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Postfeminist young women are encouraged to “embrace” their sexuality by sexualizing their bodies as a means of empowerment. In stark contrast, dominant understandings of violence identify these same bodily displays as risk factors, condemning women who enact them as “asking for” victimization. While these competing demands on the female body have been widely documented in popular media, empirical work has not investigated if, and the extent to which, women reproduce these tension-filled constructions of the body in their own lives. Using in-depth interviews with 15 participants of varied race, class and gender identity in the US, this paper explores the ways in which these conflicting discursive constructions of the body are enacted by participants in their everyday lives. While participants took up varied sensibilities of the body and empowerment (including several that emphasized sexiness and sexuality), participants uniformly discussed perceptions of risk that inscribed the female body as vulnerable. This produced tensions in reasoning for some participants (but not all), in ways that were intersectionally inflected by race and gender presentation. More broadly, data suggests that postfeminist (and other) visions of the body that appear to otherwise produce lived experiences of empowerment are deemed invalid in contexts of risk.

In many dual-task situations, responses to the second of two tasks are slowed when the time between tasks is short. The response-selection bottleneck model of dual-task performance accounts for this phenomenon by assuming that central processing of the second task is blocked by a bottleneck until central processing of Task 1 is complete. This assumption could be called into question if it could be demonstrated that the response to Task 2 affected the central processing of Task 1, a backward response compatibility effect. Such effects are well-established in younger adults. Backward compatibility effects in older (as well as younger) adults were explored in two experiments. The first experiment found clear backward response compatibility effects for younger adults but no evidence of them for older adults. The second experiment explored backward stimulus compatibility and found similar effects in both younger and older adults. Evidence possibly consistent with some pre-bottleneck processing of Task 2 central stages also was found in the second experiment in both age groups. For younger adults, the results provide further evidence falsifying the claim of an immutable response selection bottleneck. For older adults, the evidence suggested that Task 2 affects Task 1 when there is stimulus compatibility but not when there is response compatibility.

Violence against women is a salient outcome of systemic gender inequality across the globe. In the US, the societal discourse of violence prevention simultaneously frames women in positions of victimhood and of empowerment. This study investigates the ways women draw upon these contradictory constructions in their meaning-making and practices related to violence prevention. Twenty women aged 18–62 discussed their experiences of risk and safety around an urban university campus in an in-depth interview. Women’s selective appropriation of victim and empowerment scripts produced multiple and tension-filled constructions of risk, in ways inflected by gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age. Themes included the endorsement of a “safety checklist” that functioned to construct women’s risk as unmanageable and victimhood as inevitable; complex generational differences in women’s willingness to identify fears of gendered bodily harm as legitimate and in the ways they did so; and the creation and maintenance of imagined communities of safety and danger, implicitly inflected by ‘race’ and class.

Psychology's conventionally treatment of individuals' engagement with and resistance to the societal processes in which they are embedded has come under scrutiny amid the rise of postmodernist and critical feminist perspectives (among many others) in the social sciences. A sample of social psychology's responses to these critiques is presented in the recently published book, Social Categories in Everyday Experience edited by Shaun Wiley et al. (2011). In this essay, the challenges of seriously addressing the critiques of psychology's conventional treatment of social categories, which implicate fundamental assumptions of the discipline, are discussed. Further, it is argued that in order to effectively construct psychological accounts of political activism and social change amid theories that are increasingly cognizant of the complexities and contingencies of social embeddiness, the person must be reclaimed and revisioned. Notions of agency that complement an intersectional and systemic vision of the social world are discussed.

Throughout the course of everyday life individuals enter into interactions in which an intricate relationship between agency and subordination can be observed: they sometimes act agentively and at other times—via discursive and/or interpersonal processes—their agency is reduced to objectness. Thus, theoretically we can think of constant dynamics of transfer of agency. It is argued that the transfer of agency between persons (or groups) is a fundamental quality of the societal discourses in which all persons are constituted. This transfer of agency occurs constantly throughout social interaction and at different levels of social functioning as individuals live and make meaning of their experiences. In light of this perspective, it is suggested that social change movements that aim to interrupt the transfer of agency and instead fix agency with one person (or one group of people) are inadequate. Rather, these movements can actually subvert their own agenda by producing problematic tensions in discourse and subjectivity. The self-defense movement, a component of the movement to end violence against women, is presented as a case study. The problematic and tension-filled positions and meanings the movement (re)produces for women are explored as an effect of denying any transfer of agency between women and men around issues of violence and gender oppression.

A learning progression for matter is a hypothesis about how knowledge about matter could evolve, with proper instruction, from young children’s ideas about objects and liquids to the atomic-molecular theory taught in high school. It involves a series of deep reconceptualizations consisting of mutually constraining changes in a large network of interrelated domain-specific, epistemological, and mathematical knowledge. Each reconceptualization results in a stepping stone—a coherent state of knowledge about matter that is conceptually closer to scientific understanding and helps students keep moving forward. Reconceptualizing matter at the macroscopic level in elementary school is crucial to understanding the atomic-molecular theory in later grades. In this chapter, we elaborate the K-2 section of a learning progression for matter; we describe how preschoolers’ knowledge about matter could be progressively reconceptualized to include concepts of material, amount of material, and weight that are compatible with a scientific theory of matter at the macroscopic level (2nd grade stepping stone). We present a classroom intervention with kindergartners based on this learning progression. Students’ significant progress (compared to a control group) supports the validity of learning progression as a theoretical construct and as an approach to science education.