User:Nicola.georgiou/sandbox/Approaches to Knowledge/Seminar group 16/ Power

Seminar Group 16 Power Contributions

= Introduction to this Sandbox - Power=

The word Power is a word most human beings are familiar with. It is something that affects every human in her everyday life. When approaching the concept of power from an academic perspective, it is realised that the perception of power is more complicated. For instance, in the discipline of politics, the word ”power” might awake connections such as government, election, democracy and dictatorship. However, in another discipline, Physics for instance, the word ”power" gives connotations to the natural phenomenon of work and mathematical formulas such as:

F = m × a.

So, what is power? And how can it used, or misused, in different disciplines? This Sandbox explores the interdisciplinary issue of Power and how different types of the concept can be identified.

=Power in Sociology of Family=

Introduction
The origin of the issues and questions regarding power in disciplines might be traced to the subject of a certain subdiscipline: sociology of family. Who will make new scientific discoveries, who will write a book that changes the world, and who will save our dying earth? How will they identify their race, gender, class, and disabilities? As “the simplest and smallest unit[s] of society,” families might have some of the answers.

Definition of Sociology of Family
The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology defines sociology of the family as “the study of how human sexual reproduction is institutionalized and of how children, who are the product of sexual unions, are assigned places within a kinship system.” The two main issues in sociology of family are “The relationship between types of family structure and industrialization” and criticisms suggesting that “a woman's place in the home compounds female inequality in society at large and that the modern family based on intimacy and emotional attachment in fact masks a system of exploitation of wives by husbands and children by parents.”

Power and Sociology of Family
Sociologists David M Newman and Elizabeth Grauerholz divide the part on “Thinking Sociologically about Families” of their book Sociology of Families into chapters on the relationships between families and gender, ethnicity, and wealth. Such are some of the identities that have become inseparable parts of the notion of power over the course of history. A project called “Dollar Street” shows our world as a street ordered by income, with 30,000 photographs of 264 families from 50 different countries. The project makes one imagine how large a role families, or even the kinds of toys children play with, in creating the boundaries of the notion of power. In the chapter “Duty to Parents” of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft explores the power of parents over their children and compares the two possible bases of that power: “blind obedience” and “reason.” She quotes John Locke: “if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken much by too strict an hand over them; they lose all their vigour and industry." To her, this strict hand of their parents weakens girls much more than it weakens boys. Once the girls grow up to become women, they continue being a part of the same vicious cycle that raised them; as Engels says “In the family, he is the bourgeois, the woman represents the proletariat,” drawing an analogy between the power inequality existing within economic classes and within family.

Conclusion
Sociology of family explores the power dynamics within families and marriages that oftentimes reflect the larger society. It explores how race, gender, class, and disabilities that a child is identified with at birth, plays a role on where she will be placed on the power spectrum for a whole lifetime. It also explores how the approaches of her parents to race, gender, class, disabilities, and beliefs will determine her actions on shaping that power spectrum, for a whole lifetime.

= Power in Medicine =

The power of doctors, as both direct and indirect coercion
Doctors are the only ones who are able to heal people, who have the knowledge required to do it. They automatically become powerful in the sense that they are the only ones who can prescribe treatments to people, who can directly decide which patient they take charge of first during emergencies, and so on. This constitutes the first kind of power that they hold, the direct and immediate kind. This fundamental power that is within their reach is most likely due to the long studies that they undertook to get there, the prestigious diplomas that they have, and is the reflection of an institutionalized society that rewards education priviledges and intellectual elites. There is indeed some sort of universal consensus on the fact that doctors hold the absolute truth and have to be trusted no matter what. However, "Healthcare professionals must recognise that they do not hold a privileged position from which they alone recognise all medical truths". In fact, there most certainly is a monopoly of medicine, as we know it, that does not leave any place left for other alternatives (such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, osteopathy…) which comes from the fact that current medicine is based on a universal scientific truth that is accepted by everyone, and never contested. In other words, powerful medical institutions have constructed a framework in which the patient believes that he moves autonomously, when he, in reality, does not have a real incidence on his choices that are shaped by the flow of medical knowledge gravitating around him. However, we can highlight the fact that in a situation like our current one, medicine definitely does not appear as a flawless institution which holds the absolute truth, as we see how different powerful figures of the healthcare system are still arguing on the nature of coronavirus, and struggling to find a common ground with the problematic amount of diverging opinions on the matter.

Medicine as a powerful institution involved in discrimination processes.
There is, beyond doubt, an intersection of power within medicine. More than exercising a constant power on patients, the medical institution illustrates inequalities in rather precise and punctual areas such as gender or ethnicity. First of all, access to healthcare is not the same for every population as precarious groups (especially in the US but also in the UK) of people can struggle to afford it, usually non-white people. The second matter has to do with gender. Privileged white males have more access to prestigious studies like these, they become doctors and sometimes abuse of their medical power: "In January 2016 a powerful white male doctor sexually assaulted a black female patient at one of the most prestigious academic hospitals in the U.S." . Abuses of power are indeed pretty frequent within such a big institution, "Perhaps his power, prestige and sense of invincibility were all factors that actually made him feel like he could get away with exploiting others." This, once again, illustrates the fact that doctors have an indisputable power over patients, that is unconsciously and collectively accepted. Furthermore, gender inequalities are well represented in the gynecological sector, in which women are regularly mentally and physically abused. They are indeed systematically exposed to emotional harassment and pressure concerning pregnancy, abortion, constantly made guilty for their actions on their body, and even sometimes physically hurt by doctors who totally disregard their body and intimacy.

=Power in Sex Work and Female Liberation= Sex work, defined as ‘the exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for material compensation’, is a considerably stigmatised topic, in which power, coercion and hierarchy play significant roles. This is displayed in the forms of coercion of necessity, power of the system, and underlying gender oppression.

Power of Necessity
The public often assume all sex workers enjoy their work and that they choose to do this, but in reality, the majority of female sex workers have been coerced into this line of work due to unfavourable situations such as drug addiction, asylum seeking or destitution. In an interview across 9 countries, 89% of respondents “wanted to escape prostitution, but did not have other options for survival”. Within sex work itself, there is a large power imbalance between the client and the worker — the job is essential to the worker, but not the client, thus the worker is inclined to follow their client’s orders and requests, albeit how unsafe and degrading it can be, putting them in a position of maltreatment, potentially leading to further detriment — a Korean study found that 81% of women who had partaken in prostitution had symptoms of PTSD. In regions where sex work is criminalised, workers are in such precarious positions that they risk the possibility of arrest, exhibiting the true necessity of their job. This is an evident example of indirect coercion, caused by deprivation, fundamentally linked to our insatiable capitalist society.

Power of the System
If a worker feels threatened by their clients while self-employed, as they risk being raped and experiencing other forms of violence, they may seek a manager — a person who can administer clients and their background to ensure safety, or to obtain more customers, increasing revenue for the worker. However, especially where sex work is illegal, this can give rise to exploitation of the worker, particularly by male managers towards female workers. For example, the manager can take a higher percentage than the amount agreed on, and even threaten and abuse if demurred. This is a form of direct coercion — the worker has less power than the manager and must follow their direct orders, or they are endangered. Another display of direct coercion lies within the criminalisation of sex work by the government. Mariana Popa, a sex worker in East London, regularly cooperated with other street workers to ensure safety. However, a police crackdown compelled her to work alone to avoid arrest, resulting in her getting stabbed to death. This direct coercion can also be seen in sex workers and travel restrictions. Some countries still explicitly outlaw the entry of sex workers — in the USA, prior to entry, they must be granted a waiver, a long and costly procedure, and even then entry denial is still a possibility. The same rule is applied to individuals who have a history of drug use, revealing the true deprecation of sex work and the power disparity between client and worker, involved in the same field. As women compose the larger portion of the sex work population (85-90%), the underlying systemic oppression of the female population is presented.

= The different forms of economic and political power =

Introduction
Different forms of power can be observed in many different social issues such as government and politics, environmental issues or economical issues. Today we will look further into some of the major forms of economic and political power.

Power created by money
First, we will look at the power created by money. “Money is an economic unit that functions as a generally recognized medium of exchange for transactional purpose in an economy.” Money is a symbol of economic value and social power. It has in the past, changed its appearance and value however it always has been the main actor in trades. In fact, it is a social organisation made to facilitate economic interactions and exchanges between the population. For the idea of money to work, it has to rely on the idea that every individual in the society using it have to accept and recognize it. Therefore we understand that it comes with constraints, however those constraints are necessary in order to be able to express the power of money. As said previously, this power can be mainly found on the idea that it facilitates trading and exchanges as it puts a value on things. Furthermore, the power created by money can be seen through the fact that it is more efficient than trading. In fact, where trading requires both actors to agree on both things that are traded, monetary transactions facilitate this by having only one aspect to consent on, and that’s just the monetary value of what is traded. Thus, the power created by money is that it facilitates the growth of commerce and transaction.

Power of government
To look at the power of governments, we will focus on western European countries such as the United Kingdom. Montesquieu expressed a doctrine on the separation of powers in a government in order to avoid tyranny. It says that “power should not be concentrated in the hands of one person”. Montesquieu also recognized the three functions of a government in our societies : Legislative, Executive and Judiciary.

Legislative power : “Legislative power is the capacity of a legislative chamber or actors within that chamber to thwart, encourage, or compel actions by others.” Legislatures have the power to create laws, however the extent of this power depends on what type of political system the legislation takes place in. For example, in Westminster style legislatures, the executive power can basically pass any law they want as they usually have a majority behind them. However, this is not always the case.

Executive power : The basic definition of executive power explains that the executive power is the power to execute the laws. Thus, we understand that executive has to keep the confidence of the legislature as they both work hand in hand.

Judiciary power : The judiciary power is the third power controlled by the government. It is the system of courts that “interprets, defend and applies the laws”. This branch also has the power to change laws.

As those three functions of the government becomes clearer, we understand that Montesquieu’s doctrine makes sense. The notion of power makes sense in this situation because in fact, the same part of the government of a state can not control entirely the three functions or they will have full power and it will look more like a dictatorship than anything else.

=Power in Visual Arts and Dadaism=

Introduction
Our norms of aesthetics expressions are usually shaped and displayed in a certain way, which may lead to the power of non-decision making in the field of Visual arts. Those new works of art with the aggressive nature are not part of or even contrary to the preconceptions, thus, the interests to them are not articulated, and remain hidden.

The natures of power in artistic creation and appreciation
Visual arts is one of the major sub-disciplines of Arts, defined as “specific activities that produce sensitivity in humans done by people with skill and imagination”. It includes multiple forms of artistic expression e.g. architecture, ceramics, drawing, painting. Like one unique type of artistic language, the artists use their works to construct certain subjectivities through employing particular techniques and elements. This shows that the underlying power is used as strategy to convey certain meanings and emotional feelings to the public.

Besides, power as indirect coercion exits in the process of artistic appreciation. The quality of artworks is judged by people who access and rate it. The opaque rating criteria reveal an implicit form of power as there is no unified standard widely known to the public for assessing artworks. For instance, people all think that the artworks created by famous artists e.g. Picasso, Monet, Vincent Van Gogh are unarguably accepted to be successful.

Dadaism as an example
Dadaism is an anti-art art movement triggered by the outbreak of World War I, with participants in Europe and North America in the early 20th century. Dadaists protested against “bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests” which they believe had lead to the war. By fighting against rationality, they strived to create “a different narrative” and “a new normal, a new discourse” for that time. One typical example is Marcel Duchamps’ Fountain urinal that “satirized the traditional veneration of the arts”.

Various forms of power could be identified from this artistic movement. Dadaists confronted to the mainstream understanding on arts, and tried to use power of their artworks as direct coercion to cause actions of the politics. Also, many people tend to accept what is considered normal and do not accept Dadaists’ aggressive works even nowadays. This reflects the strong power of predominant norms rooted in public opinions. Moreover, Dadaism was a mirror to that society and had profound impacts later on art design, the art of protest, and the artistic movements. This vividly shows that because artworks reflect the times, they possess power to strategically drive the evolution of forms of artistic expression in our shifting cultures. This gradually widens the scope of acceptable objects in the discipline of Visual arts.

=Power in Education Studies=

Introduction
Learning is highly valued in most societies, often seeing education as powerful gateways into better vocational opportunities. The purpose of education studies is placing education in social contexts to better understand who, how and what purpose education will serve for the learners and the wider community.

Education Inequality - Power as Strategy
Education inequality happens at the local level: although a country has a high GDP, for example the United Kingdom, a Unicef report that looked at the educational inequalities in the world’s richest countries ranked the UK 16th in secondary school and 23rd in primary school educational inequality. Family background is recognised as influential in academic achievement and access to academic opportunity. As an example of power as strategy, the division between ‘private’ and ‘public’ schools furthers educational inequality, private education establishing a culture of social exclusivity for those of affluent family backgrounds. In short, private school’s prominence provides further advantages for their already privileged students in an enduring cycle of power and entitlement.

Power on a Structural Level - Intersectionality of Power
On the other end of the spectrum, differences in academic skills can also be a systemic issue, with an intersectionality of power based on gender, race and income. In the USA a history of slavery puts minorities, and specifically Black students at a disadvantge. Governments funnel more money into white education than minority education, more money put into vocational education in preparation for manual labour to prevent minorities from reaching higher status jobs, and standardised testing being a sole marker of success that hinders minority students from entering higher education institutions. Females are also more likely to do well in humanities driven subjects, while males the scientific and mathematical, a form of indirect coercion. Ultimately, the realities of minority education have become vehicles for maintaining power on a structural level in society. The placement of students in the educational system parallels the hierarchical structures in society. According to their social standing, students are judged and held to a different standard by their teachers and the government policy makers that fund their schools. This leads to the creation of unequal classroom cultures and an indirect coercion of power, rooted in histories of racial and gender biases that continue to marginalise certain demographics.

=Power in Art History=

Introduction
The discipline of art history is rooted in the artists that created the works in the likes of The National Gallery and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artists like Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Caravaggio, who were all the greats of Renaissance art. But who were they? They were all men. Another artist who, like the men mentioned above, created Biblical paintings of masterful beauty, was Plautilla Nelli. Except, Nelli was written out of every Renaissance history book, being dismissed as “another nun with a paintbrush,” and her name is virtually unknown.

Sexism in Art History
The origins of this bias are found in the dynamics of art history. Women were mostly barred from artistic training and professions until the 1870s. But why does it still exist today? From the percentage of works by female artists in famous galleries to the amount women’s artworks sell for at auction, the numbers paint a bleak picture. Two works by women have broken into the top 100 at auction sales for paintings, even though women were the subject matter for about half of the top 25 paintings. Georgia O’Keefe holds the auction record for work by a deceased female artist which sold in 2014 for $44.4m, compared to a Picasso work that sold for $179m the following year. At the National Gallery of Scotland, only 4% of works are by female artists.

Hope for the Future?
Unfortunately, these biases are grounded in long-standing traditions in the discipline of art history. Many feminist art histories doubt the possibility they will be able to gain any ground in the study of women artists. They believe that the field of art history is “based on assumptions which make it impossible for women’s roles and images ever to be interpreted correctly.” However, a shift may be occurring in the art world. Guerilla Girls, an artist-activist group set up in the 1980’s to challenge the dismal representation of women in the art world, are being featured in an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. A new Los Angeles gallery was opened recently with an exhibition of female abstract sculpture. And in big auction houses, more shows by female artists are being held, with their works commanding millions of dollars. It is with hope that places of art influence, such as these commercial galleries and auction houses, will be able to change this long-standing power imbalance found in the discipline of art history.

=Power in Historical Bias=

"Mistakes in biased history are motivated, not accidental"

This is how C. Behan McCullagh concludes the introduction to his article Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation. McCullagh was a professor in philosophy at La Trobe University before his retirement in 2007. His research was focused on the philosophy of history and the use of history. In the mentioned article, McCullagh discusses bias in the discipline of history. This area of research provides valuable knowledge in relation to the concept of power.

Introduction to Power
Power is a commonly used concept in politics, sociology as well as physics, but the definition of the word is less obvious. Power could be described as ”the ability to control people or things”, but it could be argued that the concept of power is not that simple for the reason that there are more than one type of power. Two of these are interesting in relation to historical bias: Power as a strategy or language and power as indirect or institutionalised coercion.

Power as a Strategy in Historical Bias
The first aspect of power is that it can be used as a strategy and a language. In the discipline of history, this can be seen in how history has been told. An example is the nordic vikings. In the nordic countries the vikings are widely portrayed as heroic and adventurous soldiers who explored new land and brought wealth back to their homeland. In contrast to this it can be examined how the United Kingdom tells the story about the vikings. In British sources, words like ”ruthless pirates” and ”terror from the sea” replace the heroic terms found in nordic historical sources. This illustrates how the language used in the portrayal of history can become a strategy for creating power dynamics by showing one part as superior and another as inferior. Another example is the version of colonialism that European children learn in school. It is often showed as something progressive for Europe rather than something damaging for the colonised regions which is a way of showing Europe as more powerful and less evil.

Power as Indirect Coercion in Historial Bias
On the contrary, historical bias can also be considered power as indirect or institutionalised coercion. This sort of power is based on unconscious bias, meaning that the intention is not to create a superior and inferior power dynamic; but it still is created because of institutionalised inequality. This could mean that the British colonisation of Africa is showed the previously described way because of tradition, and not for the reason of establishing a power dynamic. Interestingly, this principle is incompatible with the introductory quote by McCullagh; that historical bias is not accidental. Hence, an intriguing further area of research could be how historical research and historical teaching today is influenced by power as strategies or indirect coercion.

Conclusion
To conclude, historical bias can deliberately be used to establish a certain balance of power, which historical sources state regarding the British colonisation, for instance. However the fact that modern day history textbooks still maintain this power relationship makes it interesting to examine whether this still is a power strategy or if it, contradictory to McCullagh’s research, is accidental institutionalised coercion.

= Power in Nursing: The Impact of Gender Roles in Nursing =



Modern nursing appeared in 19th century Germany, with Theodor Fliedner (1800–1864) organizing deaconesses in Germany-where young women from small villages and lower classes moved from around Germany to Kaiserswerth to be trained in nursing care - and Britain, with Florence Nightingale(1820-1910): known as the founder of modern nursing and as a social reformer in the medical field. Although the action of caring for the ill was already in practice since circa 1–500 AD, when religious organizations were the care providers, nursing became a certified profession only in the 19th century.

How Gender Roles impacted early Nursing?
The roles that women were taking as care-takers or housewives shaped how they were perceived in society. In the late Middle Ages, words of the semantic domain of "mother" and of "woman" were associated with caring meanings It was a sensible implication, provided the conceptions the society had in those times, that since women carry tasks such as delivering babies, they must also be able to care for them and for others.

Wet-nursing was a common practice before infant formulas were invented in 1865. Women were breastfeeding abandoned or orphan children and children whose mothers could not breastfeed them, sometimes for money, thus encouraging the reasoning behinds women's image as the care-taker of a family.

Nuns are another example of women whom it was expected from to be able to care for the poor and ill; they were viewed as charitable practitioners and were highly esteemed in the society. Before nursing became officially a profession, in the Civil War, the term 'nurse' could be, as well, misconstrued. Since there were no nursing schools yet, nor official nursing credentials, a 'nurse' could have been the wife of a soldier on the battlefield. The nurses that volunteered on the battlefield were usually professionally inexperienced; their experience came from caring for their loved ones.

The Age of Modern Nursing


Multiple practice schools for nurses opened in the late 19th century, most notably, Florence Nightingale's school of Nursing and Midwifery at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, which opened in 1860. Although, at first, nursing as a discipline was criticized because of its lack of theoretical rigor and its emphasis on practice and caring, a committee for the study of nursing education, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, encouraged in the Goldmark Report(1923), that nursing schools should be more academical, become a discipline at universities and that students should no longer provide free services for their practices.

The majority of male nurses from the early 20th century worked in mental hospitals(psychiatric hospitals) and received very little training; they were perceived as less qualified and of lower status than female nurses, thus establishing a gender stereotype within modern nursing: men worked in mental nursing, women worked in general nursing. Many schools even rejected male students, for they could have seduced or upset the female students.

In the United Kingdom, after World War II, when the Ministry of Health saw that male and female nurses can work together(nurses had to work together regardless of gender due to a shortage in the number of nurses available for Worl War II), the employment of male nurses in both mental and general nursing increased. The ministry arranged a one-year training course for men leaving military services and offered male nurses full-time jobs by the National Health Service(NHS).

By 1960, men were allowed to become members of the Royal College of Nursing and there was a gradual rise in the number of male nurses.

How Past Gender Roles in Nursing impact our Society today?
Despite more men being associated with nursing jobs today, the gender divide remains uneven with 11.2% of nurses and health care workers employed by the NHS being men, in 2015.

The term [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwife#:~:text=A%20midwife%20is%20a%20health,who%20are%20physicians%20(doctors). midwife] is used to this day, although there are male nurses who have this profession as well as women. The slang job titles being attributed to males in nursing positions such as, murse(a male nurse) or [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/midhusband#:~:text=Noun,of%20midwife%3A%20A%20male%20midwife. midhusband](male midwife), continue to show that to this day, gender roles are imprinted in nursing, from the early basis of the discipline. As of 2016, a study by Health Education England shows that children feel more at ease having a woman as their nurse and that they perceive females as nurses and males as doctors.

In 2019 roughly 16,000 students graduate from UK nursing schools, both men and women, according to the Royal College of Nursing ; despite a shortfall in the number of students that graduate each year and the misconceptions of gender roles from the past that still follow the profession, today people realize the importance of nurses and nursing students in society due to the deadly 2020 pandemic : COVID-19.

=Power in the media and social media platforms=

The media, indirect coercion and power as strategy
The notion of power as ‘indirect coercion’ can be observed in the distribution of information via media outlets in the modern age. Many media providers mobilise biases through their platforms and are fuelled by CEOs who have an ideological agenda to share with the masses. FOX News and Breitbart Journal have been described as the most politically biased networks in the United States, with a -51 bias score, indicating that this is a consensus shared by both Democrats and Republicans. In this way, one can also note how certain strategies are used by said media providers to exert power over people’s ideologies and biases. This can be furthered by observing how social media platforms use personal data and search history to inform which advertisements are presented to the viewer, with the most prominent case of this being the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal that was considered a breach of user privacy and demonstrative of how ‘global manipulation is out of control’.

Intersections of power within social media platforms
Despite this, the advent of social media has restored users with a greater level of autonomy than historically observed. Although there are guidelines that have to be upheld in regards to conduct expected on social media platforms, there is generally a lack of censorship and freedom to post content aligned with the creators’ ideals. This demonstrates the power of the individual, but at the same time, the economical power of social media, which can be noted through it’s use as a career platform for influencers of today, some of whom can earn up to $1 million per post. Moreover, perhaps the power of social media is best observed in the legal realm; it has served as the basis for social movements that have resulted in the conviction of various criminals and raised awareness to wider social issues. The biggest instance of this, the #MeToo movement resulted in famous criminals like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, who had largely evaded prosecution until this point, being brought to justice, and simultaneously triggered a domino effect of victims taking power back from their oppressors through social media. This demonstrates the intersections of power that occur within social media being used as a tool through which individual thought can be expressed.

=References=