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This article critically reads a Personal Independence Payment Claim Form. All agents implicated in this form (e.g. the Department of Work and Pensions, assessors, an Office Manager and health professionals) are contemplated although of central concern is the positioning of claimants—or the persons filling in the form on their behalf—and social workers, and the constructions of social work practice resulting from such positioning. This article investigates discourse in the form itself, the discourse claimants are obliged to supplement and the discursive formations this text registers/generates. To read this form, I distinguish between overt, declarative and manifest content and the covert, descriptive, latent, perhaps unintentional but violent content, accessing the latter through a symptomatic reading, which draws upon my interpretation of principles associated with deconstruction, critical discourse analysis, decentering and positioning. Conceiving of PIP-related practice as possessing the dynamic qualities of an ‘episode’, this article argues that although the text provides help with costs, a corollary or side-effect, is that claimants and social workers are made to inhabit problematic positions within discourse/practice. Textual analysis may, nevertheless, unsettle, and re/position and de/re/construct relations, thereby decentering institutionalised ways of being.

Purpose This article documents accounts of the tactics parents and siblings of autistic persons in Hong Kong deploy to manage social encounters. This article aims to consider the impact of such tactics and their enmeshment with factors that combine to limit satisfactory outcomes and outlines a project intent upon contriving dialogue between persons. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative project elicited stories and accounts (or narratives) produced by persons involved in encounters involving autistic persons. This project also intervened in these encounters. Findings Persons involved in social encounters are de-fused, in the sense of being disconnected. The emotions persons experience through these encounters (e.g. and especially anxiety) remain hidden. Dialogue has the capacity to re-fuse, not only reconnecting but also rejecting unsatisfactory arrangements. Originality/value The dialogue produced in the article may extend beyond the specific circumstances and persons considered, potentially reducing the barriers and distances between autistic persons and others.

The article engages with arrangements of time and space and how they conjoin to constitute a disability chronotope that combines with other textual elements to both expand and limit empathetic horizons in Still Human, a film about a physically impaired middle-aged man and his Pilipino foreign domestic helper (FDH), set largely within a Hong Kong public housing estate. The study distinguishes between the text's declarative and descriptive layers, albeit while recognizing the forced and perhaps violent nature of this division. Structuring the surface of the film are technical codes and a chronological, optimistic, and sometimes humorous overcoming narrative through which protagonists triumph over tragedy. However, the surface of the text is intermittently disturbed by descriptive layers, or figurative currents. Although this troubling content appears peripheral to, and on the margins of, the text, this underlying and seemingly extraneous content is a crucial supplement which may more effectively realize authorial intentions to disclose the protagonists' humanness and engender empathy than the more prominent technical codes that structure the text's surface. Such coexisting layers illustrate how texts are stratified and how the content of texts and the intentions of authors are haunted by undecidability.

This article explores events in and around a supermarket with a middle-aged man with learning impairments. While documenting their particularities, this article also deploys these events as prisms through which to reflect upon how place is implicated in disabling practice and how the disabling geographies that such practice shapes and is shaped by may be un/re/made. These events are made subject to two readings. In the first, although the supermarket seems merely a backdrop against which events take place, it combines with forms of governmentality in and with regard to place to form a product, or text, through which the normative order speaks. In the second, place is regarded as a dynamic process constituted by innumerable elements in constant motion. Because both these readings register the product and process of disabling geographies, this article attempts, albeit while being thwarted, to realise less disabling geographies through rehabilitating process and attending to the ‘thingness’ of place; actual and imaginative subversions, or reversals and deconstructions. These seek to disturb and trouble disabling geographies and the practice made possible therein.

The article deconstructs UK Channel 4's 2012 and 2016 Paralympic advertisements, illustrating how the structure and arrangement of signs combine to challenge and reinforce stereotypical attitudes about ability/disability. However, the focus extends beyond taken-for-granted and commonsensical boundaries of a "text" to contemplate how readers' readings (e.g. on weblogs, in newspapers, journals, books, etc.) in specific contingent contexts combine to produce paratext that authors meanings relating to ability and disability. Both the advertisements and the readings they engender produce ambiguous and complex meanings that seem to resist, or thwart, authorial intentions to produce positive representations and efforts to master, or govern, texts through binary oppositions. Such fragility and undecidability in the representations, readings, and the texts they combine to produce give them double-edged qualities. Although this makes them comparable to the pharmakon, namely a beneficial remedy and/or drug/poison, with regard to their likely impact upon a media landscape containing other portrayals of disability, the undecidability of the texts coincides with the dis/ability and dis/abled identities to which they refer.

This article explores psychic experiences of air pollution and the ways these experiences have become narrated in various texts, especially but not exclusively those responding to one weekend in December 2013 when Shanghai purportedly experienced the highest levels of fine-particle, or PM2.5, pollution on record. This paper is also concerned, more generally, with processes associated with attempts to transform the messiness, or figurative haze, of fieldwork into an authoritative written account. These dual concerns—with air pollution and writing—are mutually informing since both seem to translate troubling, and often socially unacceptable, emotions into more presentable and tolerable forms. Through narrativization, namely acts of authorship and inscription, persons implicated in this article attempt to relieve, figuratively write over, or otherwise repress anxieties. While it is understandable, and perhaps even normal, to perpetuate such processes, this article argues we should engage rather than erase them since they not only animate persons and texts but also illuminate efforts to understand human responses to air pollution.

This article primarily accounts for walks taken in purportedly public places with ‘Paul’, a middle-aged man who is currently diagnosed as having ‘severe learning difficulties’. These walks offer wi...

This article explores the diverse semiotic landscapes which may be experienced as a consequence of apparently mundane rides taken upon the Shanghai metro. I first present, and then untangle, the id...

Based upon ethnographic research, this article explores undergraduate students' experiences at a normal university in Shanghai focusing on the types of identities and forms of sociality emerging therein. Although students’ symptoms of disappointment seem to indicate the power of university experiences to extinguish purposeful action, this article suggests they are associated with students' identity work, central to which are attempts to cope with disintegrations to school-related identities and efforts to construct alternate senses of self.

This article focuses on a filmic portrayal of issues relating to autism in a Chinese context, using this as a prism through which to consider how meanings associated with disability in general, and the autistic spectrum in particular, are produced. Instead of perpetuating a reductive positive/negative approach to representation, the article focuses on the fluid and dynamic ways in which author and audience co-produce texts relating to disability in ways which are invariably influenced by, and reproducing of, specific socio-cultural and discursive circumstances. Meaning-making in relation to disability is, however, ongoing and there is potential to realize disability differently.

Based upon ethnographic data gathered in Shanghai, this paper explores residents’ experiences of, and responses to, living within an environment, which displays features of what Rosa terms ‘social acceleration’. After exploring anxieties induced in residents who feel sedentary – relative to others – and their attempts to cope with this, this paper focuses upon how residents’ attitudes towards social acceleration become refracted in imaginative forms, especially texts currently circulating within Shanghai, which insinuate ostensibly supernatural characters into certain prominent locations in the city. As these texts critique ‘progress’ and register residents’ anxieties regarding social acceleration so they smooth over disquiet and unease thereby encouraging not only discourses of development but also the patterns, pace and tempo of social acceleration. The final part of this paper explores the costs of ‘slowdown’, arguing these are sufficient to compel residents not only to re-engage with, and therefore perpetuate, socially accelerating forms but perhaps even to intensify them, hence the deployment of the term ‘re-acceleration’ in the title of this paper.

This case is drawn from reflection upon ethnographic research conducted during 12 months in Shanghai. When this project commenced, I was initially concerned with residents’ attitudes toward living in a socially accelerated environment. Later, however, I became intrigued with, and preoccupied by, texts circulating in the city which ostensibly insinuated supernatural characters into prominent downtown locations. In this case, I present an alternate account of the processes involved in constructing data from “field” to “page.” This case, which is different from those more systematic versions subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals, explores the opportunities and challenges associated with ethnography—as both process and product. Specifically, I first elaborate upon how the field has already been constructed and is not, therefore, “waiting to be discovered.” Then, I reflect upon the multifaceted, and often conflicting, material fieldwork produces. Finally, I explore how the “field” is no longer, if indeed it ever was, discrete and separate—both geographically and emotionally—from “real” life. Although intended to be exploratory rather than authoritative, and edifying rather than systematic, this case concludes by arguing that reflexivity, namely, critical reflection upon, and acknowledgement of, the biases affecting such matters as how researchers imagine and construct the field, should be recognized during all stages of ethnography, including the texts produced consequent to fieldwork. However, reflexivity should not be performed as an end in itself. Instead, reflexivity should facilitate insights into links between knowledge claims, personal experiences, and the sociocultural and discursive contexts in which ethnography is produced.

Using an autoethnographic approach, this paper focuses upon interactions between ‘Paul’ (a pseudonym), whose symptoms associated with ‘severe learning difficulties’ are such that he is positioned on the low-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, his carers and others, in spaces taken for granted to be ‘public’ in both the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. This paper examines how social discourses relating to disability filter into social interactions, ultimately constructing the symptoms they purport to represent. This paper concludes by highlighting how interactions might be viewed as enabling rather than disabling, as producing spaces for thinking about the human condition.

Despite the recent emergence of scholarship on various aspects of contemporary urban Chinese residential life, these accounts typically perpetuate a narrative that situates the anonymous and emotionally distant life in new, often high-rise, apartments in contrast to the hugely more intimate relationships in older, predominantly low-rise living spaces. This article, whilst acknowledging the meaningfulness of such a distinction, first seeks to add ethnographic richness to this division, showing how, at least in the case of a small area within Shanghai’s Luwan district, an old/new neighbourhood division is incapable of expressing the more complex, often ambivalent, ways in which people experience residential life, before proceeding to show how residents’ experiences often cross-cut what is, in large part, a discursive division rather than a physical demarcation of separate spaces. The article also explores the ways in which residents seek to cope with, as well as find security and comfort within, residential spaces that are changing. Permeating this article are various meanings associated with the term ‘ontological security’ that, broadly speaking, refers to the order and regularity, as well as sense of well-being, that people feel in their lives.

Several studies and interviews of the Chinese students studying in an international foundation program in Beijing are conducted to explain the ambivalence that exists in the students with regards to their experiences towards secondary education. The Chinese youth are shown to undergo various sufferings while undergoing their secondary education but consider all these sufferings to be positive and worth it at the end.

Part 1: Deliberating Online Spaces 1. Grounding Online Spaces Peter Marolt 2. Users, not Netizens: Spaces and Practices on the Chinese Internet David Kurt Herold Part 2: Defining Online Spaces 3. "The Corpses were Emotionally Stable": Agency and Passivity on the Chinese Internet Jonathan Benney 4. Regarding Subjectivities and Social Life on the Screen: The Ambivalences of Spectatorship in the People's Republic of China Alex Cockain Part 3: Claiming Online Spaces 5. A Framing Analysis of Chinese Independent Candidates' Strategic Use of Microblogging for Online Campaign and Political Expression Yu Liu and Qinghua Yang 6. China's Dream of High-speed Growth Gets Rear-ended: The "Wenzhou 723" Microblogging Incident and the Erosion of Public Confidence Gunter Schucher and Maria Bondes Part 4: Enjoying Online Spaces 7. Gold Farmers and Water Army: Digital Playbour with Chinese Characteristics Ge Jin and David Kurt Herold 8. Chinese Fansub Groups as Communities of Practice: An Ethnography of Online Language Learning Xiao Liu and Gabriele de Seta Part 5: Shaping Online Spaces 9. Balancing Market and Politics: The Logic of Organizing Cyber Communities in China Cuiming Pang 10. The Role of Chinese Internet Industry Workers in Creating Alternative Online Spaces Bingqing Xia and Helen Kennedy