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The essay explores the profound nature and consequences of subjectivity struggles in everyday life. W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness and its constituent concepts of the veil, twoness, and second sight illuminate the process of racialized self-formation. Racialized self-formation contributes to understanding the cultural reproduction of domination and subjugation, the two primary concerns of radical interactionists. Double consciousness, long ignored by symbolic interactionists, cannot be neglected by radical interactionists if they are to articulate a comprehensive account of self-formation in a white-supremacist culture. Reflections on racialization, meritocracy, and subjectivity struggles in contemporary everyday life conclude the essay.

In an era of global economic expansion, the harsh underside of capitalism clearly affects human subjectivities and consciousness.¹ Emotions, which both express and structure subjectivity and consciousness, reflect and manifest the social reality of human life in its various globalized dimensions. My argument in this chapter thus concerns the ways in which the contradictions as the harsh underside of capitalism affect the subjectivities of racial minorities. For this reason, the relationship between emotions and commodity capitalism is an especially pressing concern for the formation and expression of racial identity in the United States today. To understand the social reality of race in the U.S. capitalist system is to take seriously the affects that express and constitute the critical social thought of racial minorities. As African Americanist scholars such as Cornel West (1994, p. 42) have argued, the ideology of unregulated capital in corporate consumerism creates market moralities and market mentalities that “erode civil society.” The critical thought of black Americans, West (1992, p. 42) avers, suffers irreparable damage by images that relentlessly commercialize the so-called good life:These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others – and thereby edge out nonmarket values – love, care, service to others – handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America.Corporations thus capitalize on civil rights gains while commodifying the activist politics of communities and governmental organizations. In effect, the “status quo” of government that promotes economic justice and civil rights protections is fragmented and replaced by corporate domination and the rule of the free market. Instead of turning to non-commercial avenues of civil society to change oppressive relations of power, Americans opt for consuming social change in a laissez-faire economy that equates individualism and free choice with purchasing merchandise. In her powerful critique of class privilege and consumption-based individualism, Bell Hooks (2000, p. 81) explains how the media's use of race to promote a “shared culture of consumerism” vitiates community values and deflects attention from class antagonism. Such consumerism, Hooks maintains, promotes ambitions for lifestyles of conspicuous consumption and celebrity that renders incoherent and undesirable a democratic sensibility that made civil rights gains for women and minorities possible in the first place (Bell Hooks, 2000, p. 77).

In this chapter, I discuss the development of the cannibal picking up from Jennifer Brown’s (2013) study, Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Brown (2013, p. 7) argued that the cannibal is a sign of ultimate difference who ‘reappears in various guises at times when popular culture needs to express real fears and anxieties’. I argue that the most recent version of the cannibal is gendered female and that this coincides with a postfeminist media culture. I explore how the cannibal is positioned as an ambiguous figure which questions both humanity and monstrosity. I argue that this is complicated by gendering it female as women have traditionally straddled the line between human and less-than human in popular culture. I discuss three films: 301/302 (Park, 1995), The Woman (Torino, Van Den Houten, & McKee, 2011) and Raw (De Forêts & Ducournau, 2016) and explore how they use incest, objectification and dehumanization as well as cannibalism to explore the ambiguities of postfeminist subjecthood. I will argue that by performing acts of cannibalism the female cannibals in these films reclaim their subjectivity both by objectifying others and by identifying with their victims. The cannibalism also presents the opportunity for female-oriented families through shared consumption which ironically embraces patriarchal ideals of feminine feeding roles and challenges the patriarchal basis of the family.

There is widespread debate about the nationalistic top-down approach of citizenship education. By using the notion of cultural citizenship as a useful theoretical lens, citizenship education research tends to focus on the process of subjectivity construction among students’ citizenship learning process. The Communist Party of China plays a dominant role in cultivating citizens in the form of ideological and political education (IaPE) in Chinese universities. The research problem thus focuses on the dynamics and complexity of how Chinese university students construct their subjectivities regarding citizenship learning through IaPE. The main purpose of the study is to provide some research directions for understanding students’ citizenship learning today.

With the case study of one university in China and interview data from 25 students, this paper examines the ways in which students understand and respond to dominant discourses.

The findings revealed there is a deficit of citizenship learning in IaPE, and students felt ideologically pressurized. This study suggests students’ complex subjectivities of active participants but confused minds as a phenomenon in Chinese higher education, in which they must involve in IaPE for personal academic and career development, while they adopted covert strategies for self-conscious citizenship learning expectations. These strategies took the form ranging from obediently completing basic curriculum requirements and distancing away by studying abroad, to actively searching for learning opportunities from other courses and media society.

This paper contributes to citizenship education research by recognizing the complexities of how subjectivities are formed in formal university settings.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to discuss the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis for thinking on organizational functioning and organizational change.

First, the authors discuss basic Lacanian ideas with regard to the notion of the unconscious and its discursive status and with respect to the crucial difference between the ego and the subject. Subjectivity is linked to the notion of the lack. The authors then address implications of Lacanian theory for thinking about and intervening in organisations.

It is argued that the non‐satisfying nature of work needs to be recognised, that organizational intervention entails an intervention on discourse, and that subjectivity is an issue to be recognized in the context of organizational functioning.

In discussing the implications of this point of view, the authors address the possibility of a psychoanalytic ecology of human resources.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the diverse rendering of the idea of nation and the role of universities in nation-building in the 1950s Murray and Hughes Parry Reports in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This paper provides trans-Tasman comparisons that reflect the different national and international interests, positioning of science and the humanities and desired academic and student subject positions and power relations.

This paper adopts a Foucauldian genealogical approach that is informed by Wodak’s (2011) historical discourse analysis in order to analyse the reports’ discursive constructions of the national role of universities, the positioning of science and humanities and the development of desired academics and student subjectivities and power relations.

The analysis reveals the different positioning of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand in relation to the Empire and the Cold War. It also demonstrates how Australian national interests were represented in these reports as largely economic and defence related, while Aotearoa/New Zealand national interests were about economic, social and cultural nation-building. These differences were also matched by diverse weightings attached to university science and the humanities education. There is also a hailing of traditional, enlightenment-inspired discourses about desired academic and student subjectivities and power relations in Australia that contrasts with the emergence of early traces of more contemporary discourses about equity and diversity in universities in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The paper demonstrates the value of transnational analysis in contributing to historiography about university education. The Foucauldian discourse analysis approach extends existing Australian historiography about universities during this period and represents a key contribution to Aotearoa/New Zealand historiography that has explored academic and student subjectivities to a lesser extent.

The higher education sector in Sweden has, over decades, faced increasing demands in terms of efficiency rates in research, as well as increasing demands in the international competition for external revenue. These demands have influenced academic career trajectories and postdoctoral tracks as well as the everyday work of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how doctoral students express and challenge subjectivity in the present context of research education.

The authors depart from the overall understanding that doctoral students’ lines of actions in research education depend on and form assemblages and, thus, define an academic institution. By re-analysing eight in-depth interviews, they illustrate how doctoral students from different milieus not only comply but also challenge, use border-crossings and change directions in research education.

The results show that some of these doctoral students try to act as loyal and satisfied, especially in regard to their supervisors, whereas others use coping strategies and resistance. It is illustrated that when some of the students use “unsecure” molecular lines, they appear more open to redefining possibilities and change, in comparison with those on more stable molar lines. Those acting on molar lines sometimes express a lack of emotional (productive) engagement, even though this particular group tend to more often get access to rewarded assemblages. These patterns are partly gender-related.

The tension between finding more stable lines and spaces for change is apparent in doctoral students’ subjectivity, but also how this tension is related to gender. The women doctoral students appear not only more mobile but also in a sense more alert than their men peers. This offers insights in how actions define and redefine not only academic institutions but also different subjectivities.

In the present, given the manifold demands on academic institutions, new insights and methodological approaches are necessary to illustrate how contemporary changes affect research education and the everyday life of doctoral students.

This paper seeks to critique recent research on gender and accounting to explore how feminist methodology can move on and radicalise the gender agenda in the accounting context.

After examining current research on gender and accounting, the paper explores the nature of feminist methodology and its relation to epistemology. It explores three inter‐related tenets of feminist methodology in detail: power and politics, subjectivity and reflexivity.

The paper suggests that much research in the accounting is concerned with gender‐as‐a‐variable, rather than being distinctly feminist, thus missing the opportunity to radicalise the agenda. It makes suggestions for how a feminist approach to methodology could be applied to the accounting context.

The paper calls for a wider application of a feminist approach to accounting research and gives suggestions as to where this might be applied.