Browsing by Author "Rangiwananga, Melissa"

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    Stripping the Skin off Humour
    (Massey University, 2011) Rangiwananga, Melissa; Coombes, Leigh; McCreanor, Tim
    Culturally specific hegemonic processes produce authority over meaning and exclude possibilities for authentic ethical encounters. Contingent on a binary relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’, humour holds social tensions in particular ways. Where contemporary understandings of humour tend to posit humour as self-evidently desirable (Billig, 2005), there is an absence of psychological attention to the social power relations that constitute the “performativity” of humour – or as Butler (1993, p. 2) suggests, “the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”. This paper draws on the experience of living the contradictions of hegemonic discourse that produces social positions where laughter is enacted to enable a ‘safe’ encounter. If humour occurs on the boundaries of social convention then what does that mean for the complex relationships at “the hyphen” (Fine & Sirin, 2007; Jones & Jenkins, 2008) between us/them? Is it possible that rather than simply maintaining a particular social order, humour may also enable a re-defining of the contours of social relations? Could humour open spaces at the boundaries through recognition of multiple competing political discourses and make it possible for an ethical response that seeks authentic encounters with the ‘other’?
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    Troubling political discourses of terrorism : responding to the call of the other : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, Aotearoa/New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2010) Rangiwananga, Melissa
    As a story of a complex interplay of hegemonic power relations that play out as relationships of violence on contested boundaries, the dominant narrative of terrorism may be understood as a discursive site of tension between sameness and difference in the production of a 'unified' political identity. Contingent on a binary relationship between 'self' and 'other', terrorism functions as a particular form of Orientalism (Said, 1978) that produces Western knowledges as the authority over meaning and excludes possibilities for ethical responses (Spivak, 2004). This thesis draws on Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) theory of the political production of discourse and subjectivity to question the conditions of possibility that enable the production of terrorism in discourse. Through an understanding of discourse as socially contingent systems of meaning, the analysis explored how social relationships were constructed in political text, and how, through these hegemonic constructions, it became possible to exclude some from the authority to articulate their experiences and understanding of social relations. Revealing the contingency of relation among multiple discourse, terrorism became necessary to the discursive field that constitutes nationalism through an ongoing antagonism between governance and sovereignty that enabled a rejection of the call of the 'other'. To enable an ethical response and open possibilities for authentic encounters with the 'other', this thesis argues into a space where new meanings and possibilities for social relations are enabled through the generation of 'new' discourses that attend to the spaces between our relational boundaries.