The Shadow of Institutions

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-150
Author(s):  
GerShun Avilez

This chapter investigates the relationship between the Black queer body and medical diagnosis, elaborating how minorities negotiate the authority of state-empowered medical institutions. The central contention is that Black diasporic queer writers create narratives concerned with autonomy and desire to undermine medical control and definition. Novelists K. Sello Duiker and Jackie Kay show how gay and transgender bodies under medical care must be reclaimed or hidden in the shadows to dodge the possibility of material or discursive violence of medical care. Duiker presents a counterinstitution rooted in same-sex desire as a possible means of escape. Kay suggests that narrative is a productive way to negotiate the threat of injury. Both writers imagine strategies of how queer individuals may elude the social definition of medical diagnosis.

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-130
Author(s):  
H. Mahler ◽  

Health development is essentially a political and social process that should start off with the acceptance of the social function of health and should ensure that health technology is developed and applied in harmony with this social function. It is not synonymous with the development of increasingly sophisticated services in medical institutions. In many countries the value of these expensive institutions can be seriously questioned if measured in terms of their impact on improving the health status of the populations. No country can afford to provide every citizen with every possible form of medical technology, nor would this necessarily be good for the health of the individual and of society. On the contrary, quite apart from possible adverse side effects and iatrogenic diseases, it would tend to make people overdependent on a medical "aristotechnocracy." Paradoxically, though medical care is often justified on the grounds that it reduces work-absenteeism, quite the contrary seems to be happening in many situations. In many countries, the so-called "health" industry is already consuming a high proportion of the national manpower pool and is approaching the upper limit, beyond which it could be seriously questioned whether medical care, as currently practised, is not becoming detrimental to further economic development. Other social sectors are in the same position, making it imperative to join forces in common planning and coordination of all the social services. Such planning requires clear definition of social policy, of which health policy forms an integral part.


Author(s):  
Oleksii Chepov ◽  

The qualitative and clear definition of the legal regime of the capital of Ukraine, the hero city of Kyiv, is influenced by its legislative enshrinement, however, it should be noted that discussions are ongoing and one of the reasons for the unclear legal status of the capital is the ambiguity of current legislation in this area. Separation of the functions of the city of Kyiv, which are carried out to ensure the rights of citizens of Ukraine and the functions that guarantee the rights of the territorial community of the city of Kyiv. In the modern world, in legal doctrine and practice, the capital is understood as the capital of the country, which at the legislative level received this status and, accordingly, is the administrative and political center of the state, which houses the main state bodies and diplomatic missions of other states. It is the identification of the boundaries of the relationship between the competencies of state administrations and local self-government, in practice, often raises questions about their delimitation and ways of regulatory solution. Peculiarities of local self-government in Kyiv city districts are defined in the provisions of the Law on the Capital, which reveal the norms of the Constitution in these legal relations, according to which the issue of organizing district management in cities belongs to city councils. Likewise, it is unregulated by law to lose the particularity of the legal status of the territory of the city. It should be emphasized that the subject of administrative-legal relations is not a certain administrative-territorial entity, but the social group is designated - the territorial community of the city of Kiev, kiyani. Thus, the provisions on the city of Kyiv partially ignore the potential of the territorial community.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Flannigan

Abstract Parents who serve as trustees, and solicitors who draft trusts that involve family relations, may need to address whether parents are free to entertain conflicts and benefits that may be attributable to parent status. I discuss in broad terms the kinds of conflicts and benefits that normally should not be objectionable. The definitive consideration is the social definition of when parent access is a limited access.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-90
Author(s):  
Peter Murphy

The article reviews the social theory of Harry Redner with particular reference to his view of the relationship between high literacy (book culture) and civilization. The question is posed whether, alongside book culture, an axial-type metaphysical culture is also key to the definition of civilization.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 43-81
Author(s):  
Patrizia Calefato

This paper focuses on the semiotic foundations of sociolinguistics. Starting from the definition of “sociolinguistics” given by the philosopher Adam Schaff, the paper examines in particular the notion of “critical sociolinguistics” as theorized by the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. The basis of the social dimension of language are to be found in what Rossi-Landi calls “social reproduction” which regards both verbal and non-verbal signs. Saussure’s notion of langue can be considered in this way, with reference not only to his Course of General Linguistics, but also to his Harvard Manuscripts.The paper goes on trying also to understand Roland Barthes’s provocative definition of semiology as a part of linguistics (and not vice-versa) as well as developing the notion of communication-production in this perspective. Some articles of Roman Jakobson of the sixties allow us to reflect in a manner which we now call “socio-semiotic” on the processes of transformation of the “organic” signs into signs of a new type, which articulate the relationship between organic and instrumental. In this sense, socio-linguistics is intended as being sociosemiotics, without prejudice to the fact that the reference area must be human, since semiotics also has the prerogative of referring to the world of non-human vital signs.Socio-linguistics as socio-semiotics assumes the role of a “frontier” science, in the dual sense that it is not only on the border between science of language and the anthropological and social sciences, but also that it can be constructed in a movement of continual “crossing frontiers” and of “contamination” between languages and disciplinary environments.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Irina Troitskaia ◽  
Alexander Avdeev

The purpose of this article is to analyze changes in the diagnosis of causes of death of the local population and to study the relationship of these changes with the development of medicine and unification of the definition of causes of death in Russia. The information base of the study is the registers of the two parishes in the Moscow County in the period from 1815 to 1918. The obtained results show a significant improvement in the diagnosing of causes of death in the second half of the XIX century, connected with the expansion of the network of medical institutions in the Moscow Province and the activity of the medical society in the development of the Russian nomenclature of diseases.


Author(s):  
Amal Adel Abdrabo

There is a new trend taking place in Egypt over the last decades that is attempting to establish a new culture of development arguing for a knowledge-based development of Egyptian society. Consequently, Egyptian society has begun to witness the emergence of different policies, national strategies, and mega development projects that try to translate these policies into reality. But the question that remains is what type of knowledge, and in which context, should be developed? In this vein, this research serves two purposes. First, it contests the notion of knowledge while using a new method of inquiry that creates an opening for an alternative-more-humanized sociology that opposes the dominant sociological perspective that studies people as quantitative objects. The research uses institutional ethnography to provide new-actor-related insights and interpretations while exploring the social momentum within Egyptian society. Second, the research seeks to investigate the relationship between the desire to transform Egypt into a knowledge-based society through the knowledge precincts projects, following the global agenda, and the creation of a political, social, and cultural environment that allows knowledge to thrive, leading to more social justice and equity. In the end, the research asks: What is the definition of ‘knowledge' provided by the Egyptian government through its different developmental policies? How does it function inside the knowledge precincts projects? It also asks: Does Egypt's commitment to large scale programs through knowledge precincts reveal an authoritarian inclination?


Author(s):  
Eugene O’Brien

This chapter examines the implications for Irish Catholicism that the ‘Yes’ vote in the May 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage may have for the social and cultural position of the Catholic church in contemporary Ireland and in the future. His analysis channels the thinking of Ferdinand Tönnies, an early German sociologist and a contemporary of Durkheim and Weber, who used the German words ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ to distinguish between two fundamentally different structural paradigms for social relations. O’Brien sees marriage as a core ideological signifier of ideological hegemony, and using the fantasy fiction of Terry Pratchett’s satire on religion entitled Small Gods as a lens, he looks at the referendum as a significant turning point in the definition of marriage, and by extension, in the transformation Irish society from the organic community of the Gemeinschaft, to the more postmodern and pluralist notion of the Gesellschaft.


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