The Narrative Study of Self and Society

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir B. Marvasti ◽  
Jaber F. Gubrium
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Narrative Study ◽  
Research Tradition

Stories and storytelling are found everywhere, from an overall cultural presence to the narrative study of self and society. Within a tradition of sociological research stemming from the 1920s, this chapter discusses the narrative study of self and society in the context of social interaction. Three forms of narrative study and aims are distinguished—ethnographic, strategic, and conversational. Substantive topics include the interactionist research tradition, Erving Goffman’s preeminent contribution, the narrative construction of selves, society as a complex narrative environment, and narrative power and practice. We end with cautionary words about methodological, conceptual, and ethical limitations of narrative form and analysis.

An embodied distress: African asylum seekers’ experiences of mental health difficulties while awaiting an asylum outcome in Ireland

2020 ◽  
pp. 136346152096610
Author(s):  
Rebecca Murphy ◽  
Brian Keogh ◽  
Agnes Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Mental Distress ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Narrative Study ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Mental Health Difficulties

The mental health of asylum seekers has attracted significant interest and examination. Quantitative studies have consistently indicated that asylum seekers experience mental distress at a higher rate than both host populations and their refugee counterparts. Qualitative insight into asylum seekers’ embodied experience of mental distress is limited. This qualitative narrative study aimed to explore African asylum seekers’ everyday embodied experiences of mental distress. Sixteen semi-structured one-to-one interviews were conducted with African asylum seekers who had experienced mental distress and were receiving mental health care services in Ireland. Narrative data were analysed using a holistic analysis framework of narrative form and content. Participants described their everyday endurance of relentless rumination, shame, self-loathing, anger, and mistrust, and of becoming demoralised and hopeless. Study findings indicate that asylum seekers’ mental distress interweaves the physical, psychological, emotional, and social realms, thus impacting on the whole of their being. Consequences for asylum seekers include feeling anaesthetised, having a severely diminished capacity to connect and interact with their external surroundings and other people, and, for some, efforts to end their life. Examinations of, and responses to, asylum seekers’ mental distress must delve beyond the confines of diagnostic categorisations and codifications of symptomology. To achieve heightened understanding and efficacious interventions, we must empathetically listen and engage with asylum seekers’ narratives of distress and the socio-cultural and socio-political context they inhabit.

scholarly journals At the intersection of risk: when literary journalism and sociology study urban problems by means of akin methodologies

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (84) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Soares
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Literary Journalism ◽  
Cheap Labour ◽  
Long Form ◽  
Urban Problems

Literary journalism, or long form reporting, intersects sociological research at the methodological level when analysing urban problems. To establish the connection between literary journalism and sociology, we focus on the influence early literary journalists had on the sociological/imagological and narrative construction of social problems and how literary journalism continues to be a tool in the unveiling of risk-related issues such as the exploitation of cheap labour and the degradation of urban environments. We examine a corpus of literary journalism texts through qualitative methods, namely content and discourse analysis, to conclude that literary journalism and sociology resort to the same data gathering methodologies, interviews, surveys and statistics, while narratively exposing life at the socioeconomic peripheries.

‘The changes and chances of this mortal life’: aspects of ageing in the fiction of Stanley Middleton

2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 721-737 ◽  
Author(s):  
MIKE HEPWORTH
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Ageing Process ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Interactive Process ◽  
The Social

Sociological research shows that individuals attempt to make sense of the meaning of the ageing process in the course of conversations with other people. The social construction of ageing is therefore an interactive process during which ideas and beliefs about ageing are negotiated and exchanged. Novels are a rich and easily accessible source of data on the social construction of the meaning of ageing during the course of social interaction and this paper explores the imaginative contribution of the English novelist Stanley Middleton to our awareness of these subtle processes. It is suggested that Middleton's fiction provides a particularly rewarding example of the contribution of the novelist to our understanding of the origins of the experience of growing older as a product of social interaction.

scholarly journals CIVILIZATIONAL IDENTITY OF RUSSIAN STUDENT YOUTH IN A DIGITAL SOCIETY

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-166
Author(s):  
V. V. Maximov ◽  
E. A. Malakhova
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Young People ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Comparative Assessment ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Digital Society ◽  
Statistical Connection

The modern concept of civilization, processes of civilizational identification and identity on the basis of allocation of basic values have been considered. Traditional spiritual and moral values of Russian population have been studied. Methodological and methodical issues of sociological diagnostics of civilizational identity of Russian students have been revealed. Some results of the author’s sociological research with presentation of a comparative assessment of the orientation of young people on the values of the Russian civilization have been adduced. On the basis of comparative analysis, the description of social constructs (patterns) of values of the Russian civilization has been given, the data on the statistical connection of the civilizational identity of students and their integration into virtual forms of social interaction have been presented. The measures to improve the conditions of the process of civilizational identification of Russian students and to include them in the process of digitalization of society have been substantiated.

scholarly journals A New Approach to Chinese Discourse: Cultural Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 522-534
Author(s):  
Irina G. Nagibina ◽  
Liudmila V. Kulikova
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Research Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
New Research

The article provides a systematic description of the trends in the development of the Chinese discursive and communicative linguistics. Discursive research and its results in the Chinese academic community have their own specifics, which are based on the traditional philosophical and ideological foundation and a unique language picture of the world. The scientific findings explicate culturally determined communicative and discursive conventions of the Chinese social interaction. The aim of the research is to highlight the Chinese cultural discourse studies as a new research tradition in the Chinese linguistics of the modern stage, to expand its methodology, and to construct the discursive space of China as the totality of the dominant cultural and communicative vectors, these vectors being an interpretative tool to help understand and evaluate Chinese discourses

scholarly journals Sociology towards death: Heidegger, time and social theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-137
Author(s):  
Kelly Nielsen ◽  
Tad Skotnicki
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Existential Phenomenology ◽  
Research Tradition ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Sociological Thought

In this article, we draw on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to propose an approach to sociology that takes human experiences of finitude and possibility as crucial topics of investigation. A concern with death is not absent in sociological thought. To the contrary, Durkheim’s Suicide grounds a sociological research tradition into death and dying. Yet Heidegger’s existentialism renders our finitude – not just death – a matter of everyday life, a constitutive feature of human existence and a source of sociological investigation. By explicating Heidegger’s interconnected concepts of finitude, futurity, authenticity and resoluteness, we propose to investigate people’s ordinary temporal experiences as well as the institutional contexts that make them possible. On this basis, we develop two concepts – existential marginalisation and existential exhaustion – that foreground questions of time, meaning and institutions in the study of poverty, inequality and everyday life.

Altenberg, Peter (1859–1919)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kim
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal ◽  
Arthur Schnitzler ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Gustav Klimt ◽  
Clash Of Cultures

Born in Vienna on 9 March 1859, the Jewish-Austrian poet Peter Altenberg (birth name: Richard Engländer) became a literary sensation with his characteristically telegraphic writing style. The purpose of this narrative form, he explained, was to capture Kleinigkeit (the smallness) of modern life—fleeting, ordinary, and unembellished. His so-called prose poems went on to garner the admiration of contemporary artists, architects and writers who belonged to the Young Vienna. They included, among others, Hermann Bahr, Gustav Klimt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus and Arthur Schnitzler. Suffering from pneumonia, Altenberg died in Vienna on 8 January 1919. Opposed to the assignment and expectation of specific social roles in a conservative Austro-Hungarian Empire, Altenberg took on a nom de plume to redefine his cultural identity in the image of the oppressed, including children, women and non-Europeans. This act of political resistance in writing became a lifelong commitment to exposing the divided and hypocritical world around him, although some of his works portrayed those in suffering with a certain degree of eroticization and prejudice. By focusing on moments of ambiguity, contradiction, monotony and triviality in social interaction, he exposed the clash of cultures between old provincialism and new cosmopolitanism in contemporary Vienna while pushing new limits of mimetic representation.

SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION SYSTEMS OF INTERACTION "SOCIETY AND STATE" IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-44
Author(s):  
P.A. MERKULOV ◽  
◽  
A.V. KUSTOVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Secondary Analysis ◽  
State System ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
State Administration ◽  
The World ◽  
Transformation Systems

The purpose of the article is to consider the processes of social transformation of the "society - state" system in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of sociological research are analyzed on the basis of three aspects: the transformation of the picture of the world of Russians, social interaction, public administration during the coronavirus pandemic. Attention is focused on the need to take into account the substantive and dynamic aspects of the transformation of the "society - state" system. The factors that determine the transformation of the picture of the world into pandemic-reality conditions, the characteristics and reasons for the formation of such social groups as covid dissidents and coronasceptics are analyzed. The features of the transformation of social interaction of Russians in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resolution of the contradiction between solidarity and social disunity are analyzed. The attitude of the population to the measures implemented by the state administration apparatus, taken to reduce the dynamics and negative consequences of the spread of coronavirus, is considered. As a result of the secondary analysis of sociological research data, factors are highlighted that make it possible to consider the key trends of social transformation in society during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trusting Technological Actors

2010 ◽  
pp. 35-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Shank
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Theoretical Foundation ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
Timely Topic ◽  
Research Studies

This chapter sets forth a theoretical foundation for studying trust toward technological actors as social actors using sociological research in structure and cultural sentiments. The introduction considers how modern intelligent technologies make human-technology trust a relevant and timely topic, while the background section reviews humans’ social interaction with technology. Using social structure and cultural sentiments the author constructs four propositions about trusting technological actors. Two empirical research studies illustrate the cultural sentiment propositions showing trust in technological actors and violation of trust in computers. Throughout the chapter the author connects the sociological literature with everyday examples before providing grounded propositions that would be appropriate foundations for research in multiple disciplines.

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