Introduction: Cultural Constructions of Communication

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Hanno Hardt
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Constructions

Touching Blind Bodies: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogical and Cultural Constructions of Visual Disability in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Tilley ◽  
Jan Eric Olsén
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Blind People ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Visual Disability ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Educational Challenges ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.

Broken Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Straus
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Valuable Resource ◽  
Mobility Impairment ◽  
Attitudes Toward Disability ◽  
The Core ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation and narration of disability. The most characteristic features of musical modernism—fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Modernist musical representation and narration of disability both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic age, a period when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a corresponding urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a corresponding urge to incarcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about. This book draws on two decades of work in disability studies and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of disability into musicology and music theory. This interdisciplinary enterprise offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability, and shifting attention from biology and medicine to culture. Within modernist music, disability representations often embody pernicious stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable resource, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized, eugenic-era attitudes toward disability.

scholarly journals The Double Standard of Aging for Men and Women: Evidence From Across Europe, 2006–2018

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 556-557
Author(s):  
Richard Settersten ◽  
Jack Day ◽  
Gunhild Hagestad
Keyword(s):  
Multilevel Modeling ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
European Social Survey ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Social Survey ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Variation Explained ◽  
Cultural Constructions ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Is there a “double standard” (i.e., a harsher judgment) in the perceived ages at which women and men reach old age, and have these judgments changed over time? We use European Social Survey data from 23 countries in 2006 and newly released data from 16 of those countries in 2018. In both 2006 and 2018, men typically assign women substantially earlier ages than women themselves do. In some places, however, men also give themselves lower ages than women give them. With respect to when women become old, the differential views of men and women are persistent. So is the fact that women differentiate less between the sexes¬–though men differentiate less in 2018 relative to 2006. We use multilevel modeling to examine variation explained by both individual characteristics and country indicators of demographic and policy contexts. Findings underscore the significance of the double standard in cultural constructions of aging.

Charting the moral life courses: A theory of moral development in U.S. evangelical and mainline Protestant cultures

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica McKenzie ◽  
Lene Arnett Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Moral Transgressions ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Analytical Approaches ◽  
Resultant Theory ◽  
Cultural Constructions ◽  
The Relationship

Drawing from qualitative analyses of interviews, ethnographic data, and a review of interdisciplinary literature, this manuscript puts forth a theory of moral life course narratives among U.S. evangelical and mainline Protestants. This theory delineates the relationship between religious worldviews and conceptions of moral behaviors, and the manner in which these worldviews and attendant moral conceptions change across the life course for community members. Grounded theory analyses of 32 participants’ divinity-based moral discourses were interpreted in conjunction with their worldviews, as well as church, home, and school contexts. Analyses indicated that evangelical children highlighted their moral transgressions because they regarded themselves as still quite close to a sinful birth. Evangelical adults, who had been saved and were moving toward God, temporally and spiritually distanced themselves from the morally wrong deeds of their youth. Meanwhile, mainline children and adolescents rarely reasoned about their moral experiences in terms of divinity. This finding is understood in light of their church’s emphasis on developing an individualized relationship with God over time. The study and resultant theory elaborate cultural constructions and transmissions of moral life course narratives that, in turn, provide a framework for understanding when, why, and how divinity enters into moral meaning making for cultural community members. We conclude by advocating for theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches that expose the cultural nature of developmentally dynamic moral selves.

Regions, groups, and identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.L. Thurston
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Archaeologists once viewed super-individual identity as primordial and tied to territorial boundaries, useful for describing an orderly past and creating national or ethnic genealogies. Current research ties identities not to regions, but to groups: complex cultural constructions, expressed in varied yet simultaneous manifestations of bonds with family, lineage, clan, or polity, each with multiple shifting markers. These can involve kinship, status, gender, age, occupation, shared experience, and social memory, in turn impacted by wider sociopolitical, religious, and economic concerns. Between Iron Age groups, cooperation, détente, and conflict were equally likely; trade, travel, and familiarity resulted in material and ideological co-mingling, while still preserving difference, and involved symbolic and practical novelty, as well as continuity with the past. Once, such complexities caused archaeologists to label identity research impossible or unnecessary, but its exclusion often leads to misinterpretation. Fortunately, thoughtful considerations of method, materiality, and scale have resulted in productive new approaches.

scholarly journals Towards a landscape ecosophy. Interpreting how the Villarrica-Pucón urban system inhabitants in the Araucanía region of Chile perceive and relate with the dynamics of Landscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Salazar ◽  
Daniela Jalabert
Keyword(s):  
Urban System ◽  
Central Line ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Crisis ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Ethnographic Methodology ◽  
Circular Causality ◽  
Cultural Constructions ◽  
The City

Abstract As a reaction to the complex global crisis, the notion of ecological urbanism has emerged in order to understand and attend the inaccuracy between the urban system and the environment of which it is a part. This article suggests that the form we perceive the city-nature relation deeply determines the praxis of urbanism arguing that the problem of ecological urbanism is essentially epistemological and ethical. Accordingly, the article introduces the concept of “landscape ecosophy” through which not only is possible to understand the indivisible connection of perception and socio-ecological practices, but also help us to reconnect the praxis of urbanism with a relational epistemology and landscape. The article empirically seeks to interpret how the Villarrica and Pucón urban system inhabitants in the Araucanía Region of Chile perceive and relate with the mountain and lacustrine landscapes in their daily practices of inhabitation. To achieve this, an ethnographic methodology is used. The discussion central line is represented by the question, ‘So close, but so far?’, as in spite of the fact that both cities are deeply connected to the landscape, their socio-cultural constructions are defined by the notions of disconnection and a lack of awareness. On the other hand, in a sort of circular causality, the article also identifies how certain urban initiatives may not only imply a reconnection between the urban system and the landscape of which it is a part, but also contribute to trigger the emergence of deeper landscape ecosophies.

scholarly journals What Support? Foucault, Power, and the Construction of Rape

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aliraza Javaid
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Male Rape ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Voluntary Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Constructions ◽  
Voluntary Agencies

This paper is concerned with the social and cultural constructions of male rape in voluntary agencies, England. Using sociological, cultural, and post-structural theoretical frameworks, mainly the works of Foucault, I demonstrate the ways in which male rape is constructed and reconstructed in such agencies. Social and power relations, social structures, and time and place shape their discourses, cultures, and constructions pertaining to male rape. This means that constructions of male rape are neither fixed, determined, nor unchanging at any time and place, but rather negotiated and fluid. I theorize the data—which was collected through semi-structured interviews and qualitative questionnaires—including male rape counselors, therapists, and voluntary agency caseworkers. The theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that frame and elucidate the data contribute to sociological understandings of male rape.

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