scholarly journals The Social World of Outdoor Swimming: Cultural Practices, Shared Meanings, and Bodily Encounters

2020 ◽  
pp. 019372352092859
Author(s):  
Kate Moles
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Shared Meanings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethnographic Data

This article examines the particular relations and entanglements of practices, bodies, and water in the social world of outdoor swimming. Using ethnographic data to describe how the relations, interactions, and meaning-making unfold and happen before, during, and after a swim, we can consider the ways the social world of outdoor swimming is ordered, the ways in which participants produce and are enrolled into that social order and the sense of belonging and connection that this enables. This article uses this case to highlight how we need to consider a sociology of and in water; to consider the ways interactions and meaning-making occur in and around bluespace; and to do this in ways that disrupts and expands our understanding of social worlds and life.

Voorbij navelstaren en narcisme

KWALON ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Müller
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Qualitative Studies ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Auto Ethnography

Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography Beyond navel-gazing and narcissism.Ferrell’s auto-ethnography as part of ethnography The labeling of auto-ethnography as navel-gazing does not do justice to the variety with which auto-ethnography is applied. A distinction should be made between emotional and analytical auto-ethnography. In the first form the central person of the researcher plays the central role, in the second auto-ethnography is applied to get a better understanding of the social world which is being studied. In this article the author discusses the second approach by using the work of Jeff Ferrell. Ferrell is a well-known cultural criminologist, who focuses critically on the cultural understanding of social life. By looking at how Ferrell applies auto-ethnography, insight is gained into the added value of this method for qualitative studies: (1) the integration of the personal experiences of researchers in texts in order to achieve a richer description of the social worlds they explore, (2) making explicit the role of the researcher in publications, and (3) developing new (more appealing) forms of representation.

scholarly journals Recovering critique in an age of datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1135-1151
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Questions

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

Political Language and Political Reality

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (01) ◽  
pp. 10-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Edelman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Social World ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Logical Positivist ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The Social

The most incisive twentieth century students of language converge from different premises on the conclusion that language is the key creator of the social worlds people experience, and they agree as well that language cannot usefully be understood as a tool for describing an objective reality. For the later Wittgenstein there are no essences, only language games. Chomsky analyzes the sense in which grammar is generative. For Derrida all language is performative, a form of action that undermines its own presuppositions. Foucault sees language as antedating and constructing subjectivity. The “linguistic turn” in twentieth century philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory entails an intellectual ferment that raises fundamental questions about a great deal of mainstream political science, and especially about its logical positivist premises.While the writers just mentioned analyze various senses in which language use is an aspect of creativity, those who focus upon specifically political language are chiefly concerned with its capacity to reflect ideology, mystify, and distort. The more perspicacious of them deny that an undistorting language is possible in a social world marked by inequalities in resources and status, though the notion of an undistorted language can be useful as an evocation of an ideal benchmark. The emphasis upon political language as distorting or mystifying is a key theme in Lasswell and Orwell, as it is in Habermas, Osgood, Ellul, Vygotsky, Enzensberger, Bennett, and Shapiro.

Towards an Immature Sociology

1998 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 458-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Lee
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
Theoretical Interpretation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Sociology Of Childhood

Sociological theory displays a tendency to depict the social world in terms of completed ‘beings’. The social, thus depicted, is a world of powers to ‘finish’ (such as the power granted to convention to provide for social order), and finished products (such as agents and ethical points-of-view). As sociologists of childhood have attempted to bring children into sociological focus in their own right, the disciplinary concern with the ‘complete’ has required that children be attributed the properties assumed more normally to belong to adults. The sociology of childhood has thus preserved the privilege of the complete and the mature over the incomplete and the immature. In this paper the key sociological issues of convention, agency and ethics are given a theoretical interpretation that makes them fit for understanding childhood. The ability of convention to complete social order is questioned. Agency is portrayed as the emergent property of networks of dependency rather than the possession of individuals. An alternative to the ethics of ‘positions’ is offered in the form of an ethics of ‘motion’. Where extant sociologies of childhood have brought children into the ‘finished’ world of sociological theory, this paper uses childhood's ontological ambiguity to open the door onto an unfinished social world.

If I Give My Soul

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Attractive Option ◽  
Penal Institutions ◽  
Gang Affiliation ◽  
Leadership Structure ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
Ethnographic Data

Prisons and jails in Rio de Janeiro are violent and crowded; they are governed by narco-gangs and are also intensely religious spaces. Rio's penal institutions reflect the social world of the poor neighborhoods where most of the inmates lived before their arrests. They are places where the state has a weak presence and residents organize around nonstate entities, primarily gangs like the Comando Vermelho or the Pentecostal churches. Inside of prison Pentecostal inmates form churches that resemble the gangs in organization and leadership structure. The gangs allow the churches to function autonomously, even allowing inmates to renounce their gang affiliation and join the churches as long as their religious commitments are deemed genuine. To gather data on the incarcerated Pentecostal groups, I spent two weeks living inside a prison in Brazil and then collected ethnographic data by regularly visiting one prison and one jail in Rio de Janeiro over a year to observe church activities and interview inmates, guards, and the Pentecostal volunteers visiting from outside churches. This book is a lived religion study of prison Pentecostalism, and I emphasized the rituals and embodied daily practice of the faith. From the data collected, I argue that the ganglike structure of the churches and the rigorous and visible practice of the faith enable the churches to thrive in prison. The churches provide protection, which makes them an attractive option to inmates whose lives may be at risk, but more important the churches allow members the opportunity to live moral and dignified lives in the midst of horrendous circumstances.

scholarly journals The Conference Reimagined. Postcards, Letters, and Camping Together in Undressed Places

Digithum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soile Veijola ◽  
Emily Höckert ◽  
David Carlin ◽  
Ann Light ◽  
Janne Säynäjäkangas
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social World ◽  
Meeting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Moment

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this accounting to problematize the conventional practices of goal-oriented meetings and co-authored papers as forms of academic meaning-making. In finding a meeting point where expertise was disorientated and status undressed, we were able to investigate the idea of co-being between human and nonhuman realities as the step social theory needs to take to become a point of connection with the social world, instead of an escape from it. We conclude that this involved silence and necessary fictions as a means to consider the future and past in the moment of meeting.

scholarly journals Figuras impertinentes: Rodrigo Calderón y el Libro de entretenimiento de la pícara Justina (1604)

2021 ◽  
pp. 202-236
Author(s):  
Claudia Mesa Higuera
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Limpieza De Sangre ◽  
The One ◽  
Purity Of Blood ◽  
Editio Princeps ◽  
Coats Of Arms

RESUMEN: Este ensayo propone una lectura de La pícara Justina y sus paratextos, a partir de la relación de complementariedad entre el self-fashioning y las artes plásticas. Este análisis subraya el potencial de emblemas y jeroglíficos, escudos y empresas, de moldear la identidad individual y así contrarrestar la fijación del orden establecido con la genealogía, el abolengo, y la “limpieza de sangre”. El caso de Rodrigo Calderón, poderoso ministro de Felipe III, cuyo escudo de armas figura en la portada de la editio princeps, sirve como ejemplo para investigar la conexión entre la heráldica y el fenómeno del self-fashioning, en la España de la temprana modernidad. Por una parte, la manipulación de la identidad a partir de formas simbólicas representa un desafío al sistema; por otra, la adopción de sus paradigmas perpetúa y sustenta los idearios culturales sobre los que está construido. ABSTRACT: This essay proposes a reading of La pícara Justina and its paratexts based on the complementary relationship between self-fashioning and artistic modes of expression. This analysis emphasizes the potential of emblems and hieroglyphics, imprese and coats of arms, to shape individual identity in order to counteract the establishment’s fixation with genealogy, ancestry, and the so-called “purity of blood”. The case of Rodrigo Calderón, a powerful political figure at the court of Philip III whose coat of arms is featured on the title page of the first edition, offers an example to investigate the connection between heraldry and the process of self-fashioning in early modern Spain. On the one hand, the exercise of shaping one’s public persona through symbolic forms of representation constitutes a challenge to the social order; on the other hand, the adoption of its own paradigms, contributes to perpetuate discriminatory cultural practices and prevailing ideologies.

scholarly journals Resilience Among Dementia Family Caregivers in a Changing Social World

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 9-9
Author(s):  
Brandy McCann ◽  
Karen Roberto ◽  
Tina Savla ◽  
Rosemary Blieszner ◽  
Emily Hoyt
Keyword(s):  
Family Caregivers ◽  
Care Setting ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Connections ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Dementia Caregivers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Early Phases ◽  
Roll Out

Abstract Dementia caregivers must manage the social worlds of their loved ones as well as their own. In a mixed methods study, we interviewed 50 family caregivers prior to the pandemic, twice during early phases of the pandemic, and again during the vaccine roll-out phase. Findings revealed how implementation of stay-at-home orders altered reliance on informal support as well as social ties and interactions. Using content analysis, we identified three ways in which caregivers’ managed changes in their social world: rethinking family visits (fewer people, higher quality); reinventing public spaces (church services, exercise venues); and reconsidering self-care (setting boundaries, solace in nature). Caregivers showed varying degrees of resilience in the ways they managed adverse social situations and cared for themselves. Findings reinforce the need for inclusive programs and services to help caregivers learn to maintain supportive social connections that reinforce their care decisions and routines, particularly during times of duress.

scholarly journals ‘You can’t stand on a corner and talk about it …’: Medicinal cannabis use, impression management and the analytical status of interviews

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 205979911876842 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Morris
Keyword(s):  
Impression Management ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Social World ◽  
Cannabis Use ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
The Social ◽  
Medicinal Cannabis ◽  
Interviews As Topic

In this article, I examine how four medicinal cannabis users used impression management during in-depth, qualitative interviews to attend to self-presentational concerns. I examine the rhetorical strategies and narratives articulated by the participants while also attending to the role that I played in co-construction as the interviewer. Later I discuss how, although the participants’ accounts are occasioned by the interviews, they can still provide significant insights into the social worlds of the participants beyond the interviews. While discussions about whether to treat interviews as topic, resource or both are not new, I argue that we can treat interviews as both topic and resource because impression management is a product of the individual’s habitus and it and the accounts it produces are part of their social world.

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