David Robins

Bio: David Robins is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Neighbourhood (mathematics) & Working class. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 5 publications receiving 423 citations.

Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude

Abstract: "Cool Rules" introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a serious, systematic analysis of Cool's history, psychology, and importance. The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. "Cool Rules" traces Cool's ancient origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. Pountain and Robins examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flaneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s. What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as cynical advertisers have seized on it to create a constantly updated bricolage of styles and entertainments designed to affect the way people think about themselves and their society.

Tarnished Vision: Crime and Conflict in the Inner City

Abstract: The neighbourhood bad boys the group confrontation false dawn postscript - figures in an inner city landscape.

Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research

Abstract: Some 70 years after its development in Frankfurt, Germany, critical theory retains its ability to disrupt and hallenge the status quo. In the process, it elicits highlycharged emotions of all types—fierce loyalty from its roponents, vehement hostility from its detractors. Such vibrantly polar reactions indicate at the very least that critical theory still matters. We can be against critical theory or for it, but, especially at the present historical uncture, we cannot be without it.

Authorizing Students’ Perspectives: Toward Trust, Dialogue, and Change in Education

Abstract: This article argues for attending to the perspectives of those most directly affected by, but least often consulted about, educational policy and practice: students. The argument for authorizing student perspectives runs counter to U.S. reform efforts, which have been based on adults’ ideas about the conceptualization and practice of education. This article outlines and critiques a variety of recent attempts to listen to students, including constructivist and critical pedagogies, postmodern and poststructural feminisms, educational researchers’ and social critics’ work, and recent developments in the medical and legal realms, almost all of which continue to unfold within and reinforce adults’ frames of reference. This discussion contextualizes what the author argues are the twin challenges of authorizing student perspectives: a change in mindset and changes in the structures in educational relationships and institutions.

Performing tourism, staging tourism (Re)producing tourist space and practice

Abstract: This article explores the metaphor of performance to investigate how tourism can be conceived as a set of activities, imbricated with the everyday, whereby conventions are reinforced and broken. By looking at the contexts in which tourism is regulated, directed and choreographed or, alternatively, is a realm of improvisation and contestation, I will consider the constraints and opportunities which shape the ways in which tourist space (here considered as ‘stages’) and performance are reproduced, challenged, transformed and bypassed. A range of examples will be used to exemplify the ways in which tourism is staged and performed. I will also focus on how the global proliferation of tourist practices and attractions acts to theme tourist space in highly commodified ways and simultaneously decentre normative modes of performing tourism.

Resistance Through Rituals

Abstract: ion, but will bear fruit to the extent that ways are found to do justice to the contradictions of our society in an adequate confrontation of the theoretical and political problems which they pose. The logic-of-enquiry of participant observation 233

Work, Self and Society: After Industrialism

Abstract: Despite recent interest in the effects of restructuring and redesigning the work place, the link between individual identity and structural change has usually been asserted rather than demonstrated. Through an extensive review of data from field work in a multi-national corporation Catherine Casey changes this. She knows that changes currently occuring in the world of work are part of the vast social and cultural changes that are challenging the meta trends of modern industrialism. These events affect what people do everyday, and they are altering relations among ourselves and with the physical world. This valuable book is not only a critical analysis of the transformations occurring in the world of work, but an exploration of the effects of contemporary practices of work on the self.