Artfully thinking the prosocial

Author(s):  
Deborah Warr ◽  
Gretel Taylor ◽  
Richard Williams

This chapter explores how arts-based activities form part of an experimental approach for social research that fuses sociological insights with creative practice. As an ethos, people conceive the prosocial as seeking to promote collective human flourishing, while a prosocial practice is inclusive and imaginative. The potential to flourish is supported by involvement in diverse social relations that connect people as families, friends, communities, neighbourhoods, and nations. Experiences of social collectivity, however, are being shredded through the expanding dominance, and cascading impacts, of market-oriented ideologies. The chapter shows how the status of the social as a nonmarket domain has little value or sense when seen from within these dominant ideological framings.

2020 ◽  
pp. 036319902096739
Author(s):  
Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste

In the Arab world, the recognized children of elite men and slave women could adopt the status of their father, ignoring the slave origin of the mother, owing to a system of patrilineal transmission. This regime co-existed with negative stereotypes toward slaves and blackness, despite the very fact that—as this study of notable families in Tetouan between 1859 and 1956 demonstrates—skin color was not the determinant factor to form part of this group. Rather, it was based on the social definition of filiation, leading to legal disputes between family members to delineate the boundaries of kinship.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Wilkie

Inventing the Social, edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim and Alex Wilkie, showcases recent efforts to develop new ways of knowing society that combine social research with creative practice. With contributions from leading figures in sociology, architecture, geography, design, anthropology, and digital media, the book provides practical and conceptual pointers on how to move beyond the customary distinctions between knowledge and art, and on how to connect the doing, researching and making of social life in potentially new ways. Presenting concrete projects with a creative approach to researching social life as well as reflections on the wider contexts from which these projects emerge, this collection shows how collaboration across social science, digital media and the arts opens up timely alternatives to narrow, instrumentalist proposals that seek to engineer behaviour and to design community from scratch. To invent the social is to recognise that social life is always already creative in itself and to take this as a starting point for developing different ways of combining representation and intervention in social life.


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (10) ◽  
pp. 710-716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sheehan ◽  
Michael Dunn ◽  
Kate Sahan

There is a growing body of literature that has sought to undermine systems of ethical regulation, and governance more generally, within the social sciences. In this paper, we argue that any general claim for a system of research ethics governance in social research depends on clarifying the nature of the stake that society has in research. We show that certain accounts of this stake—protecting researchers’ freedoms; ensuring accountability for resources; safeguarding welfare; and supporting democracy—raise relevant ethical considerations that are reasonably contested. However, these accounts cannot underpin a general claim in favour of, or against, a system of research ethics governance. Instead, we defend governance in social research on the grounds that research, as an institutionalised form of enquiry, is a constitutive element of human flourishing, and that society ought to be concerned with the flourishing of its members. We conclude by considering the governance arrangements that follow from, and are justified by, our arguments.


Author(s):  
Arkadyi L. Marshak ◽  

The article analyses the present state of culture in Russia, its multilevel content. It shows the influence of different layers of society on the state and development of the present social structure. Based on perennial research data collected with participation of the author, sociocultural models of social relations and their influence on the cultural potential of the social structure are described. The article emphasizes the necessity of multilevel social research of the cultural potential of Russian society. The main directions of theoretical, methodological and empirical program of such research are formulated.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-385
Author(s):  
Welhendri Azwar

The system of values, norms and some stereotypes attached to women are one of the factors that giving influences on the position and relationships of women with men in the existing social structure. Each person embraces the system of values or norm which is a consensus and constructed by the community itself than from generation to generation. The emergence of social construction on the status and role of women is the result of the perspective of a community towards their biological differences between men and women. The perspective which then results in oppression, exploitation, and subordination of women in social relations are contextually strongly related to socio-cultural conditions at that time. This section will discuss how women are positioned in the social life and the perspective of the culture of its subordination. Next, it is also described how the emergence of patriarchal ideology, a system that accommodates the interests of men to dominate and control women, as a consequence of the understanding of the nature of women which biologically different to men. The hegemony of patriarchal ideology brings the social awareness for women to accept the conditions of subordination as a natural thing, which is wrapped by the products of culture and tradition. It includes how patriarchal ideology is giving the effect on the system and the tradition of marriage.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Levine-Rasky

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe, situate and justify the use of creative nonfiction as an overlooked but legitimate source of text for use in social inquiry, specifically within the ambit of narrative inquiry. What potential lies in using creative writing, creative nonfiction specifically, as a source of text in social research? How may it be subjected to modes of analysis such that it deepens understandings of substantive issues? Links are explored between creative nonfiction and the social context of such accounts in an attempt to trace how writers embed general social processes in their narrative. Design/methodology/approach Three exemplars from literary magazines are described in which whiteness is the substantive theme. The first author is a woman who writes about her relationship with her landscaper, the second story is written by a man who is overwhelmed by guilt after uttering a racial slur, and the third text is by a man who describes his attempts to help a homeless couple. The authors’ interpersonal experiences with people unlike themselves tell something significant about the relationship between selfhood and power relations. Findings No singular pattern emerges when analyzing these three narratives through the critical lens of whiteness. This is because whiteness is not a subject position or static identity but a practice, something that it is done in relation to others. It is a collective capacity whose value is realized only in dynamic relationship with others. As a rich source of narratives, creative nonfiction may generate insights about whiteness and middle classness and how their intersections give rise to complex and contradictory sets of social relations. Originality/value There is very little precedence for using creative nonfiction as text for analysis in any discipline in the social sciences despite its accessibility, its richness and its absence of risk. Inviting the sociological imagination in its project to link the personal to the political, it opens possibilities for the analysis of both in relationship to each other. As a common form of narrating everyday understandings, creative nonfiction offers something unique and under-valued to the social researcher. For these reasons, the paper is highly original.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Brives

Clinical trials are a fundamental stage in a drug’s biography for they provide the standard by which a molecule’s therapeutic status is determined. Through this process of experimentation, a pharmaceutical substance acquires a new competence – that of treating or preventing disease. This article examines experimentation in drug production, and shows how this complex apparatus not only transforms the status of the molecule but also produces new understandings of and expectations for how people should act. Drawing upon observation of a trial of prophylactic prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, I show that the production of this biomedical technology – the therapeutic drug – is coupled with the production of its users. In so doing, I challenge the conception of drugs as bounded objects and instead offer the concept of ‘biomedical package’, which highlights the social relations that characterise it.


Author(s):  
Yingjie Yuan

Viewing teams as evolving networks of intertwined social relations, the social network perspective has been increasingly adopted to understand the emergence of team creativity in the past decades. This network lens enables creativity scholars to accurately depict how creative inputs embedded in team structures combine to take effects in collective processes and eventually form team creative outcomes in a dynamic fashion. Yet applications of this network view in team creativity research are scarce, and not closely linked to the development of social network theories. Therefore, after introducing the core concepts and principles of social network theories, this chapter reviews the status quo of team creativity research in terms of three components—creative inputs, team structure, and creative processes from a social network perspective. Furthermore, this chapter puts forward three key directions for future studies on the emergence of team creativity—specialization, integration, and dynamics.


The article is devoted to the consideration of the good ethics metaphysical basis. As a phenomenon whose nature is transcendent, the good reveals itself in two projective optics. It is on the one hand about the ontological aspects of the good ethics, acting as a being together mode. On the other hand, the relevance of the human charitable nature to the good ethics principles. Thus, the good builds the basis, the output operating mode of co-existence. The phenomenon has objective properties and a universal character. In other words, goodness creates the condition, the nature of the order of being. This logic has traces of Socrates, which identifies concepts: good, knowledge and virtue. Good is a living knowledge that acquires the status of Truth – the knowledge of real. It opens to the person the essence of its purpose, improves and transforms its personality. It is about spiritual knowledge that opens to a person who knows, in the process of mastering the world around him. This knowledge fills the personality with the content, gives uniqueness. It is a living knowledge, aimed at improving the image, its spiritual development, growth. And, consequently, the projection of knowledge-good at the level of society acts as a mechanism for organizing and maintaining social order. A person who through the social context knows the ethical principles of good (love, respect, complicity, etc.), comprehends the laws of the spiritual order. She is an integral part of the order, and thus recognizes itself as real, unique, finds a connection to reality. The transformation of these principles into cultural universal, opens the world to the world as a single whole, an integral part of which is itself. With the explication of meanings, culture «introduces» a person in the previously compiled symbolic-communicative space, forming the ability to understand, with the message, with participation, in general forms an orientation to the community, the integrity of social relations. In this perspective well-being issues are opened. This is the principle of the spiritual knowledge power, realized in accordance with human principles of the good ethics.


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