Acting discursively: the development of UK organic food and farming policy networks

This paper documents the early evolution of UK organic food and farming policy networks and locates this empirical focus in a theoretical context concerned with understanding the contemporary policy-making process. While policy networks have emerged as a widely acknowledged empirical manifestation of governance, debate continues as to the concept's explanatory utility and usefulness in situations of network and policy transformation since, historically, policy networks have been applied to "static" circumstances. Recognizing this criticism, and in drawing on an interpretivist perspective, this paper sees policy networks as enacted by individual actors whose beliefs and actions construct the nature of the network. It seeks to make links between the characteristics of the policy network and the policy outcomes through the identification of discursively constructed "storylines" that form a tool for consensus building in networks. This study analyses the functioning of the organic policy networks through the discursive actions of policy-network actors.     

Dreams by Day and Night: Kant,Freud and Ella Freeman Sharpe

Abstract: The poet and novelist Mathilde Blind (1841–96) is known to have been influenced by evolutionary theory, particularly in her epic poem The Ascent of Man (1889). However, critics have not yet noted the extent to which her depictions of the courtship plot in her less overtly evolutionary writings are indebted to Darwin's representations of animal mating rituals. Although Darwin's commentary on patterns of relationships in the animal world often reinforced stereotypes of masculine aggression and feminine coyness, feminist writers, including Blind, shifted the focus onto creatures, such as birds and spiders, whose mating behaviour disrupts these stereotypes. This article examines four pieces in which Blind re-imagines the courtship plot by applying imagery of other species to human relationships: her poems ‘The Song of the Willi’ (1871), The Heather on Fire (1886) and ‘The Teamster’ (1889), and her novel Tarantella (1885). By rewriting the courtship plot in this way, Blind contests the idea that middle-class gender relations are sanctioned by the natural world and highlights the variety of possible gender roles found in other species.