scholarly journals The co-constitution of ageing and technology – a model and agenda

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Peine ◽  
Louis Neven
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Theory Development ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Cat Model ◽  
Age Studies

Abstract This paper presents a model for studying ageing and technology. It investigates the theoretical gains that can be made by combining insights from Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although technology has become a much more salient part in the everyday lives of older people and investments are high in technologies to deal with the alleged challenges of demographic change, theory development about ageing–technology relations has not kept up with these trends. Partly this is due to the poor connection between the social scientific understanding of ageing and the technically focused discipline of gerontechnology. This has led to an interventionist logic that underlies much of the current and implicit theorising about ageing and technology. We briefly analyse the problems of the interventionist logic and then present a model that conceptualises ageing and technology as co-constituted. We propose this model – which we call the CAT-model – to highlight a number of fundamental ideas about ageing–technology relations. At the centre are four different arenas (life-worlds of older people, design worlds, technological artefacts and images of ageing) in and across which these relations can and should be studied. To develop the model, we build on our own theoretical and empirical work over the last decade, and on examples from recent scholarship that straddle the disciplinary boundaries between STS and Age Studies.

Stabilizing American Society: Kenneth Boulding and the Integration of the Social Sciences, 1943–1980

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Main Determinant ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.

Why clothes matter: the role of dress in the everyday lives of older people

2018 ◽  
pp. 181-196
Author(s):  
Julia Twigg
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Constitution ◽  
Frail Elders ◽  
Consumption Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday

Dress is part of the material constitution of age, providing as it does the vestimentary envelope that presents the body to the social world. Drawing on a series of empirical studies, this chapter explores the role of dress in the embodied lives of older people. It argues that a focus on dress is relevant not just to the younger old and to arguments concerning the new role of consumption culture among this group, but also for the day to day embodied lives of frail elders, in this case those with dementia.

scholarly journals Reframing translational research as transactional research:

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Dixi Louise Strand
Keyword(s):  
Translational Research ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Hospital Setting ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Situational Analysis ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Danish Hospital

Translational research (TR) is subject to increasing attention and demand in research and health policy in the Nordic countries as well as internationally. While clinician-scientists are often positioned as key actors in both policy and academic debates on TR, less is known about the clinician-scientists’ everyday work—their practices and commitments at the interface of academia and clinical health care. Drawing on the framework of arena analysis, developed in situational analysis, this article presents an empirical exploration of the everyday practices of clinician-scientists by extending research into a Danish hospital setting. The findings shed light on hospital-based translational research as constituted by clinician-scientists’ practical integration of and transactions across many different work practice arenas. This paper depicts these arenas and the complex of commitments and capabilities involved. The analysis converges with existing Science and Technology Studies approaches to translational research as mutually reconfiguring clinical and scientific practices. In addition, it adds to this debate by providing an empirical work practice account of hospital-based TR and by suggesting a conceptual reframing of translational research as transactional research.

Habits of the Heart

2011 ◽  
Vol 637 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica R. Miller ◽  
Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Moral Force ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Future Work

The landscape of youth religious participation is an underengaged area across both the humanities and social science. While the humanities lack empirical data on the changing religious life worlds of youths, existing empirical work in the social sciences suggests that institutional religion buffers criminality and delinquency—a brand of engagement the authors refer to as “buffering transgression.” This is a process that both conceives and privileges religion as an institutional and a moral force responsible for creating prosocial behavior. While empirical studies on youths and religion keep religion arrested to institutional and moral functions, scholars in the humanities work hard to legitimate youth cultural forms, such as hip hop, by conflating its rugged dimensions with a quest (and hope) for democratic sensibilities—a motif the authors suggest is rooted in ideologies of teleological progress. Using the tropes progress, peril, and change, this article explores the utility (and limitations) of empirical work and the often misguided efforts to moralize religion. Here the authors raise queries regarding youth cultural change and religion and quantitatively model youth religious change over 16 years. The implications of these theoretical and empirical interventions point toward future work at the social scientific intersections of religion in culture.

scholarly journals Ephemeral Infrastructures of Drug Smuggling Mobilities

2021 ◽  
pp. 009145092110455
Author(s):  
Javier Guerrero C. ◽  
Craig Martin
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Drug Smuggling ◽  
The Core ◽  
Organizational Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Temporal Qualities

The study of drug smuggling has often taken an organizational perspective whereby the structures of how smuggling is constituted predominate. Building on a growing body of scholarship addressing the networked complexities of drug smuggling this article considers the importance of distinct infrastructural arrangements. Its primary focus is on the materiality of drug smuggling infrastructures, and how the social, spatial and temporal qualities of these configurations overlap with licit mobility infrastructures, including intersections of visibility/invisibility, stability, and permanence. The core conceptual premise, drawn from Science and Technology Studies, is that drug smuggling mobilities are formed of ephemeral infrastructures that exhibit temporary, short-lived stability and permanence through the subversion of licit infrastructural configurations. Drawing on material from El Dorado Airport, Colombia, the paper examines the everyday artefacts which constitute these ephemeral infrastructures.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

Narrating Society: Enacting ‘Immigrant’ Characters through Negotiating, Naturalization, and Forgetting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Media And Communication

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

Bringing Moral Culture into the Fray

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Farrell
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Conflict ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Moral Culture ◽  
Social Scientific Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Basic Level

This introductory chapter briefly presents the conflict in Yellowstone, elaborates on the book's theoretical argument, and specifies its substantive and theoretical contributions to the social scientific study of environment, culture, religion, and morality. The chapter argues that the environmental conflict in Yellowstone is not—as it would appear on the surface—ultimately all about scientific, economic, legal, or other technical evidence and arguments, but an underlying struggle over deeply held “faith” commitments, feelings, and desires that define what people find sacred, good, and meaningful in life at a most basic level. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The Social Consequences of Phubbing

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariek Vanden Abeele
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Expectancy Violations ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Comprehensive Literature Review ◽  
The Social

Recent empirical work suggests that phubbing, a term used to describe the practice of snubbing someone with a phone during a face-to-face social interaction, harms the quality of social relationships. Based on a comprehensive literature review, this chapter presents a framework that integrates three concurrent mechanisms that explain the relational impact of phubbing: expectancy violations, ostracism, and attentional conflict. Based on this framework, theoretically grounded propositions are formulated that may serve as guidelines for future research on these mechanisms, the conditions under which they operate, and a number of potential issues that need to be considered to further validate and extend the framework.

Feudal Europe, 800–1300: communal discourse and conflictual practices

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Structural Theory ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Scientific Argument

The discipline of international relations faces a new debate of fundamental significance. After the realist challenge to the pervasive idealism of the interwar years and the social scientific argument against realism in the late 1950s, it is now the turn of critical theorists to dispute the established paradigms of international politics, having been remarkably successful in several other fields of social inquiry. In essence, critical theorists claim that all social reality is subject to historical change, that a normative discourse of understandings and values entails corresponding practices, and that social theory must include interpretation and dialectical critique. In international relations, this approach particularly critiques the ahistorical, scientific, and materialist conceptions offered by neorealists. Traditional realists, by contrast, find a little more sympathy in the eyes of critical theorists because they join them in their rejection of social science and structural theory. With regard to liberal institutionalism, critical theorists are naturally sympathetic to its communitarian component while castigating its utilitarian strand as the accomplice of neorealism. Overall, the advent of critical theory will thus focus the field of international relations on its “interparadigm debate” with neorealism.

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