Youth

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Argenti ◽  
Deborah Durham
Keyword(s):  
Social System ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation

Youth was originally theorized by ethnographers of colonial Africa in functionalist terms that saw each age grade as an integral part of a social system that reproduced itself intact with every new generation. Theories developed in the 1960s began to account for social strife and tensions between youth and elders in hierarchical, gerontocratic social systems, but still saw initiation and other rites as resolving tensions and restoring the status quo. With the advent of the Marxist turn in the 1970s and renewed interest in youth and politics from the 1990s, ethnographies of youth in Africa have made two important new interventions: they have theorized youth not as a biological given, but as a social construct or discourse uncoupled from age, and they have highlighted not the integration of youth in society, but the tensions and instabilities at the heart of the power relations that social constructs of youth denote.

The Millennial/Gen Z Leftists Are Emerging: Are Sociologists Ready for Them?

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-427
Author(s):  
Elaine Bell Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Do So

Sociology is being challenged by the new generation of students and scholars who have another view of society. Millennial/Gen Zs are the most progressive generation since the 1960s. We have had many opportunities to discuss and imagine power, diversity, and social change when we teach them in our classes or attend their campus events. Some Millennial/Gen Z believe, especially those in academia, that social scientists are tied to old theories and ideologies about race and gender, among other inconsistencies. These old ideas do not resonate with their views regarding equity. Millennials are not afraid to challenge the status quo. They do so already by supporting multiple gender and race identities. Several questions come to mind. How do we as sociologists with our sense of history and other issues such as racial and gender inequality help them along the way? Are we ready for this generation? Are they ready for us?

Traditions and Transformations

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Regina Marler
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Female Role ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Florence Nightingale ◽  
The Status ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Octavia Hill

Modernist, feminist, experimental: the terms we now most associate with Virginia Woolf all presuppose a break with conventions and a rejection of the status quo in art and power relations. Yet all her life, Virginia Woolf kept returning in memory to her childhood home, to the crowded Victorian family in which she was raised, where boys went to the best schools that Sir Leslie Stephen could afford, and girls, however clever or gifted, were shaped for charitable work, for motherhood, for marriage to prominent men. This obsessive turning back is a kind of pained nostalgia: a lament, a grievance, a comfort—and the engine of even her most avant-garde work. This chapter explores the traditions and assumptions of that potent childhood world, in part through the prism of three conservative female role models her mother, Julia Stephen, chose for her daughters: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale.

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

On Social Stability and Social Change

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 360-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron C. Kay ◽  
Justin Friesen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Personal Control ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
System Justification ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
System Justification Theory ◽  
The Status ◽  
System Threat ◽  
Do So

More than a decade of research from the perspective of system-justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994) has demonstrated that people engage in motivated psychological processes that bolster and support the status quo. We propose that this motive is highly contextual: People do not justify their social systems at all times but are more likely to do so under certain circumstances. We describe four contexts in which people are prone to engage in system-justifying processes: (a) system threat, (b) system dependence, (c) system inescapability, and (d) low personal control. We describe how and why, in these contexts, people who wish to promote social change might expect resistance.

scholarly journals Position Description Analysis: A Method for Describing Academic Roles and Functions

1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56
Author(s):  
K. Edward Renner ◽  
Ronald J. Skibbens
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Year 2000

Similar to the 1960s, higher education is once again in a period of rapid social chance in which new demands and expectations are being made on colleges and universities. This time, however, new money is not available for the transition to be achieved though additional growth. In this paper, the methodology of Position Description Analysis is presented using Dalhousie University as a case study. Position Description Analysis is a tool for assessing the discrepancy between the status quo and the specializations needed for colleges and universities to meet the new demands and expectations which are being made of them. It is concluded that there is a need for dramatic realignement of fields of specialization in order to shift from the emphases of the past to those of the future. However, because the faculty higher in the 1960s are now tenure, but no due to retire until after the year 2000, higher education must find internal strategies for chance or face externally imposed solution to their current lack of flexibility.

scholarly journals Female slam poets of francophone Africa: spirited words for social change

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 742-767
Author(s):  
Mirjam de Bruijn ◽  
Loes Oudenhuijsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
Popular Knowledge ◽  
The Status ◽  
Gendered Power

AbstractSlam poets in Africa are part of an emerging social movement. In this article, the focus is on women in this upcoming slam movement in francophone Africa. For these women, slam has meant a change in their lives as they have found words to describe difficult experiences that were previously shrouded in silence. Their words, performances and engaged actions are developing into a body of popular knowledge that questions the status quo and relates to the ‘emerging consciousness’ in many African urban societies of unequal, often gendered, power relations. The women who engage in slam have thus become a voice for the emancipation of women in general.

scholarly journals „Winning is strictly prohibited”. O strategiach twórczych Banksy’ego i Jana Klaty

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michalina Lubaszewska
Keyword(s):  
Social System ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Amusement Parks ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status

The paper analyzes the activities of two socially committed artists: Banksy and Jan Klata, who both use the funfair motif. Banksy employs it in a literal though subversive way in his project Dismaland, which is a quizzical reversal of Disneyland. Klata employs it in his performances (which often take the form of the director’s comments on the reality that surrounds us), showing a set of “amusements” resembling those from a funfair and leading the viewer to a perceptive dissonance (similarly to the collection of Eisenstein’s amusements). It seems that the space created by the committed art that uses the concept of a funfair allows for the implementation of a real rebellion against the status quo. Actual amusement parks, however, create only an illusion of the possibility to break with the norms of the social system.

The Bible in Pop and Rock Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 329-343
Author(s):  
Michael J. Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Conservative Values

The Bible is ubiquitous in pop and rock music of the 1960s through to the present. This is surprising given that the art forms subsumed under these catchall categories are typically oppositional in nature. They resist the status quo and are often antiestablishment in posture, and by their very nature inclined to push back against the conservative values and authoritarian tendencies of organized religion. This chapter examines reasons why biblical and religious language is so persistent a feature in the popular music of recent decades, emphasizing the collective memory of the biblical story among songwriters and their audiences and the fragmentary nature of these “readings” of sacred texts and traditions.

Past, Present and Future of the International Law of Transboundary Aquifers

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Mechlem
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Water Law ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Law ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
International Law Commission ◽  
Transboundary Aquifers ◽  
Law Commission ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe article discusses the development of international groundwater law from the first codification efforts of modern water law until present and raises relevant issues for the way forward. It first traces international groundwater law from the 1960s until the end of the last century. It then reviews the growing attention groundwater has received during the last decade and third discusses the status quo. It places particular emphasis on the 2008 Draft Articles on the Law of Transboundary Aquifers adopted by the International Law Commission and the legal arrangements made for five of the 273 transboundary aquifers. It concludes with thoughts on the way forward in this important and understudied area of international law.

Resilience in social and economic systems: a concept that fails the cost–benefit test?

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICK HANLEY
Keyword(s):  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Ecological Concept ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cost

One of the first lessons that students of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) learn is to ask whether projects or policies which they are studying generate additional benefits or costs, relative to the status quo. They are also told to be very careful in defining the project/policy which is the subject of their analysis. In my view, the ecological concept of resilience fails the CBA test, when applied to the study of economic and social systems, because it offers no additional insights to those we have already, and appears to be poorly defined.

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