Sociocultural Context and the DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorder: Comment on Widiger & Hines

Widiger and Hines provide a brief overview of the development of the Alternative Model of Personality Disorder (AMPD) housed within Section 3 of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013). They highlight eight issues and controversies related to the AMPD in need of resolution for improvement of both the AMPD model itself as well as the field of personality disorders more broadly. In this brief commentary, I add a ninth issue in need of attention both with respect to the AMPD but also within the field of personality disorders more broadly: 9) How is sociocultural context to be accommodated in AMPD—and more generally personality disorder—theory, research, and treatment? The historical intra-individual, deficit-based models for conceptualizing personality disorders linger in current personality disorder discourse. However, failure to appropriately consider sociocultural context that systematically predisposes wide swaths of the population to unequal access to resources and exposure to psychological stressors, which can impact the appearance of personality pathology, serves to stigmatize minoritized individuals. The personality disorder field, and the AMPD discourse, must appropriately contend with sociocultural context in its models otherwise it risks developing models with limited generalizability and which hold potential to adversely affect sexual and gender minoritized populations, among others.

Empowering Multilingual Learners Through Critical Liberating Literacy Practices in English-Dominated Speech Communities

This chapter explores the nuances of critical literacy reviewing the influence of the sociocultural context and the critical element that arises from the individuals who negotiate their identities as they interact with others in a variety of settings. The perspective adopted here focuses on multilingual learners as they engage in literacy practices in English, the dominant language, within schooled environments resulting in hybrid productions within a Third Space, which is a metaphorical setting that promotes expansive learning. Such literacy productions consider the lived-in experiences of the individuals and their personal histories as tools for learning with the potential to liberate themselves from the dominant literacy practices. The chapter includes a discussion of the role and status of English to empower non-dominant groups within English-speaking settings.

Male Monsters Still Stalk, Yet More Violent: A Comparative Analysis of Original Slasher Films and Their Remakes

Since its origins in the mid-1970s, the slasher has been defined as a subgenre of horror in which a serial or mass killer stalks and massacres middle-class youngsters, and preferably attractive young women, using cutting weapons or projectiles. In that regard, the twenty-first century has seen a revival of the slasher, combining the release of original movies with remakes of classic films, adapting the traditional plots to the current context. In this paper, a comparative content analysis is performed on 13 slasher films made during the 1970s and the 1980s and 13 remakes premiered in the new millennium, focusing on the differences stemming from the adaptation of the latter to the new sociocultural context. The results indicate that, although there have been a number of changes, such as higher doses of explicit violence and profanity and in the fight responses of the victims, most of the subgenre’s defining traits have remained intact, whereas others, such as those relating to the defining traits of the victims, should be questioned. The limited differences found between the original films and the remakes provide the basis for drawing interesting conclusions about the subgenre itself, as well as to raise discussions about the different contexts of production and reception.

Analysis of Mr. Collins’ proposal: Jane Austen’s realism as a strategy for social criticism

Jane Austen's novels are a faithful portrait of many of the customs and rules of her time’s society. By depicting her sociocultural environment, Austen confers a greater realism to her works and adds coherence to her characters’ attitudes. She also employs realism as a strategy to make a subtle social criticism, highlighting the negative consequences of some of her time’s laws and rules. In the present article, a sociocultural context is offered about clerics, courtship and marriage proposals, and the legal device of the entailment, which will lead to a better understanding of the subsequent analysis of Pride and Prejudice’s chapter 19, in which Mr. Collins’ marriage proposal to Elizabeth Bennet is related. Through this analysis, the way in which Austen criticizes the precarious situation of women in her time will be explained, as well as its subsequent consequences on marriage engagements.

Diachronic model of the word “official” in the Russian language: semantic features and vectors of development

The relevance of this article is determined by the demand for the stereotype of a civil servant in Russian public communication and the need for its regular research in order to form an objective public opinion and determine the dynamics of social processes. The purpose of the research was to identify and describe the changes in terms of the content of the language sign official in the Russian language in Pre-Soviet, Soviet and modern periods. The methods of synchronous, diachronic, component, lexicographic and contextual analysis are used in the paper. The study was carried out on the material of lexicographic sources and modern mass media discourse on government administration. For the first time, the main vectors for developing semantics of the key lexical unit of the administrative language in the modern period were identified and described. The changes were caused by the destruction of ideologized subject-conceptual semes of the Soviet era; by the expansion of paradigmatic and syntagmatic ties, reflecting the disappearance of geo-conditioned characteristics and consolidating the features of the hierarchy of the modern management, as well as by the actualization and unification of the verbal sign. It is concluded that, in terms of the semantics of the studied verbal signs, there is a traditionally stable pejorative-evaluative emotiveness due to the sociocultural context which is reflected in associative characteristics - stimuli indicating human weaknesses associated primarily with violated moral and ethical norms. The prospects of the research are seen in continuing the synchronous-diachronic study of the most important for the modern Russian language verbal signs official, manager, bureaucrat, functionary in the lexical-semantic field bureaucracy, which is actively developing, and in using the proposed methods of analysis to study other subsystems of the Russian language.

The Sociocultural Context in Law: Modernism - Postmodernism - Metamodernism

This article analyses the socio-cultural aspects of modern law in terms of philosophical and legal analysis and in the context of the changes that take place in the culture of the 19th-21st centuries. The objec­tive of this work is to identify the discourse of today’s cultural strategies and their reflection in law and legal culture. The article uses an arsenal of methodological tools of philosophical and legal analysis, a cultural me­thodology through which the values of modern society are revealed, as well as a methodology of historical and philosophical research. The main result of the work is to establish that modern law cannot be understood outside and regardless of its contextuality, as well as in accordance with the cultural logic and peculiarities of civilisational deve­lop­ment in the context of globalisation. The main conclusion of the article is that the emergence of post-postcapitalism and the deepening of the consumer society result in a crisis of law and its excessive bureaucratisation and formalisation. The emerging cultural logic of metamodernism refers to such concepts as “structure of feeling”, “oscillation”, “communication”, “post-truth”, “totality” in order to restore the subject-orientation of law and give anthro­pological substance to the traditional concepts of “human dignity”, “freedom” and “justice”.