Complex data and simple instructions: Social regulation during the Covid-19 pandemic

Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic include the generation of new norms and shifting expectations about everyday, ordinary behaviour, management of the self, and social interaction. Central to the amalgam of new norms is the way information and instructions are communicated, often in the form of simple images and icons in posters and signs that are widespread in public settings. This article combines two sociological concerns – social control and visual research – to investigate the ways social interaction is being recalibrated during the pandemic. It focuses on some of the imagery relied on in public information about the coronavirus and investigates the form and content of various signs, instructions, and notices for their normative underpinnings, their advice and directives which attempt to modify and regulate diverse activities.

DEVELOPMENT AND CONSERVATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONS AS A MEANINGFUL RESULT OF LEGAL REGULATION

The article touches upon the problems of theory and practice of legal regulation. In a modern state, legal regulation is one of the most effective forms of social regulation. This determines the relevance of this topic. In turn, legal regulation should be based on a scientific theory – the theory of legal regulation, which, despite the attention paid to it by scientists, contains a number of controversial points, inaccuracies and errors. The author comes to the conclusion that the meaningful result of legal regulation can be both the development and conservation of public relations. In this context, we can talk about the relevant functions of law.

Promises and Prospects of Legal Education in India in the Context of the New Education Policy: A Reality Check

Legal education serves as a means of social regulation and a tool for social transformation. In 2020, the Indian government released India’s third educational policy, considered the most ambitious educational policy ever. However, legal scholars fostered several misgivings about the efficacy of the drafted policy in addressing underlying shortcomings in legal education in India. Serious concerns have been raised, especially in light of the nation’s recent loss of prospects in the global economy that could have been achieved otherwise. As a result, addressing the debate that arose due to the NEP’s introduction and its impact upon legal education, which is still subjugated by multiple regulatory frameworks, has become critical. Against this background, the present research explores legal education and its history to better grasp the problems at hand. Following that, the article attempts to analyse the quotidian adversities faced by the institutions and regulators in meeting the demands of the new world order. While doing so, this article takes a critical approach to identify the concerns and inhibitions that exist under the draft policy and remains unresolved by the NEP in view of aimed ‘radical reconstruction of education’. Finally, the authors conclude the article with findings and recommendations.

The Aesthetic Doctrine of Law (Aesthetics of Law) in the Context of the Development of Nbics Technologies

The development of NBICS technologies is one of the factors of transformation of the mechanism of social regulation, including law, which acts as a means and as an object of socio-economic modernization. The scientific search creates new contexts in the study of law, serves as a prerequisite for rethinking its es­sence and role in the life of modern society, determines the formulation of a number of questions, inclu­ding the consequences of technological progress for the legal existence of a person. In line with this kind of research, new areas of research have been identified – “legal cognitology”, “functional identify­ca­tion of law”. One of the promising ideas is an appeal to aesthetics, more precisely, to the regularities of the deve­lopment of law, which can be learned through the methodology of this field of knowledge. The sub­ject of the article is the methodology of knowledge of the law. The purpose is to establish the possibility of ex­pan­ding the methodology of knowledge of law through the methods of aesthetics and NBICS techno­lo­gies. The result is a reasonable hypothesis that the development and implementation of NBICS technolo­gies allow us to apply aesthetic methods to the establishment of the regularities of the genesis of law.

Exploring Socially Shared Regulation Processes in Peer Tutoring: Focusing on the Functions of Tutor Utterances

This study quantitatively and qualitatively examined socially shared regulation processes in peer tutoring. Participants were 22 teacher-candidate university students assigned to 11 peer-tutoring pairs. Peer tutoring included two sessions, in which one student was the tutor and another the tutee. Participants completed a socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) scale before peer tutoring and an academic engagement measurement afterward. Moreover, peer tutoring sessions were videotaped. Students were divided into two groups, based on high and low SSRL scores, and verbal protocols were analyzed. Tutoring utterances were analyzed and categorized by the following social regulation functions, namely “orientation,” “monitoring,” and “evaluation,” while distinguishing between deep- or surface-level. Tutors in high-SSRL groups adopted deep-level orientation more than low-SSRL groups. Qualitative analysis indicated deep-level orientation played a key role in peer tutoring. Additionally, regarding motivational factors, high-SSRL groups showed stronger agentic and cognitive engagement than low-SSRL groups. The implications for teacher-candidate university education are discussed.

BEYOND MOVEMENTS: THE ONTOLOGY OF BLACK LIVES MATTER

This special issue on Black Lives Matter provides insights on the choices activists and organizations are making to defend Black lives in light of various, often unsupportive, political contexts. This concluding essay takes a step back to consider how anti-blackness conditions and shapes the ongoing movement for Black lives. Whites’ refusal to see Black people as fully and irrevocably human facilitates their constant aggression against Black people, including treating Black people as socially dead and beyond the bounds of social regulation. Consequently, scholars should conceptualize the movement for Black lives as a fundamentally defensive movement for recognition as persons rather than an insurgent attempt to integrate into white society. Starting analyses with realization of global antiblackness as a fundamental context allows social movement scholars to better conceptualize race, understand relationships between competing parties, recognize the scope and goals of Black movements, understand organizations’ strategic choices, and opens new areas for inquiry and analysis.

Out of the Closet, Not Yet Out of the House: Gay Men’s Experiences of Homonegativity and Internalized Homonegativity

This paper explores how Australian gay men experience gender and sexuality in relation to heteronormative gender norms, specifically masculinity. A sample of 32 gay men 22–72 years of age participated in an online interview, using a videoconferencing software, on masculinity and homosexuality. Thematic analyses revealed that gay men experience gender and sexuality-related strain across all levels of their socioecological environment through social regulation, homophobic discrimination/harassment, and anti-effeminacy prejudice. The gay men expressed feelings of self-loathing, shame, internalized homonegativity, and isolation as a result. In examining interactions at each level of the socioecological environment, future research and practice may gain understanding in the social phenomena and how to ameliorate such strain.