringing this together with deep understandings of narratives and the ways in which the archive demonstrates that assumptions of intergenerational rupture…
Israel’s war on Gaza and the violation of children’s rights
The current intensification of Israel’s on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza since October 7, equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The IPC has reported that the entire p…
Doing racialized masculinities in Finnish schools
This paper focuses on Judith Butler’s theorisation of the performative subject and contemporary critiques to consider its relevance to the doing of racialized masculinities in Finnish schools. Recent postcolonial critique has indicated that, early work on performativity and subjectivation implicitly assumes a white and western, enlightenment subject and does not take the aftermath of slavery into account. While Butler’s work since then theorises …
Making diversity visible in often unrecognised family practices
This article makes a small contribution to Families, Relationships and Societies’ knowledge production. It addresses racialised and ethnicised inequalities experienced in the everyday lives of a family constituted through serial migration, where the adult interviewed (‘Lizzie’) reflected on her childhood experience of leaving the Caribbean to join parents she did not remember and siblings she had never met. It reuses material from a larger study …
Making Sense of Sexual Harassment Over Time
The #metoo movement and various other social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible in recent years. Such collective practices of naming and thereby resisting sexual harassment have been made possible by feminist discourses that have enabled the linking of personal experiences to gendered social structures. In this paper, we examine temporal shifts in young people’s accounts of sexual harassment based on two datasets gen…
Restorying complex intersections in everyday practices of space, place and belonging
Open science communication
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the complex relationship between science and policy. Policymakers have had to make decisions at speed in conditions of uncertainty, implementing policies that have had profound consequences for people's lives. Yet this process has sometimes been characterised by fragmentation, opacity and a disconnect between evidence and policy. In the United Kingdom, concerns about the secrecy that initially surrounded…
World of Change
BACKGROUND: Besides handling the physical impacts of COVID-19 there is more than ever a need to understand what can help when mental health is challenged. Within this context our practical wisdom - our ability to understand and recognise when 'the other', for example the patient, is feeling lonely or anxious is particularly important. AIM: This article aims to contribute to the understanding of how the competence of health professionals may be ad…
Adult narratives of childhood language brokering
This paper analyses the retrospective narratives of an adult language broker. Language brokering involved not only learning how to translate/interpret language for others, but also understanding the meaning that Spanish and English assumed in society and the ways in which she and her parents were socially positioned. Language brokering was both psychosocial and agentic. The participant had to align her respect for, and protectiveness of, her pare…
(Re)inspiring Narratives of Resistance
In 2020, COVID-19 took many people by surprise, as did the intercontinental waves of protest triggered by the casual racist murder of George Floyd by a US policeman. The years of 2020 and 2021 will undoubtedly be remembered for massive, unexpected disruptions that require new social normalities to be negotiated. These social disruptions were triggered by unexpected viral pandemics and viral video footage. Yet they built on already existing, entre…
Understanding the friendship networks of older Black and Minority Ethnic people living in the United Kingdom
Older Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people living in the United Kingdom (UK) are vulnerable to the experiences of social isolation and loneliness. Despite this, it is widely assumed that they adhere to traditional family practices and living arrangements that protect them from social isolation and loneliness. Such assumptions are problematic and can reify family networks as the main area of research for older BME people to the detriment of frie…
Marcia Worrell (1966–2020)
Memorializes Marcia Worrell (1966-2020). Marcia read psychology and sociology from 1985 at the University of Reading. Her PhD, awarded in 2001 on child abuse and neglect at the Open University, led to her advocacy on behalf of survivors. During her PhD research she was employed as a researcher and a member of course teams designing innovative courses on child welfare and protection. Her first permanent lectureship, in 1992, was at the University …
Transitions to Adulthood of ‘At Risk’ Young Men
This paper focuses on two cohorts of Norwegian young men whose behaviour in childhood and adolescence caused serious concern to their parents, teachers, social workers and, in some cases, the police, Despite having been identified as ‘at risk’, they made transitions to positive adult masculine identities in two different historical contexts; the 1980s and 2000s. The paper analyses the difference that historical context makes to these young men’s …
Indelible stains’? Introduction to special issue on Gender and Memory
Slavenka Drakuli, the celebrated Croatian
Situating Children's Family Troubles
This article aims to contribute to understandings of how children experience family troubles. It considers how children's family troubles are socially situated and interlinked with the resources children and other family members have available and the societal contexts in which they live. Since this is an under researched area, the article aims to understand how bringing together different sources of evidence can illuminate children's perspective…
Environment in the Lives of Children and Families
How do environmental policies link to dynamic and relational family practices for children and parents? This Policy Press Short presents innovative cross-national research into how ‘environment’ is understood and negotiated within families, and how this plays out in everyday lives. \n \nBased on an ESRC study that involved creative, qualitative work with families in India and the UK who live in different contexts, this book illuminates how enviro…
The Institutionalisation of ‘TongNian’ and ‘childhood’ in China and Britain
This article engages with the question of how theorisation of the social construction of childhood can be applied across cultural contexts, taking China and Britain as examples. The paper draws on collaborative dialogue between scholars from the People's Republic of China and Britain, and literatures from both Anglophone and Mandarin sources. It takes forward emergent work on theorising childhood from diverse global perspectives by focusing on th…
Narratives of fathering young children in Britain
This is the final version of the article. Available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record
Re-interpreting
This article probes how childhood experiences are actively taken into adult lives and thus challenges the unwitting and unintentional reproduction of an adult-child binary in childhood studies. We do this by analyzing interviews with one adult daughter of immigrants from Mexico to the United States at four points in time (ages 19, 26, 27, and 33). Using narrative analysis to examine the mutability of memory, we consider how Eva oriented herself t…
Unsettling intersectional identities
At a time when the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, Brubaker brings "trans/gender" and "trans/racial" creatively into conversation to theorize the historical location of identity claims and to examine the question of whether identities are optional, self-consciously chosen and subject to political claims rather than biologically pre-given. His main argument is that the distinction between se…
Telling ‘moral tales’? Family narratives of responsible privilege and environmental concern in India and the UK
Contemporary discussions of climate change response frequently emphasise individual moral responsibility, but little is known about how environmental messages are taken up or resisted in everyday practices. This article examines how families negotiate the moral narratives and identity positions associated with environmental responsibility. It focuses on families living in relatively affluent circumstances in England and South East India to consid…
Narratives of success among Irish and African Caribbean migrants
This paper compares the narratives of two men in midlife who migrated to the UK from Ireland and from the Caribbean as children, in the middle of the last century. We examine how success is narrated over the life course to show how migrants' positioning of themselves differs from the ways in which they are positioned by outsiders, including in policy and public discourse. We conclude that while outsider narratives often polarise success and failu…
Crossfires
Young people - nationalism, racism and gender, Ann Phoenix gender, migration and cross ethnic coalition building, Philomena Essed After the last sky, where do the birds fly? what can European women learn from anti-racist struggles in the United States?, Gloria Wekker the boundaries of community - gender relations and racial violence, Theresa Wobbe gender, orientalism and the history of ethnic hatred in former Yugoslavia, Dubravka Zarkov from nati…
Young Masculinities
Book synopsis: This book examines aspects of 'young masculinities' that have become central to contemporary social thought, paying attention to psychological issues as well as to social policy concerns. Centring on a study involving in-depth exploration, through individual and group intererviews, the authors bring to light the way boys in the early years of secondary schooling conceptualise and articulate their experiences of themselves, their pe…
Intersectionality
International audience
My Wife Ordered Me to Come
This study used a discursive approach to analysing doctors' and nurses' accounts of men's health in the context of general practice. The analysis worked intensively with interview material from a small sample of general practitioners and their nursing colleagues. We examine the contradictory discursive framework through which this sample made sense of their male patients. The 'interpretative repertoires' through which doctors and nurses construct…
Shifting Identities Shifting Racisms
Young People's Constructions of Self
The article examines the use of photo‐elicitation methods in an ESRC‐funded study of young consumers. Participants were asked to take photographs of consumer items that were significant to them. These were subsequently used in recorded interviews as a trigger to elicit the discussion of the relationship between consumer goods and identity. The analysis focuses on how the features of visual representation influence the versions of identity that ar…
Producing Contradictory Masculine Subject Positions
This paper reports a qualitative analysis of data from a study of masculinity in 11–14 year old boys attending twelve London schools. Forty‐five group discussions (N= 245) and two individual interviews (N= 78) were conducted. The findings indicate that boys’ experiences of school led them to assume that interviews would expose them to ridicule and so threaten their masculinity. Boys were generally more serious and willing to reveal emotions in in…
De‐colonising practices
This paper uses feminist work on diaspora and postcolonial theory to examine the ways in which women serial migrants, who as children left the Caribbean to join their parents in the UK, experienced racialised, gendered intersections in the 'contact zone' of school.Drawing on narrative accounts from 50 women serial migrants the paper argues that school was a key site for racialised subjectification, even though, as girls new to the UK, the partici…
Positioned by “hegemonic” Masculinities
This paper takes up the idea of “hegemonic” masculinity and explores its relevance to a group of 11-to 14-year-old boys in London schools. Although there is considerable debate in the literature over the existence and significance of an organising mode of “dominant” or hegemonic masculinity, it is apparent from the interview material provided by these boys that attributes such as “hardness”, antagonism to school-based learning, sporting prowess, …
Researching family practices in everyday life
The study of the everyday is recognised as central to the understanding of identities, agency and social life. Yet, attempts to research everyday life often fail to capture the complexity of the mundane. This paper draws on findings from two studies: fatherhood across three generations and adult narratives of childhood language brokering to illuminate that complexity. The purpose of bringing these studies together is methodological; in particular…
Dealing with difference
In recent years theories of difference have become increasingly complex as they have shifted away from unitary, essentialist constructions of 'race' and ethnicity. The resulting conceptualizations of 'race' and ethnicity - as dynamic and multiple - provide new perspectives on difference, identities, subjectivities and power relations. This article argues that concepts of racialized and ethnicized difference have been taken up or resisted in diver…
Re-interpreting
This article probes how childhood experiences are actively taken into adult lives and thus challenges the unwitting and unintentional reproduction of an adult-child binary in childhood studies. We do this by analyzing interviews with one adult daughter of immigrants from Mexico to the United States at four points in time (ages 19, 26, 27, and 33). Using narrative analysis to examine the mutability of memory, we consider how Eva oriented herself t…
Style Failure
Recent studies of youth culture suggest that consumption is central to the construction of adolescent identities. Many of these studies have focused on the links between consumption, style and identity, and have concluded that style is a crucial means of sustaining and defining group boundaries. Drawing on a series of group interviews with young people from an ESRC-funded study of young consumers, we focus here on the causes and consequences of b…
Neoliberalism and Masculinity
The last decade has seen the growth of knowledge societies within neoliberal economies. As a result, learners are increasingly individualized and expected to be responsible for their learning. The main part of the article uses findings from a study of young masculinities to argue that boys are not free to choose to work toward qualifications but are concerned to manage their everyday school interactions in the context of their complicated, multip…
Interrogating intersectionality
Intersectionality is an increasingly popular feminist approach to theorising and analysing the fact that everybody is simultaneously positioned in multiple social categories. It is, however, a much debated concept. This paper considers recent literature on intersectionality to discuss current debates on the concept. In particular, it considers whether, on the one hand, intersectionality fails to address structural inequalities because it focuses …
The relationship between qualitative and quantitative research
The dominant methodological approach in psychological research has involved the use of quantitative methods within a positivist framework. In this article we argue that both qualitative and quantitative methods have their strengths and limitations, depending on the research question under investigation. We examine some of the advantages of qualitative methods, paying particular attention to the value of such methods for feminist researchers. We c…
Lads, Machos and Others
The theoretical underpinnings of recent research on the emergent masculinities of boys and young men are reviewed and analysed. Particular attention is given to the construction of boys as active subjects in the production of their masculine identities. A coming-together of discursive social psychology and psychoanalysis is observed in this area. Several major studies drawing on, and contributing to, this theoretical perspective are reviewed. Emp…
Thinking through Class
Current debates about the utility of the concept of social class for social analysis have been helpful in illuminating the shortcomings of traditional theories and traditional methods of assessment of social class. Yet, social class continues to have an important impact on life chances and worldviews. This article uses data from an interview study of 248 young Londoners (young women and men; black, white and of `mixed-parentage') to examine the p…
Unsettling intersectional identities
At a time when the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, Brubaker brings "trans/gender" and "trans/racial" creatively into conversation to theorize the historical location of identity claims and to examine the question of whether identities are optional, self-consciously chosen and subject to political claims rather than biologically pre-given. His main argument is that the distinction between se…
Intersectionality, Black British feminism and resistance in education
This roundtable discussion was the opening plenary panel of the 7th Gender and Education Association Conference, entitled 'Regulation and Resistance', held at the Institute of Education, London, 25–27 March 2009. The discussion centred on exploring the historical development and continuing relevance of intersectional and Black British feminist approaches for contemporary debates in gender and education. Notes 1. As described in the introduction t…
Israel’s war on Gaza and the violation of children’s rights
The current intensification of Israel’s on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza since October 7, equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The IPC has reported that the entire p…
Narratives of success among Irish and African Caribbean migrants
This paper compares the narratives of two men in midlife who migrated to the UK from Ireland and from the Caribbean as children, in the middle of the last century. We examine how success is narrated over the life course to show how migrants' positioning of themselves differs from the ways in which they are positioned by outsiders, including in policy and public discourse. We conclude that while outsider narratives often polarise success and failu…
Challenging gender practices
This article aims to contribute to the currently sparse literature on transnational families and gender. It focuses on the retrospective accounts of Caribbean-born adults who as children were serial migrants, joining their parents in the UK following a period of separation. It considers aspects of their relationships with their siblings and with their mothers and fathers. The article illuminates what the serial migrants viewed as contradictory ev…
Youth and gender
Indelible stains’? Introduction to special issue on Gender and Memory
Slavenka Drakuli, the celebrated Croatian
Situating Children's Family Troubles
This article aims to contribute to understandings of how children experience family troubles. It considers how children's family troubles are socially situated and interlinked with the resources children and other family members have available and the societal contexts in which they live. Since this is an under researched area, the article aims to understand how bringing together different sources of evidence can illuminate children's perspective…
Negotiating daughterhood and strangerhood
Most considerations of daughtering and mothering take for granted that the subjectivities of mothers and daughters are negotiated in contexts of physical proximity throughout daughters’ childhoods. Yet many mothers and daughters spend periods separated from each other, sometimes across national borders. Globally, an increasing number of children experience life in transnational families. This paper examines the retrospective narratives of four wo…
Motherhood under twenty
Women who become mothers under the age of 20 are usually thought to he at greater risk of health and social problems. The authors argue that such a prevailing view has become institutionalised in the approaches of practitioners and researchers. They examine the ideological and factual bases of such an attitude towards teenage mothers and conclude that ideology is dominant. Suggestions are made as to how this might be overcome to allow a more bala…
Short reviews
Wayne Patterson, THE KOREAN FRONTIER IN AMERICA, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 1988 Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS: KOREANS IN LOS ANGELES, 1965–1982, Berkeley, Calif.: University of Califoria Press, 1988. Pyong Gap Min, ETHNIC BUSINESS ENTERPRISE: KOREAN SMALL BUSINESS IN ATLANTA, New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1988. Louis‐Jacques Dorais, Lise Pilon‐Le and Nguyen Huy, EXILE IN A COLD LAND: A VIETNAMESE COMM…
Black identity and transracial adoption
Much of the opposition to transracial adoption depends on unvalidated assumptions about the identity of black and mixed race children living with their own families. We know little, however, about the ways in which these families help their children to cope with racism. Research moreover suggests that young black children often have a negative view of their racial identity. On the other hand, research also shows that black adolescents tend to hav…
Working parents
Young Mothers
Motherhood
Motherhood
Introduction - Ann Phoenix and Anne Woollett PART ONE: PSYCHOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY Motherhood - Ann Phoenix and Anne Woollett Social Construction, Politics and Psychology Psychological Views of Mothering - Anne Woollett and Ann Phoenix PART TWO: THE MANDATE FOR MOTHERHOOD Having Children - Anne Woollett Accounts of Childless Women and Women with Reproductive Problems The Social Construction of Motherhood - Harriette Marshall An Analysis of Childcare …
Young Mothers
The relationship between qualitative and quantitative research
The dominant methodological approach in psychological research has involved the use of quantitative methods within a positivist framework. In this article we argue that both qualitative and quantitative methods have their strengths and limitations, depending on the research question under investigation. We examine some of the advantages of qualitative methods, paying particular attention to the value of such methods for feminist researchers. We c…
Shifting Identities Shifting Racisms
Not Such Mixed up Kids
Identities and Racisms
Thinking through Class
Current debates about the utility of the concept of social class for social analysis have been helpful in illuminating the shortcomings of traditional theories and traditional methods of assessment of social class. Yet, social class continues to have an important impact on life chances and worldviews. This article uses data from an interview study of 248 young Londoners (young women and men; black, white and of `mixed-parentage') to examine the p…
Race' in psychology
This article addresses the ways in which the subject of 'race' is discussed in psychology and the issues this raises for teaching. It argues that psychological work provides contrary possibilities. On the one hand, it helps to reproduce negative racialized constructions of those constructed as Other (particularly black people). On the other, it allows challenges to such constructions. For example, the 'race' and IQ controversy, and the periodic r…
Youth and gender
VIII. Developmental/Educational Psychology
Consuming Cultures
Lads, Machos and Others
The theoretical underpinnings of recent research on the emergent masculinities of boys and young men are reviewed and analysed. Particular attention is given to the construction of boys as active subjects in the production of their masculine identities. A coming-together of discursive social psychology and psychoanalysis is observed in this area. Several major studies drawing on, and contributing to, this theoretical perspective are reviewed. Emp…
Dealing with difference
In recent years theories of difference have become increasingly complex as they have shifted away from unitary, essentialist constructions of 'race' and ethnicity. The resulting conceptualizations of 'race' and ethnicity - as dynamic and multiple - provide new perspectives on difference, identities, subjectivities and power relations. This article argues that concepts of racialized and ethnicized difference have been taken up or resisted in diver…
"But it's racism I really hate"
"But it's racism I really hate"
This article addresses the issue of how discursive analyses revealing the way personal accounts of masculinities are constructed can be supplemented by theories providing plausible explanations of how individuals take up particular subject positions. It is suggested that psychoanalytic concepts are helpful in this regard. An analysis is presented of material from a participant in a study of emergent masculinities among boys in London schools. Thi…
Aspiring to a politics of alliance
Positioned by “hegemonic” Masculinities
This paper takes up the idea of “hegemonic” masculinity and explores its relevance to a group of 11-to 14-year-old boys in London schools. Although there is considerable debate in the literature over the existence and significance of an organising mode of “dominant” or hegemonic masculinity, it is apparent from the interview material provided by these boys that attributes such as “hardness”, antagonism to school-based learning, sporting prowess, …
Young Masculinities
Mapping Present Inequalities to Navigate Future Success
Sociology (66 works) · Gender Studies (50 works) · Psychology (45 works) · Gender Studies (35 works) · Political science (34 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (21 works) · Social science (19 works) · Narrative (18 works)