How to Tame

As our social worlds increasingly shift online, many of the technologies people encounter are mediated by algorithms. Algorithms have become deeply embedded into people's online lives, often working to tailor and personalize their routine encounters with the world. How does one domesticate, or make one's own, an algorithmic system? One of the goals as people adopt new technologies is to weave them into their everyday routines, establishing a pattern of use in order to make that technology their own. In this paper we focus on people's experiences domesticating the short-form video sharing application, TikTok. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore how people's routine experiences with TikTok's For You Page algorithm influence and inform their domestication process. We first highlight people's motivations for adopting TikTok and the challenges they encounter in this initial acquisition phase of domestication. After adopting the platform, we discuss the challenges people experience across the final three phases of domestication: objectification, incorporation, and conversion. We find that though they enjoy TikTok, our participants feel that they are never fully able to domesticate TikTok. As they are never able to fully control their digital selves, and thus integrate it into their routine lives, TikTok is in constant misalignment with their personal moral economy. We discuss the implications of domesticating algorithmic systems, examining the questions of whose values shape the moral economy created by and through people's uses of algorithmic systems, and the impact of nostalgia on the domestication process.

Writing Radically as Women With Virginia Woolf: Why?

In a short essay titled “Why,” Virginia Woolf daringly questioned the ways in which knowledge is produced, performed, and proclaimed as particular kinds of truths in institutions of power and authority, including academic writing. She subversively suggested, “The little twisted sign that comes at the end of the question has a way of making the rich writhe” and advised that such questions choose their “asking place with care”. In this article, we suggest that the “post” scholarship moment is the moment to ask new questions about the ways Woolfian inspired life-writing as a performance of self and social worlds might be engaged to trouble and open up what the “product” and performance of academic work, words, and worlds might come to be.

Intimate Eating

In Intimate Eating Anita Mannur examines how notions of the culinary can create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur traces the ways in which people of color, queer people, and other marginalized subjects create and sustain this belonging through the formation of “intimate eating publics.” These spaces—whether established in online communities or through eating along in a restaurant—blur the line between public and private. In analyses of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, Nani Power’s Ginger and Ganesh, Ritesh Batra’s film The Lunchbox, Michael Rakowitz’s performance art installation Enemy Kitchen, and The Great British Bake Off, Mannur focuses on how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics. In this way, the culinary becomes central to discourses of race and other social categories of difference. By illuminating how cooking, eating, and distributing food shapes and sustains social worlds, Mannur reconfigures how we think about networks of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

Civilian Empowerment: A Theological Inquiry

A theological inquiry into civilian empowerment approaches “god” or “gods” as sources of power. Since our conception of god depends on what we can say—our language—the gods of empowerment belong to our various social worlds. We could understand the flow of power here as one where God empowers the church and then shares it with society, or where God empowers people in society and the church gives witness to it. The protestant theologians Paul Lehmann and Edward Hobbs take the second view. Lehmann’s approach opens us to a community-creating power that other language communities besides the Christian church could articulate and celebrate. Hobbs explains how the Christian trinity exposes our limitations, hubris, and the call to care for others. These theologies reveal our human capacity to create caring communities with the power to call for change.

Qualitative Methods in Research

This chapter discusses various methods and approaches to data collection under the qualitative methodology framework, noting that these methods provide rigour and depth understanding in an inquiry. Though the chapter touches on traditional qualitative methods such as the interview and observations, it focused more on examining alternative and non-traditional qualitative methods in data collection, such as the bricolage and distance researching. The chapter further identified other strategies such as sampling, triangulation and ethical considerations that may be relevant to a qualitative study. The chapter helps the reader to reach a broad-based understanding as to the location of qualitative research and the methodological demands necessary to apprehend complex social worlds of studied participants.

Homophobic Conduct as Normative Masculinity Test

Homophobic violence can be considered as an expressive act. Violent behavior can be considered as anti-homosexual when victims are chosen because they are considered or perceived as homosexual. Following this reasoning, hate crimes as homophobic crimes have a communicative value, since they represent a range of “masculinization” practices within the processes of gender socialization, both in conventional and illegitimate social worlds. Every homophobic act aims to intimidate not just the victim, but the whole group associated with the, whether concretely or merely in the perception of the perpetrator. This chapter will take into account the main research on victimization from an international perspective; it will highlight how both the gender of the perpetrator and the cultural constructions of masculinity(ies), in a heterosexist and hegemonic system, seem to play a fundamental role in producing homophobic and anti-homosexual behaviour.