Chapter 3: Just for the casuals? Leisure and learning in eikaiwa

10.47908/13/3 ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Daniel Hooper
Keyword(s):  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Constructed Identity ◽  
The Face

Through a narrative telling of his journey as an eikaiwa teacher and researcher, Daniel Hooper takes on the issue of “fun” or “leisure” within eikaiwa teaching in this chapter. He claims that while the notion of eikaiwa teachers being “fun” is often marked as cause for eikaiwa being positioned outside of “serious” education, the socially-constructed identity of the “entertainer” is by no means restricted to eikaiwa. Furthermore, he also argues that “fun” has undeservedly been given a bad name in the field and that, even in the face of social/professional stigma, eikaiwa teachers can craft their own valid “educator” identities.

A qualitative exploration of the prescribing and use of statins in asymptomatic people in Ireland: A case of medicalisation, biomedicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation

2020 ◽  
pp. 136345932094606
Author(s):  
Paula Byrne ◽  
Órla O’Donovan ◽  
Susan M Smith ◽  
John Cullinan
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Cardiovascular Disease ◽  
High Cholesterol ◽  
Medical Problems ◽  
The Public ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
Notable Increase ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

There has been a notable increase in the use of statins in people without cardiovascular disease but who may be at risk in the future. The majority of statin users now fall into this category but little research has focused exclusively on this group. Debate has ensued regarding medicating asymptomatic people, and processes described variously as medicalisation, biomedicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation are used to explain how this happens. These overlapping and interrelated processes require issues to be ‘problemised’ as medical problems requiring medical solutions given the prevailing understandings of health, risk and disease. However, current understandings of risk and disease are not simply the result of technological and scientific advances, they are also socially constructed. We interviewed members of the public, GPs and others, and found that rather than high cholesterol being seen as one of several risk factors that contributes to heart disease, it tended to be promoted simplistically to the status of a disease needing treatment of itself. Statins were justified by those taking them as different to ‘unnecessary medicines’. However, some participants demonstrated resistance to statins, worried about over-medicalisation and deviated from accepted practices, indicating a complex ‘muddling through’ in the face of uncertainty.

What's the Fuss about Social Constructivism?

Episteme ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
John Dupré
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Enterprise ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Many ◽  
Social Construction Of Science

The topic of this paper is social constructivist doctrines about the nature of scientific knowledge. I don't propose to review all the many accounts that have either claimed this designation or had it ascribed to them. Rather I shall try to consider in a very general way what sense should be made of the underlying idea, and then illustrate some of the central points with two central examples from biology. The first thing to say is that, on the face of it, some doctrine of the social construction of science must self-evidently be true. The notion of science as progressing through the efforts of solitary geniuses may have had some plausibility in the seventeenth century, but it has none today. Science is a massively cooperative, social, enterprise. And surely it is constructed. Scientific knowledge doesn't grow on trees; it is produced through hard work by human agents. Putting these two banal points together we conclude that science is socially constructed.

Contextualizing gender in climate change adaptation in semi-arid Zimbabwe

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.P. Mubaya ◽  
Paramu L. Mafongoya ◽  
Jiri Obert
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Face ◽  
Rural Context

Purpose Climate change impacts tend to coalesce with everyday vulnerability and affect different socio-economic groups in different ways. In this regard, this study aims to contribute to studies that make gender critical to understanding the way that climate change is experienced. Socially constructed gender differences have a bearing on the extent of exposure to climatic shocks, leading to various patterns of vulnerability to these shocks. Design/methodology/approach This study uses both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to collect data. Findings The study finds that there is an inherent potential within the study area for equal opportunities for both men and women to address levels of vulnerability to climatic shocks and, by implication, potential to challenge patriarchal structures that tend to characterize these study areas. The contextualization of gender analysis remains elusive in the face of increasingly shifting gender roles that traditionally defined women as victims to everyday vulnerability and more recently in conjunction with climatic shocks. Originality/value In this regard, this research contributes to emerging perspectives on the potential role of ‘woman as heroine’ and challenges the perception of ‘woman as victim’ in environmental management. Considerations for mainstreaming adaptation responses to climate change do not necessarily have to consider women as a special social group in isolation but, rather, implications for both men and women and caution that embeddedness remains key for gender considerations in any rural context.

scholarly journals São Paulo’s 2013 water crisis: a socially constructed disaster risk

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Izabela Penha de Oliveira Santos ◽  
Ana Paula Fracalanza ◽  
Robert Coates ◽  
Jeroen Warner
Keyword(s):  
Water Scarcity ◽  
Water Governance ◽  
Metropolitan Region ◽  
Water Crisis ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Disaster Scenario ◽  
Release Model

Frequent cases of water scarcity in Brazil reveal a water governance and administration crisis. During the water crisis (2013-2016), the São Paulo Metropolitan Region experienced a disaster scenario. This article analyses how it was constituted as a socially constructed disaster episode. A case study was carried out in the Novo Recreio neighbourhood (Guarulhos, SP) through ethnographic observations, interviews, and newspaper articles. The results were analysed based on the Pressure and Release Model (PAR). It was concluded that the water crisis period in SPMR has disproportionately affected the Guarulhos population, especially in Novo Recreio. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that public policies and the neighbourhood's territorial formation are related to its population's current frail living conditions and increased socio-environmental vulnerability in the face of continuous water scarcity, thus corroborating the social construction of the risk of water scarcity.

scholarly journals Pragmatism as Problem Solving

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312199399
Author(s):  
Monica Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Sociological Practice ◽  
American Sociology ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
The Face

At the level of sociological practice a three-sided debate occurs in American sociology between the rationalist tradition, in which the goal is the better understanding of society; the emancipatory tradition, in which the goal is improvement of society; and the skeptical tradition, which argues that we cannot know if either our knowledge or our norms are correct, and therefore it is not possible to expect progress in either. Each of these strands runs into difficulties: for the rationalist tradition, an inability to cumulate knowledge; for the emancipatory tradition, a difficulty in grounding the norms that would determine what counts as emancipation if norms are socially constructed; and for the skeptical tradition, inability to accept the logical conclusion of the argument, which is inaction even in the face of extreme injustice. The author shows that when pressed on these points, each tradition moves in the direction of pragmatism understood as problem solving, and that the practice of problem solving offers resolutions to these dilemmas.

Why do people believe in a zero-sum economy?

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel G. B. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Evolutionary Model ◽  
Everyday Experience ◽  
Coalitional Psychology ◽  
The Face ◽  
Zero Sum

AbstractZero-sum thinking and aversion to trade pervade our society, yet fly in the face of everyday experience and the consensus of economists. Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) evolutionary model invokes coalitional psychology to explain these puzzling intuitions. I raise several empirical challenges to this explanation, proposing two alternative mechanisms – intuitive mercantilism (assigning value to money rather than goods) and errors in perspective-taking.

Mars: was There an Ancient Eden?

1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias C. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Positive Answer ◽  
Biogenic Elements ◽  
Habitable Zones ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Early Mars ◽  
Favorable Conditions ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Rocky Planets ◽  
Impact Erosion

AbstractThe clear evidence of water erosion on the surface of Mars suggests an early climate much more clement than the present one. Using a model for the origin of inner planet atmospheres by icy planetesimal impact, it is possible to reconstruct the original volatile inventory on Mars, starting from the thin atmosphere we observe today. Evidence for cometary impact can be found in the present abundances and isotope ratios of gases in the atmosphere and in SNC meteorites. If we invoke impact erosion to account for the present excess of129Xe, we predict an early inventory equivalent to at least 7.5 bars of CO2. This reservoir of volatiles is adequate to produce a substantial greenhouse effect, provided there is some small addition of SO2(volcanoes) or reduced gases (cometary impact). Thus it seems likely that conditions on early Mars were suitable for the origin of life – biogenic elements and liquid water were present at favorable conditions of pressure and temperature. Whether life began on Mars remains an open question, receiving hints of a positive answer from recent work on one of the Martian meteorites. The implications for habitable zones around other stars include the need to have rocky planets with sufficient mass to preserve atmospheres in the face of intensive early bombardment.

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