Abortion in the Web of Relationship: Negotiating the Abortion Decision Through a Lens of Care

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-55
Author(s):  
Lisa R. Avalos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Abortion Debate ◽  
Structural Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Structural ◽  
Dorothy Smith ◽  
The Web

Does the public abortion debate in the United States bear any relation to women’s private discourse about their abortion experiences? In this work—a qualitative study of the abortion narratives of 20 women—I argue that the familiar pro-choice and pro-life frameworks that have dominated public abortion discourse do not begin to provide a suitable forum for the collective expression and understanding of women’s personal abortion stories. By focusing on the conflicting rights of the parties involved, these frameworks leave us poorly equipped to understand how women experience abortion as members of social networks where interdependence and connection are important. While the debate emphasizes conflicting rights, women articulate their experiences with abortion in ways that emphasize relationship, care, and connection to others. By drawing on the work of theorists such as Dorothy Smith, Jean Baker Miller, Carol Gilligan, and Georg Simmel, I illuminate the misappropriation of women’s abortion experience in the public debate, relating this phenomenon to the social-structural context in which it and other exclusions of subordinate groups occur.

scholarly journals The Social Oikos

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Michael Lee Humphrey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Core Points

In one of the foundational articles of persona studies, Marshall and Barbour (2015) look to Hannah Arendt for development of a key concept within the larger persona framework: “Arendt saw the need to construct clear and separate public and private identities. What can be discerned from this understanding of the public and the private is a nuanced sense of the significance of persona: the presentation of the self for public comportment and expression” (2015, p. 3). But as far back as the ancient world from which Arendt draws her insights, the affordance of persona was not evenly distributed. As Gines (2014) argues, the realm of the household, oikos, was a space of subjugation of those who were forced to be “private,” tending to the necessities of life, while others were privileged with life in the public at their expense. To demonstrate the core points of this essay, I use textual analysis of a YouTube family vlog, featuring a Black mother in the United States, whose persona rapidly changed after she and her White husband divorced. By critically examining Arendt’s concepts around public, private, and social, a more nuanced understanding of how personas are formed in unjust cultures can help us theorize persona studies in more egalitarian and robust ways.

scholarly journals The politics of platform power in surveillance capitalism: A comparative case study of ride-hailing platforms in China and the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 205943642110467
Author(s):  
Ngai Keung Chan ◽  
Chi Kwok
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Behavioral Predictions

This article uses a comparative case study of two ride-hailing platforms—DiDi Chuxing in China and Uber in the United States—to explore the comparative politics of platform power in surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism is an emerging economic system that translates human experiences into surveillance assets for behavioral predictions and modifications. Through this comparative study, we demonstrate how DiDi and Uber articulate their operational legitimacy for advancing their corporate interests and visions of datafication in the face of legal uncertainty. Although DiDi and Uber are both “sectoral platforms” in urban mobility with similar visions of datafication and infrastructuralization, we highlight that they deploy different discursive legitimation strategies. Our study shows that Uber adopts a “confrontational” strategy, while DiDi employs a “collaborative” strategy when they need to legitimize their data and business practices to the public and regulatory authorities. This study offers a comparative lens to examine the social and political dynamics of platform firms based in China and the United States and, therefore, contributes to understanding the various aspirational logic of platform thinking in different political contexts.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-46
Author(s):  
Marc DiPaolo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Contemporary Context

Examines case studies of fictional heroes as analogues of real-life working-class figures to encourage greater empathy between members of different classes. Doing so will help scholar, undergraduate, and fan readers understand the very contemporary context of America through the lens of fictional characters who are understandably resonant with a broad swath of the public during this politically divided time. The essays in this anthology contemplate the social anxieties that attend class conflict in the United States and Great Britain, and consider how fictional comic book narratives depict these cultural anxieties.

Introduction

1979 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nasaw
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Social History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
The Public ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Colleges And Universities

A history of American public schooling reduced to graphs would tell a simple story of almost continuous growth. In every category, the graphs would incline upwards, recording a steady rise in the number of students in school, the time they spent there, the teachers who taught them, the schools that housed them, and the dollars expended. The upward trend would continue unbroken from the 1820s until the 1970s. We cannot, at this time, chart the downward course that has commenced (if only temporarily) in the mid-1970s. We know only that that part of the American public that votes on school bond issues and makes its opinions known to professional pollsters is no longer willing to spend as much money or place as much trust in public schooling as it once was. It is too soon to predict the future course of public schooling in America, but a good time to reconsider the past. To understand why Americans have grown disillusioned with their public schools we must look beyond the immediate present to the larger history of the United States and its public schools. The public schools of this country—elementary, secondary, and higher—were not conceived full-blown. They have a history, and it is the social history of the United States. This essay will not attempt to present that history in its entirety but will focus instead on three specific periods decisive for the social history of this society and its public schools: the decades before the Civil War, in which the elementary or “common schools” were reformed; the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, in which the secondary schools “welcomed” the “children of the plain people”; and the post-World War II decades, which found the public colleges and universities “overwhelmed” by a “tidal wave” of “non-traditional” students— those traditionally excluded from higher education by sex, race, and class. In each of these periods, the quantitative expansion of the student population was matched by a qualitative transformation of the enlarged institutions.

scholarly journals Surrogacy in the United States: The Horse Is Out of the Barn

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-83
Author(s):  
Daniela Bandelli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Acceptance ◽  
International Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Legal Abortion ◽  
The Public ◽  
Abortion Debate ◽  
The Status

AbstractThe United States are pioneers and leaders of surrogacy international market. Although, there are groups and NGOs in the civil society which are active on the issue of surrogacy (such as the Stop Surrogacy Now campaign in the abolitionist front, and the Center for Genetics and Society in the reformist one), this issue remains marginal in the public debate and has not reached the status of cause for feminists (as for example abortion, violence against women, sexual harassment, breast cancer, etc.). In the United States, the low engagement of feminists can be explained by looking at the evolution of surrogacy debate since the first clinics established in the 1980s to today’s advanced social acceptance of surrogacy and assisted reproduction, as well as to the centrality of the autonomy principle in American feminism, and radicalisation of the abortion debate. Feminists, who in 2020 still need to fight for access to safe and legal abortion, are very careful not to make a misstep in favour of their opponents by admitting that individual autonomy on the body and reproduction can, at times, be limited as a form of women’s protection and emancipation from commodification.

scholarly journals “That Was What I Had to Use”: Social and Cultural Capital in the Careers of Women Broadcasters

2018 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Lucht ◽  
Kelsey Batschelet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Full Participation ◽  
The Public Sphere

This study uses in-depth, biographical interviews to understand a range of historical experiences in the careers of individual women broadcasters in the Midwest, a region of the United States that has received relatively little attention from media scholars. The findings demonstrate the barriers these women faced as well as the social and cultural capital available to them as they pursued diverse roles in an industry that did not welcome their full participation. The study contributes to scholars’ understanding of women’s participation in the public sphere during the 1950s to 1970s.

The Social Origins of Property

1993 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph William Singer ◽  
Jack M. Beermann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
The Public ◽  
Core Property ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Takings Clause

It was easier to make a revolution than to write 600 to 800 laws to create a market economy.Jiri Dienstbier, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia (1990)[I]t would be as absurd to argue that the distribution of property must never be modified by law as it would be to argue that the distribution of political power must never bechanged.Morris Cohen (1927)The takings clause of the United States Constitution requires government to pay compensation when private property is taken for public use. When government regulates, but does not physically seize, property, the Supreme Court of the United States has had trouble defining when individuals have been deprived of property rights so as to give them a right to compensation. The takings clause serves “to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens that, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.” To determine when a regulation amounts to a “taking” of property requiring compensation, the Court has rightly stated that the ultimate question is whether the burden of regulation has been unfairly placed on a small class of individuals rather than the public at large. To answer this question, the Court has identified a variety of factors to consider, including the character of the governmental action, (whether the regulation effects a permanent physical invasion, destroys a core property right, or is intended to prevent public harm), whether the regulation interferes with reasonable investment-backed expectations, and the extent of the diminution in value of the property (particularly whether the regulation deprives the owner of any economically viable use of the property).

The presence of religion in the Latin American public space. Notes for a debate: La presencia de la religión en el espacio público latinoamericano. Apuntes para la discusión

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Cruz Esquivel ◽  
Rodrigo Toniol
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Thematic Issue ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social

Religion in the public space constitutes a structuring issue of the contemporary debates of the social sciences of religion. This article mobilizes part of that literature, circumscribing it to the Latin American context. In that attempt, we work in two dimensions. First, we present how, from the historical and political configurations of our region in the debate, problems and questions about the public space are addressed distant from those commonly encountered when the empirical reference corresponds to the United States-Europe map. The aim is to explore the regional particularities for an effort to theoretically and methodologically strengthen the analysis of this topic. The second dimension contemplated in the text is the presentation of concrete empirical situations in which religion in public space is condensed as a controversy, that mobilize and is mobilized by different actors: politicians, religious, academics, media. These two dimensions go through the thematic issue that follows this article.

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