scholarly journals The orderliness and sociability of “talking together”

Author(s):  
Chiara Bassetti ◽  
Kenneth Liberman

Conversations among Italians often entail many-at-a-time rather than one-at-a-time speaking. This “talking together” is a deliberate aim of parties and a relevant aspect of their social life. It is a variant system for organizing ordinary talk. We describe how simultaneity is organized, how participants collaborate to maintain the orderliness of their interaction, and how, to do so, they listen to each other and continuously monitor talk for its content and its form. Following Simmel, we see this as a classic example of sociability, a play-form of sociation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-499
Author(s):  
Helen Traill

The question of what community comes to mean has taken on increasing significance in sociological debates and beyond, as an increasingly politicised term and the focus of new theorisations. In this context, it is increasingly necessary to ask what is meant when community is invoked. Building on recent work that positions community as a practice and an ever-present facet of human sociality, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the powerful work that community as an idea does in shaping everyday communal practices, through designating collective space and creating behavioural expectations. To do so, the article draws on participant observation and interviews from a community gardening site in Glasgow that was part of a broader research project investigating the everyday life of communality within growing spaces. This demonstrates the successes but also the difficulties of carving out communal space, and the work done by community organisations to enact it. The article draws on contemporary community theory, but also on ideas from Davina Cooper about the role of ideation in social life. It argues for a conceptual approach to communality that does not situate it as a social form or seek it in everyday practice, but instead considers the vacillation between the ideation and practices of community: illustrated here in a designated community place. In so doing, this approach calls into focus the frictions and boundaries produced in that process, and questions the limits of organisational inclusivity.


The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently “dialogical.” No speaker speaks alone because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on “the monologic imagination” gives us new insights into languages’ political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Schatzki

An important issue in contemporary social theory is how social thought can systematically take materiality into account. This article suggests that one way social theory can do so is by working with an ontology that treats materiality as part of society. The article presents one such ontology, according to which social phenomena consist in nexuses of human practices and material arrangements. This ontology (1) recognizes three ways materiality is part of social phenomena, (2) holds that most social phenomena are intercalated constellations of practices, technology, and materiality, and (3) opens up consideration of relations between practices and material arrangements. A brief practice-material history of the Kentucky Bluegrass region where the author resides illustrates the idea that social phenomena evince changing material configurations over time.


2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-120
Author(s):  
Rogério Tílio ◽  
Thaís Sampaio ◽  
Gabriel Martins

Upon the understanding of Applied Linguistics as an indisciplinary field of inquiry that aims to create intelligibility regarding language-centered social problems (MOITA LOPES, 2006), this article introduces a pedagogical instrument, a Critical Multiliteracies Thematic Project, as a means to develop learners’ critical social agency. The nature of this educational project derives from the pedagogy of critical sociointeractional literacy (TILIO, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2015), whose understanding of language teaching permeates notions of citizenship that defy hegemonic discourses by prompting the analysis of themes and language, and the adoption of a constant critical stance. As the pedagogical project in focus situates its practices through alternative Brazilian female voices, students of an extension English course are led to respond to the multiple discourses on gender-imbricated matters that dwells their social horizons (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017 [1929]). Hence, by investigating the dialogue established between the project and a student, this article intends to contribute to the production of knowledge on social life. In order to do so, we selected a task that integrates the project and a multimodal digital text produced by a student in response to the project. We close off the article by framing the relevance of ethically committed language education in promoting learners’ transforming practices.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 805-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein

AbstractIn this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through recognition theory back to Hegel’s original dialectic of the master and servant in thePhenomenology of Spirit. What the dialectic captures, I argue, are the actual dynamics of misrecognition in social life, not an idealised form of recognition. This foundational, constitutive misrecognition is what Lacan also theorises by way of his concept of ‘fantasy’. Both Hegel and Lacan foreground a misrecognised, desiring subject that challenges the ways in which agency has been understood in international politics. Lastly, I show the purchase of a Hegelian-Lacanian analysis for IR by considering the relations between sovereignty and nuclear weapons under the lens of fantasy.


Hipertext.net ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Roger Soler i Martí ◽  
Mariona Ferrer-Fons ◽  
Ludovic Terren

The lockdown imposed in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak as well as the resulting surge in the use of digital technologies and social media for activism or social life all represent a unique opportunity to study the relationship between online and offline activism. To do so, we focus on the Barcelona branch of Fridays For Future, the recent and global youth climate movement that expanded through social networks and organised several large-scale global protests. Based on data from Fridays For Future-Barcelona’s Twitter account, the analysis looks at and compares the level of activity and interactions during normal times and during the lockdown. The results suggest a close and mutually-reinforcing relationship between offline and online activism, with peaks of Twitter activity and interactions usually revolving around offline protest actions. They also show that the lockdown period was characterised by an increase in the number of tweets but a decrease in the number of interactions and thus in the repercussion of the movement on social networks.


1994 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
John Covaleskie

This response to Coulson's recent EPAA piece, "Human Life, Human Organizations, and Education," argues that Coulson is wrong about "human nature," social life, and the effects of unregulated capitalist markets. On these grounds, it is argued that his call to remove education from the public sphere should be rejected. The point is that education is certainly beneficial to individuals who receive it, but to think of education as purely a private and personal good properly distributed through the market is seriously to misconstrue the meaning of education. We should not care to be the sort of people who do so.


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (49) ◽  
pp. 383
Author(s):  
Angelo Serpa ◽  
Alexandre Matos Contreiras Pereira ◽  
Raísa Santos Muniz

<p>Neste artigo, busca-se problematizar os processos de complexificação dos campos de produção e consumo em dois bairros populares, os bairros Brasil, em Vitória da Conquista, e Pernambués, em Salvador, através da identificação, da caracterização e da análise das centralidades de comércio e serviços, de suas dinâmicas internas e relações com a área da qual fazem parte na cidade. Além da pesquisa bibliográfica relativa à temática e à metodologia, a aplicação de questionários para empreendedores e público consumidor, realização de entrevistas com empreendedores, bem como a sistematização, a tabulação e a análise dos dados obtidos foram os principais procedimentos metodológicos utilizados, objetivando-se traçar os perfis sociais dos dois grupos, vistos aqui como agentes nos processos de complexificação das centralidades identificadas nos bairros. As pesquisas realizadas entre 2015 e 2016 buscaram também fomentar o debate sobre a existência ou não de um processo de ascensão de uma “nova classe média”, discurso tão amplamente divulgado pelo governo brasileiro e difundido pelos veículos de comunicação nos últimos anos. A análise de dois bairros populares em contextos urbano-regionais diferenciados no estado da Bahia nos permite afirmar que é inegável o processo de complexificação das centralidades de comércio e serviços nestes recortes. Por outro lado, há um evidente empobrecimento do capital social dos empreendedores entrevistados em ambos os bairros (lazer restrito, falta de tempo para os amigos e para frequentar equipamentos culturais), o capital escolar/cultural permanecendo praticamente inalterado e a continuidade dos estudos na universidade dependendo de um enorme esforço pessoal daqueles que se dispõem a fazê-lo. Percebe-se também que a ascensão social, ou melhor, a inserção pelo consumo pode interferir na vida de relações sociais dos bairros populares analisados, com o empobrecimento do capital social de empreendedores (e consumidores).</p><p><strong>Palavras–chave:</strong> comércio e serviços, ascensão social, bairro popular, bairro empreendedor, Salvador, Vitória da Conquista.</p><p><strong>Abstract </strong></p><p>This paper aims to discuss the processes of complexification of the fields of production and consumption through the identification, characterization and analysis of trade and services centralities, its internal dynamics and the relations sustained by them within the area of the city in which they are located. We proceeded the studies in two popular neighborhoods in two different cities in the state of Bahia, Brazil. The first neighborhood is called Brazil and it is located in Vitoria da Conquista and the second is called Pernambués and it is located in Salvador. In addition to bibliographical research on both, the subject and methodology, we applied questionnaires for entrepreneurs and consumers, conducted interviews with entrepreneurs and proceeded its systematization, tabulation and analysis of the data obtained as the main methodological procedures in this study. By choosing to do so, we aimed to portray the social profiles of the two groups (entrepreneurs and consumers), seen here as active agents in the processes of complexification of the centralities identified in the neighborhoods. The surveys that were conducted between 2015 and 2016 intended to promote the debate about the possibility of existence of the process of ascension of a "new middle class" in Brazil, a discourse extensively disseminated by the government and by the media in recent years. The analysis of the two popular neighborhoods in different urban-regional contexts in the state of Bahia allows us to affirm that the process of complexification of the centralities of commerce and services in these localities is undeniable. On the other hand, there is a discernible impoverishment of the social capital of the entrepreneurs interviewed in both neighborhoods (restricted leisure, lack of time for friends and to attend cultural facilities), school/cultural capital remaining practically unchanged and the continuity of university studies (when applied) depending on a huge personal effort of those who are willing to do so. It is also noticeable that social ascension, or rather, insertion through consumption, can interfere in the social life of the residents of the popular neighborhoods analyzed resulting in the impoverishment of the social capital of the entrepreneurs (and also of the consumers).</p><p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: normal;"><strong>Keywords</strong>: commerce and services, Social ascension, Popular neighborhoods, Entrepreneurial neighborhoods, Salvador, Vitória da Conquista</p>


2018 ◽  
pp. 137-176
Author(s):  
Alberto Varon

Chapter four turns to two novels, now widely accepted as part of the Latino “canon” and central modernist texts, to argue for a form of Mexican Ameircan manhood that rewrites citizenship as non-migratory labor. As part of a national literature, this economic citizenship urges pragmatic integration through economic cooperation. By championing the economic capacity of Latinos not as laborers but as managers, inventors, and entrepreneurs, these texts engage with early twentieth-century ideals about productivity and the division of labor, critiquing notions of the so-called “self-made man” and refashioning Mexican American manhood as a model for the national citizen. Economic citizenship seeks a place within the structures of capitalism that dominated social life and to dissociate Mexican Americans from ideas of migration and transience that characterized discourses of labor so often associated with ethnic Mexicans. To do so, it examines the minor or marginalized characters in these novels.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
MAURICIO BUENO DA ROSA

Classical philosophers conceived the study of politics from a normative perspective. From this flowed the current understanding that political action should be guided by ethics. As a result, the primary goal of politics was to educate men, make them better, and guide them for good. Machiavelli does not share the conception of man left by Christian philosophy that this is a being impelled by nature to social life. According to Christian understanding, the individual was subordinate to the state, but its action was limited by the natural or moral law that transcends the state's own authority, constituting a superior office to which every member of the community can turn when temporal power goes against it. your rights. In contrast, for Machiavelli, man is a being driven by antisocial forces. According to the Florentine man has a tendency to act on selfish impulses for his own benefit. This natural tendency can be controlled by the use of religion, law, or coercion, for as he himself writes, man does good when he feels coerced to do so. For Machiavelli, the perversity of men is a finding of historical observation, men have always dominated each other, because desires and interests move them in opposite directions.


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