scholarly journals Reconstructing the Underclass

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Macnicol
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Social ◽  
Problem Family ◽  
The Way

In late 2011, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government announced the launch of a new programme on ‘troubled families’ – a term used to describe the estimated 120,000 most behaviourally anti-social families in England and Wales. To many social scientists, this appeared to be yet another reconstruction of the broad ‘underclass’ concept that has run like a thread of analysis through UK poverty discourses over the last 150 years. The symbolic nature and coded meanings of this particular concept of poverty are very interesting, as is the way it has been reconstructed periodically. This paper summarises these reconstructions, and the analytical issues raised by them: the ‘residuum’ concept of the 1880–1914 period; the ‘social problem group’ of the inter-war years; the ‘problem family’ of the 1940s and 1950s; the ‘cycle of deprivation’ of the 1970s; and the ‘underclass’ of the 1980s and 1990s.

Reconsidering Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Louis Gates, Jr
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Way

Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western, sociopolitical concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment). This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social science and medical literature: some of the modern sciences employ racial and ethnic categories. As such, race has a physical, as opposed to a purely social, dimension. The book argues that in order to more fully understand what we mean by race, social scientists need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. To be sure, the long shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism have cast a pall over the effort to understand this complicated relationship between social science and race. But while the text rejects pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at race, it makes the claim that it is time to reassess the Western-based, social construction paradigm. The chapters in this book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race: one between theories that see race as fixed or malleable; a second between the idea that race is a universal but modern Western concept and the idea that it has a deeper and more complicated cultural history; and a third between sociopolitical and biological/biomedical concepts of race. Arguing that race is not merely socially constructed, the chapters offer a collection of views on the way that social scientists must reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Andrew Mangham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Problem Novel ◽  
Social Novels ◽  
The Way

An outline of the way in which the nineteenth century invented the idea of hunger as a physiological and material phenomenon whose radical epistemological powers were constructed across literature, medicine, and physiology, this Introduction seeks to offer an outline of how the book’s reading of the social-problem novel will draw on the methodologies associated with literature and science, new materialism, and somatic (bodily) or anthropological realism. It also introduces how the social novels of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens promoted the development of knowledge and sympathy through both an emphasis on the material sufferings of the starving and a detailed analysis of what it means to go hungry, and to observe and to write about it in a way that seeks to be truthful.

scholarly journals Human Trafficking and Legal Culture

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nelken
Keyword(s):  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Trafficking In Persons ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Law ◽  
Palermo Protocol ◽  
The Way

This Article discusses the Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons. In the first part it offers a critical discussion of what is entailed by speaking of a “shortfall” of enforcement in dealing with the social problem of human trafficking. It then goes on to show that there are two competing narratives of this problem and of the way it is being responded to, and explains why we need to learn more about the interests and values that condition the “law in action.” In the last section the Article discusses the potential relevance of the idea of the “legal culture” for explaining the patterns of “law in action” in different countries and different agencies. The Article's overall aim is to show the existence of a link between the manner in which the problem of trafficking is socially defined in practice, and the role of legal culture in shaping this link.

Narrating LGBT asylum

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut Raboin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
A Site ◽  
British State ◽  
Positive State ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers the narrativisation of seventeen asylum cases in British newspapers between 2003 and 2014 in around 150 press articles, a BBC Two documentary, documentation produced by NGOs and some international legal documents. The chapter unpacks three aspects that are crucial for the problematisation of asylum: firstly, the way narratives produce a specific temporality allowing for the exposition of happier futures in the UK, and the expression of colonial imaginaries. Secondly, the importance of LGBT human rights in the way the social problem is perceived, and consequently, can be solved. Finally, the way LGBT asylum cases serve to powerfully stage the position of the British state and its liberal subjects in an LGBT-positive state: they are a site for the negotiation of what it means to uphold sexual rights.

Mobiles, Mobs, and Monads

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kélina Gotman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Contagion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
The Way

The emergence of crowd theory in nineteenth-century sociology provided a new language for thinking how unruly bodies gather together organically. Drawing on the first large-scale biohistories of the French Revolution, made possible through documents unveiled at the Archives Nationales, theories of crowds, revolutionary and disordered, animal, automatic and ecological, spawned a genealogy of thinking about the way individuals’ movements were rendered—it was thought—primitive in groups. From the ‘Jerks’ in Kentucky and Tennessee to episodes of falling, starting, ticking, and jumping in hospitals, factories and lumber camps, the ‘social body’ appeared to be teetering out of choreopolitical control. Bacchantic drunkenness, like childlike play, epitomized thoughtless imitation and epidemic enthusiasm according to social scientists and neurologists concerned with the political effects of social contagion. Rapidly proliferating automatic gesture provoked crowds, they wrote, to form and significantly to deform—to disorganize—the political, social, and economic spheres, revealing a demos in disarray.

Presidential Address: Start Spreading the News: Illuminating the Effects of Climate Change as a Social Problem

2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 605-615
Author(s):  
Nancy J Mezey
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
The Social ◽  
Pedagogical Skills ◽  
Rising Sea Levels

Abstract The theme for the 2019 SSSP meetings is a call to sociologists and social scientists to draw on their sociological roots to illuminate the social in all social problems with an eye to solving those problems. The address encourages sociologists to speak as broadly as possible so that the discipline becomes a central voice in larger public discourses. The 2019 SSSP Presidential Address is a call to focus on what is the largest social problem: climate change. After a brief overview of the science of climate change, the address focuses on the anthropogenic causes of climate change and the reasons why climate change is a social justice issue. Looking specifically at rising sea levels, the address then focuses on New York City as an example of the effects of and some responses to climate change. The address concludes with a discussion of how sociologists can and should draw deeply on the discipline’s theoretical roots, empirical tools, and pedagogical skills to illuminate climate change as a social problem.

scholarly journals Becoming an Embodied Social Self Capable of Relating to Norms: Ricoeur’s Narrative Identity Reconsidered in the Light of Enactivism

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Annemie Halsema
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

In this paper, I argue for a revaluation of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity in light of what Miriam Kyselo has coined “the body-social problem” in enactivism (Kyselo 2014). It is my contention that while phenomenological perspectives upon the body and the self are considered relevant in enactivism, the hermeneutical, discursive facets are understood as a less essential facet of the self, for instance as the self’s reflexive side, that gives expression to an experiential self (Zahavi 2007: 182-184, 2014: 57-59). Yet, it is in language that the self is addressed by others and that the self reflects upon itself and understands itself. Especially in order to understand aspects of identity which are of importance for the social situation of the self, such as gender, the way we are addressed by others and address ourselves by means of language need to be taken into account.

Expert Testimony in the Social Sciences: A Historical Overview of Contemporary Issues

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Lawrence Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Expert Testimony ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

In this brief reconsideration of the roles experts may play in legal proceedings - and concentrating on the role of social scientists in particular - it may, therefore, be useful to revisit some very familiar issues and to address some seemingly peripheral matters that are nevertheless quite central to the way we think about the involvement of experts in legal cases. For purposes of introducing some of these issues it may be helpful to focus on three interrelated concerns: the ascertaining of expert qualifications, the role of evidentiary procedure, and the extra-judicial use of social information.

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