ГЕНДЕРНОЕ ИЗМЕРЕНИЕ ХАЛЯЛЯ: ЖЕНСКОЕ ТЕЛО И РОДОВСПОМОЖЕНИЕ В ПЛАТНЫХ МЕДИЦИНСКИХ УСЛУГАХ ДЛЯ МУСУЛЬМАН В РЕСПУБЛИКЕ ТАТАРСТАН

Using the example of the Republic of Tatarstan (Russia), this article discusses the emergence of the field of medical services for Muslims. It argues that genderisation of social interactions, in particular, of those between physicians and patients, has been one of the main principles of Muslim bioethics in the Republic. Among other measures, halal certification procedures are currently being developed by numerous religious experts in order to standardise and legitimise such genderisation. The analysis draws on data collected during multiple interviews with experts, medical professionals, Muslim patients, as well as on the qualitative study of regulatory documents. The article shows that the main feature of rules that govern certification procedures in Tatarstan today is the ongoing convergence between religious norms and biomedicine. As a particular example of medical services designed explicitly for Muslims in the Republic, the paper presents and analyses the service of “halal birth-giving”. This service combines commodification of religiosity and paid care for Muslim women, thereby heavily relying on their gender and religious identities, as well as their class status.

Technological university in Brazil: examining the development and (de)construction of the model

Based primarily on an analysis of laws and legal frameworks, this qualitative exploratory study aims to examine the development, context, construction, as well as deconstruction, of the technological university model in Brazil. The Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR) is the only technological university in the country. The analysis presented herein demonstrates that its development is the outcome of movements and efforts within its predecessor, the Federal Center of Technological Education of Paraná (CEFET-PR), to respond to the deconstruction of the technical education model, on which the Institution was based, during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government. The concept of a technological university has not been replicated in any government since the transformation of CEFET-PR to UTFPR, not even during the Workers’ Party (PT) government, which introduced the model. We conclude that, despite efforts from within, the legal apparatus and the pursuit of certain characteristics and goals, such as obtaining world class status, are aligning UTFPR increasingly toward the profile of traditional universities.

Family values, customs, traditions and ethics of the Russian family in Bessarabia (the interwar period in Romanian literature)

The article analyzes the essays “Bessarabian Roads” by Mikhail Sadoveanu, written in the genre of ethnographic fiction, and the moral-descriptive novel by Georgy Bezvikonny “The Last Superfluous Man”. Our selection of works was based on the representativeness of these sources for the announced topic. M. Sadoveanu recreates a phantomatic picture of the micro-space of the Russian noble family of Madame Panina (1920s); the system of the images of these essays clearly reveals the atmosphere of social disorientation of the Russian population, as well as the manifestation of clear trends of integration into the Romanian social space. However, the family values, customs, traditions and the morals of the Russian family in Bessarabia during the interwar period retain some elements of continuity. G. Bezvikonny in details recreates the spirit of the era, its historical flavor, retrospectively reflects the life of a typical Bessarabian family with a high social class status (the so-called “Russian boyars”); in his novel, the biopsychological portrait of the family, constituted over generations, emerges in the detailed aspects of family values, customs and traditions. The above mentioned works also substantively consider the issues of “Bessarabian identity”, which were especially relevant in the aspect of studying the Russian family in the interwar period.

Creating Unbiased Machine Learning Models by Design

Unintended bias against protected groups has become a key obstacle to the widespread adoption of machine learning methods. This work presents a modeling procedure that carefully builds models around protected class information in order to make sure that the final machine learning model is independent of protected class status, even in a nonlinear sense. This procedure works for any machine learning method. The procedure was tested on subprime credit card data combined with demographic data by zip code from the US Census. The census data serves as an imperfect proxy for borrower demographics but serves to illustrate the procedure.

Outsiders in the Village

A shortage of women doctors in Rajasthan’s rural government sector has left sizeable gaps in the provision of women’s healthcare. This chapter explores how, in their narratives, women doctors position themselves as outsiders in the village, unable to create successful careers and lives in rural spaces. Medical graduates considering a rural career must contend with the hierarchy of medical prestige that places cities above villages and the timescale that frames villages as ‘backwards’ spaces. In doctors’ narratives of the village, doctors used the village as code for low educational and class status—and by separating themselves from the geographical space of the village, they also put metaphorical distance between themselves and their subaltern Other. Women doctors’ reluctance to occupy rural space illuminates the ways that class, space, and gender overlap to shape the practice of healthcare, with impacts felt far beyond the careers of doctors.

Perceptions of Distributive Justice of People in Contemporary China: an Empirical Study

Objectives: This paper aims to explore the impact of media use, subjective class status, local comparison and demographic variables on Chinese people's perception of distributive justice through quantitative analysis. Based on the existing literature, distributive justice is divided into macro distributive justice and micro distributive justice, of which the micro distributive justice includes two dimensions of outcome justice and opportunity justice. The paper analyzes 2015 Chinese General Social Survey data (CGSS2015) and get some results. First, in terms of Chinese people's macro-distributive justice perception, the use of Internet media has a negative impact on macro-distributive justice perception, subjective class status and local comparison have a positive impact, and gender, degree of education and birth generation in demographic variables also have significant impacts; Second, in terms of perceived outcome justice, subjective class status and local comparison have significant positive impacts on perceived outcome justice, gender has a significant positive impact on perceived outcome justice, and degree of education and birth age have negative impacts on perceived outcome justice; Third, for perceived justice of opportunity, Internet media use and degree of education have significant negative effects, while subjective class status, local comparison, birth generation and other variables have positive effects.

The Theme of Protest and Freedom in Cry, the Peacock

The conflict between social institutions and individuals is a complex and perplexing issue for many scholars. While reflecting on this issue, some scholars propagate the privilege to individuality, the others to the social institutions. Many scholars consider it as a matter of mutual coordination and interest. The need for a relative space for an individual and the requirement of the social institutions for regulating control over an individual’s uncensored wills are equally important. However, safeguarding or maintaining the margins of both entities is complex work. Regulating uncensored wills or reducing excessive encroachment of institutional authorities is a difficult task; it needs to be addressed with a scientific approach. The Indian social system is conservative and has been maintaining its dominance over the women’s class from the time unknown. The society, after allotting all the privileges to male members, refuses to consider women as individuals, having space and freedom. It expects women to be timid, docile, submissive and obedient. As a result, they feel tyrannized and experience untold sufferings. When the patriarchal system becomes over oppressive, it leads women to absolute confinement; the life of complete closure is highly disappointing and frustrating. The forces that obliterate their rights include gender discrimination, marriage-system, orthodox traditions, customs, rituals and class status. A woman is born with a destitute to experience a collision with the subjugating elements in her life and while wrestling against it she has little success. She goes through a perpetual war against the controlling institution while creating a space for her individuality and freedom. The factors like these rob women characters of happiness and advantages and lead women to live an insignificant life, full of suffering.

Gender of the Interface

For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.

Class Distinction-Making through Etiquette, a Computational Approach

Social scientists of class and inequality have documented the rise of omnivorousness, informality, ordinariness, and emphasis on meritocracy. This apparent decline in class closure contrasts sharply with rising inequality and declining economic mobility. How are these competing developments reflected in everyday class distinction-making? In this article, we answer this question by applying Goffman’s work on the symbols of class status to the analysis of unique data. We use word embeddings to isolate and quantify the salience of six dimensions of class (affluence, cultivation, education, employment, morality, and status) to class distinction-making within a corpus of etiquette books published between 1922 and 2017. We find that education and employment are increasingly salient dimensions while status, affluence, cultivation, and morality decline as salient dimensions of class distinction-making. These results signal a decline of class operating as a status group through cultural closure, the rise of education and employment as the carriers of class in everyday life, and the corresponding legitimation of class position and class inequality on the basis of supposedly meritocratic grounds. This research opens up new avenues for research on class and the application of computational methods for investigations of social change.

Strategic sisterhood and the girlfriend gaze: Representation of girlfriendship in the Chinese TV drama Ode to Joy

This article examines the representation of girlfriendship (Winch A (2013) Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) in the Chinese TV series Ode to Joy (2016–2017), and in particular, its representation of the interactions between urban women’s competence, experience of romance, postfeminist identity and class status in the Chinese gender context. Drawing on Winch’s concepts of ‘strategic sisterhood’ and the ‘girlfriend gaze’, we first explore how female friendship relies on networks of exchange in terms of economy, career and/or emotion, and then investigate the ways in which young women mutually monitor each other’s personal relationships to ensure their heterosexuality in society as a group.