Face Mask Face-Offs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Klinenberg ◽  
Melina Sherman

Abstract In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be especially destructive and divisive. One of the few things that has united Americans during the pandemic, however, is the experience of watching a new genre of viral videos—face mask face-offs—that showcase citizens going toe-to-toe in public places because someone refuses to wear a mask. These videos are not mere political theater; they are replete with sociologically meaningful data about the nature of Americans’ cultural divisions. By closely analyzing recorded conflicts over collective coronavirus risks and individual freedoms in public settings, the authors identify six justifications for not wearing a mask. These justifications point to emerging cultural discourses and practices organized around phones that not only point to new ways for us to observe social life but participate in the reconfiguration of social life—and social conflict—itself.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Muyiwa Seun OLUWAFEMI ◽  
◽  
Ese Freeman OGHAGHARE ◽  
Ese Freeman OGHAGHARE ◽  
Bassey UDOFIA ◽  
...  

The outbreak of Covid-19 presents an unprecedented threat to public health with a devastating effect on the world economy and health system. In March 2020, the government of the United States responded by adopting the use of face masks as one of the measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus in public places. The increase in the spread of coronavirus necessitated the need for researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of face masks as a measure to control the spread of coronavirus. It became of more concern when alternatives to face masks were observed in public places. This article reviewed factors that affect the effectiveness of face masks and the choice of an effective face mask as reported by several studies. The use of appropriate face masks and other measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus should be encouraged at all levels. Keywords: COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, FACE-MASKS.


Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina

Most histories of Catholicism in the United States focus on the experience of Euro-American Catholics, whose views on social issues have dominated public debates. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latino Catholic experience in America from the sixteenth century to today, and offers the most in-depth examination to date of the important ways the U.S. Catholic Church, its evolving Latino majority, and American culture are mutually transforming one another. This book highlights the vital contributions of Latinos to American religious and social life, demonstrating in particular how their engagement with the U.S. cultural milieu is the most significant factor behind their ecclesial and societal impact.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Burçak Gündal ◽  
Sıddıka Öztekin

Immigration and refugees are sets of global flows of people who are seeking information, technology, economic stability, and military, political, and social asylum. Immigrants and refugees, which is one of the categories of migrants, represent only one of many global exchanges in an increasingly independent world. As the number of immigrants increases, the national, demographic, and socio-economic composition of the foreign residents in a host country are impacted by the immigration and immigrant policies of the receiving country. Immigration is inseparably part of the American national identity and always will be, and the United States would not continue to grow without immigration. In setting immigration policy in the United States, policymakers must be sensitive to both the U.S. vulnerabilities and the effects of American policies on the countries of origin. Since the post 9/11 period in the United States, immigration, immigration policy and implementation have been debated issues. Especially after Donald Trump was elected, the debate about migrants and immigration issues has increased even more. The purpose of this study is to show the development of immigration in American history, the positive and negative effects of immigrants on American economy and social life, and the question of the effects of social inclusion policies on the immigrant problem.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Trent Shotwell

History of African Americans: Exploring Diverse Roots by Thomas J. Davis chronicles the remarkable past of African Americans from the earliest arrival of their ancestors to the election of President Barack Obama. This work was produced to recognize every triumph and tragedy that separates African Americans as a group from others in America. By distinguishing the rich and unique history of African Americans, History of African Americans: Exploring Diverse Roots provides an account of inspiration, courage, and progress. Each chapter details a significant piece of African American history, and the book includes numerous concise portraits of prominent African Americans and their contributions to progressing social life in the United States.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1700-1702
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu

In her book Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).


2021 ◽  
pp. 36-65
Author(s):  
Robert Schuett

Who shaped the early Kelsen’s style of thinking under the Kaiser? What were the intellectual circles in which he moved in fin-de-siècle Vienna and the interwar period before he left Austria for Cologne, Geneva, Prague, and the United States? The chapter explores ‘the other Kelsen’ by revisiting his formative years, as well as his work in the lecture halls of university and his high-profile roles in the War Ministry, Karl Renner’s state chancellery, and American foreign intelligence after escaping the fascist Continent. A reluctant jurist, Kelsen had a passion for philosophy and literature, and from Freud and the economists he learned that individual and social life was all about drives and desires, instincts and interests. Where Kelsen was, there was no land of utopia.


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