Fast Food Kids

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy L. Best
Keyword(s):  
Fast Food ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Life Choices ◽  
School Food ◽  
Youth Identity ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Children ◽  
The Many ◽  
Effective Public Health

In recent years, questions such as “What are kids eating?” and “Who's feeding our kids?” have sparked a torrent of public and policy debates as we increasingly focus our attention on the issue of childhood obesity. It is estimated that one in three American children are either overweight or obese. Enduring inequalities in communities, schools, and homes affect young people's access to different types of food, with real consequences in life choices and health outcomes. This book sheds light on the social contexts in which children eat, and the broader backdrop of social change in American life, demonstrating why attention to food's social meaning is important to effective public health policy, particularly actions that focus on behavioral change and school food reforms. The book provides narratives of the everyday life of youth, highlighting young people's voices and perspectives and the places where they eat. It provides an account of the role that food plays in the lives of today's youth, teasing out the many contradictions of food as a cultural object. The book examines the complex relationship between youth identity and food consumption, offering answers to those straightforward questions that require crucial and comprehensive solutions.

The Language of Cyberspace

2006 ◽  
pp. 396-403
Author(s):  
Leah P. Macfadyen ◽  
Sabine Doff
Keyword(s):  
Salient Feature ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Internet Communication ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
Human Interface ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Computer Mediated Communications

Amid the many published pages of excited hyperbole regarding the potential of the Internet for human communications, one salient feature of current Internet communication technologies is frequently overlooked: the reality that Internet- and computer-mediated communications, to date, are communicative environments constructed through language (mostly text). In cyberspace, written language therefore mediates the human-computer interface as well as the human-human interface. What are the implications of the domination of Internet and computer-mediated communications by text? Researchers from diverse disciplines—from distance educators to linguists to social scientists to postmodern philosophers—have begun to investigate this question. They ask: Who speaks online, and how? Is online language really text, or is it “speech”? How does culture affect the language of cyberspace? Approaching these questions from their own disciplinary perspectives, they variously position cyberlanguage as “text,” as “semiotic system,” as “socio-cultural discourse” or even as the medium of cultural hegemony (domination of one culture over another). These different perspectives necessarily shape their analytical and methodological approaches to investigating cyberlanguage, underlying decisions to examine, for example, the details of online text, the social contexts of cyberlanguage, and/or the social and cultural implications of English as Internet lingua franca. Not surprisingly, investigations of Internet communications cut across a number of pre-existing scholarly debates: on the nature and study of “discourse,” on the relationships between language, technology and culture, on the meaning and significance of literacy, and on the liter

scholarly journals Science in Social Contexts

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-157
Author(s):  
Frank Miedema
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Choice Data ◽  
Production Chain ◽  
Safe Spaces ◽  
Academic System ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Practice Of Science

AbstractGradually since 1990 a growing number of critical analyses from within science have been published of how science was organized as a system and discussing its problems, despite, or paradoxically because the growing size of its endeavour and its growing yearly output. Because of lack of openness with regards to sharing results of research, such as publications and data but in fact of all sorts of other products, science is felt by many to be disappointing with respect to its societal impact, its contribution to the major problems humanity is facing in the current times. With the financial crisis, in analogy, also the crisis of the academic system as described in Chap. 10.1007/978-94-024-2115-6_3 was exposed and it seemed that similar systemic neoliberal economic mechanisms operated in these at first sight seemingly different industries. Most of these critiques appeared with increasing frequency since 2014 in formal scientific magazines, social media and with impact reached the leadership of universities, government and funders. This raised awareness and support for the development of new ways of doing science, mostly intuitively and implicitly, but sometimes explicitly motivated by pragmatism aiming for societal progress and contribution to the good life.To get to this next level we need the critical reflection on the practice of science as done in previous chapters in order to make systemic changes to several critical parts of the knowledge production chain. I will discuss the different analyses of interactions between science and society, in the social and political contexts with publics and politics that show where and how we could improve. The opening up of science and academia in matters of problem choice, data sharing and evaluation of research together with stakeholders from outside academia will help to increase the impact of science on society. It ideally should promote equality, inclusion and diversity of the research agendas. This, I will argue requires an Open Society with Deweyan democracy and safe spaces for deliberations where a diversity of publics and their problems can be heard. In this transition we have to pay close and continuous attention to the many effects of power executed by agents in society and science that we know can distort these ‘ideal deliberations’ and undermine the ethics of these communications and possibly threaten the autonomy and freedom of research.

The Social Contexts of Racial Discrimination in Sentencing

1986 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha A. Myers ◽  
Susette M. Talarico
Keyword(s):  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Social

Living Paradox in Riverine Bangladesh: Whiteheadian Perspectives on Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir

1969 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naveeda Khan
Keyword(s):  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Physical Entity ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Changing Climate ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many

We begin with the words of rural and riverine women from Bangladesh recalling the events of their children's deaths by drowning. These events are cast as the work of supernatural beings, specifically Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir, who compel the mothers into forgetfulness and entice the children to the water. Is this a disavowal of loss and responsibility? This article considers that the women, specifically those from northern Bangladesh, assert not only their understanding of the losses that they have suffered but also their changing relationship to the river and its changing nature through their evocations of mythological figures. Alongside the many experiences of the river, the article takes note of its experience as paradoxical, with paradoxicality serving as the occasion for the coming together of the mythological, the material, and the social. The article draws upon Alfred North Whitehead to interrelate the strata of myths and their permutations, with the women's experiences of the river, and the river as a physical entity, allowing us to explore how the women's expressions portend the changing climate.

Entanglements between Agency and Vulnerability in the Phenomenon of Birth. Reflections on Children’s Expressions about ‘Being Born’

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2-2020) ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Catrin Heite ◽  
Veronika Magyar-Haas
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Cultural Embeddedness

Analogously to the works in the field of new social studies of childhood, this contribution deals with the concept of childhood as a social construction, in which children are considered as social actors in their own living environment, engaged in interpretive reproduction of the social. In this perspective the concept of agency is strongly stressed, and the vulnerability of children is not sufficiently taken into account. But in combining vulnerability and agency lies the possibility to consider the perspective of the subjects in the context of their social, political and cultural embeddedness. In this paper we show that what children say, what is important to them in general and for their well-being, is shaped by the care experiences within the family and by their social contexts. The argumentation for the intertwining of vulnerability and agency is exemplified by the expressions of an interviewed girl about her birth and by reference to philosophical concepts about birth and natality.

THE THE INDIGENOUS IDENTITY INTERPRETED AS A CATEGORY OF ANALYSIS IN POPULATION STUDIES

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (Especial) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Dante Choque-Caseres
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Northern Border ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
New Research

In Latin America, based on the recognition of Indigenous Peoples, the identification of gaps or disparities between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population has emerged as a new research interest. To this end, capturing Indigenous identity is key to conducting certain analyses. However, the social contexts where the identity of Indigenous persons are (re)produced has been significantly altered. These changes are generated by the assimilation or integration of Indigenous communities into dominant national cultures. Within this context, limitations emerge in the use of this category, since Indigenous identity has a political and legal component related to the needs of the government. Therefore, critical thought on the use of Indigenous identity is necessary in an epistemological and methodological approach to research. This article argues that research about Indigenous Peoples should evaluate how Indigenous identity is included, for it is socially co-produced through the interaction of the State and its institutions. Thus, it would not necessarily constitute an explicative variable. By analyzing the discourse about Aymara Indigenous communities that has emerged in the northern border of Chile, this paper seeks to expose the logic used to define identity. Therefore, I conclude that the process of self-identification arises in supposed Indigenous people, built and/or reinforced by institutions, which should be reviewed from a decolonizing perspective and included in comparative research.

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

Pay, Promotion, and Democratization

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Seligmann
Keyword(s):  
Officer Corps ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
Lower Deck

As soon as he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, Winston Churchill sought to buttress his credentials as a social reformer by improving conditions for sailors in the Navy and widening the social composition of the officer corps. This chapter examines his efforts towards both of these ends. It shows how he fought against the Treasury and his Cabinet colleagues to offer sailors their first meaningful pay rise in decades. It similarly catalogues the many schemes he introduced to entice people from a wider range of backgrounds, including sailors from the lower deck, to become naval officers. As with enhanced naval pay, this required him to persevere against entrenched interests, but as this chapter will show, his achievements in this area were considerable.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

The Science and Art of Interviewing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Gerson ◽  
Sarah Damaske
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interview Guide ◽  
Hidden Patterns ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Depth Interviews

Qualitative interviewing is one of the most widely used methods in social research, but it is arguably the least well understood. To address that gap, this book offers a theoretically rigorous, empirically rich, and user-friendly set of strategies for conceiving and conducting interview-based research. Much more than a how-to manual, the book shows why depth interviewing is an indispensable method for discovering and explaining the social world—shedding light on the hidden patterns and dynamics that take place within institutions, social contexts, relationships, and individual experiences. It offers a step-by-step guide through every stage in the research process, from initially formulating a question to developing arguments and presenting the results. To do this, the book shows how to develop a research question, decide on and find an appropriate sample, construct an interview guide, conduct probing and theoretically focused interviews, and systematically analyze the complex material that depth interviews provide—all in the service of finding and presenting important new empirical discoveries and theoretical insights. The book also lays out the ever-present but rarely discussed challenges that interviewers routinely encounter and then presents grounded, thoughtful ways to respond to them. By addressing the most heated debates about the scientific status of qualitative methods, the book demonstrates how depth interviewing makes unique and essential contributions to the research enterprise. With an emphasis on the integral relationship between carefully crafted research and theory building, the book offers a compelling vision for what the “interviewing imagination” can and should be.

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