The Social

The social is constituted by on-going communication and behavior patterns that influence participants perceptions, expectations and moral boundaries. For some, moral boundaries protect the racial hierarchy of American prosperity by calling natural what is actually social. Controversary about the meaning of sex, race, and ancestry can help us understand this difference, and thereby sharpen our awareness of our experiences of the social from social diversity to social amnesia. Social amnesia eliminates any awareness of the climate of injustice. In this context, a disturbing trend is our increasing reliance on private philanthropy to solve social problems, which moves us toward a new form of feudalism instead of a civic democracy. In a civic space that arises from the connections between our shared humanity and social differences, it is possible to listen to diverse voices and to make incoherent stories coherent.

#eiku – itsekorjauksesta moniäänisyyteen

Artikkeli käsittelee suomen kielen eiku-partikkelia, joka on puhutussa keskustelussa yleinen omaan tai toisen vuoroon kohdistuvan korjauksen aloituskeino. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan eiku-partikkelia kirjoitetussa keskustelussa. Aineistona käytetään Twitteriä, josta on kerätty yhteensä 760 julkista twiittiä hakusanoilla eiku tai #eiku. Analyysissä käy ilmi, että eiku-partikkelia käytetään Twitterissä osin samanlaisissa tehtävissä kuin puhutussa keskustelussa, esimerkiksi toisen keskustelijan vuoroon kohdistuvien korjausvuorojen alussa. Tällaista vuoroa voidaan käyttää sekä vilpittömään että humoristiseen korjaukseen. Viestin sisällä eiku-partikkelilla voidaan rakentaa puhutun keskustelun itsekorjausta imitoiva, humoristinen itsekorjaus. Esiin nousee aiemmassa tutkimuksessa tuntematon tapa käyttää eiku-partikkelia puheenvuoron lopussa, jolloin partikkelia seuraava korjaus jää implisiittiseksi, lukijan pääteltäväksi. Erityisesti tällöin eiku-partikkelista on tavanomaista muotoilla hashtag #eiku; loppuasemainen #eiku-hashtag on tutkimusaineistossa yleisin eiku-partikkelin käyttötapa. Typografisesti variantit eroavat toisistaan erityisesti siinä, että loppuasemainen eiku-partikkeli kirjoitetaan tavallisesti isolla alkukirjaimella ja sen jälkeen voidaan lisätä affektia ilmaisevia pisteitä tai sanallinen lisäys, kun taas #eiku-hashtag kirjoitetaan lähes poikkeuksetta pienellä alkukirjaimella viestin viimeiseksi elementiksi. Kumpikin variantti erotetaan muusta viestistä edeltävän virkkeen lopettavalla välimerkillä ja mahdollisesti kappaleenvaihdolla. Kirjakielisemmän eiku-partikkelin yhteydessä ei käytetä emojeita tai hashtageja. Sosiaalisen median erikoiskieltä ilmentävän #eiku-hashtagin yhteyteen niitä voidaan lisätä. Loppuasemainen #eiku toimii Twitter-keskustelussa konventionaalistuneena metapragmaattisena kommenttina, jolla kontekstualisoidaan ei-vakavuutta, moniäänisyyttä ja ironiaa. #eiku-hashtagiin päättyvällä viestillä voidaan käsitellä moraalisia rajoja sekä ilmaista keskustelussa huumoria ja yhteisöllisyyttä tai kritiikkiä sosiaalisessa mediassa esillä olevaa uutisaihetta kohtaan.#eiku – from self-repair to polyphonyThis article analyses the Finnish particle eiku, which is a common expression for initiation of self-repair or other-repair. The data used in the study is of written conversation, collected from Twitter with the search terms eiku and #eiku. The data consists of 760 public tweets. Through the analysis is shown that, the eiku particle on Twitter may be used partially as in spoken interaction, for example in initiation of other-repair. Such a turn may be used for sincere or humorous repair. Within a single tweet, the eiku particle may appear as a vehicle for expressing self-repair in a humorous sequence, imitating the self-repair of spoken language. Another discovery that arises in the study is the turn-final use of the particle eiku. When the particle is used at the end of a turn, it leaves the repair followed by the particle implicite, for the reader to discover. Turn-finally, it is most common to use the hashtag #eiku; in the data, the turn-final use of #eiku appears the most common usage of the particle at hand. The two variants (eiku, #eiku) have some typographically significant differences. Firstly, the turn-final eiku is usually written with a capital letter and is followed by several commas implicating emotion, or by a lexical addition. However, the hashtag #eiku usually appears at the very end of a tweet, written with a non-capital letter. Both variants tend to be separated from the preceding text with sentence-final punctuation and even change of paragraph. Moreover, no emojis or hashtags are used with eiku, which appears more literary of the two variants. On the contrary, #eiku may be accompanied by such features typical of social media. On Twitter, the turn-final #eiku appears conventionalized as a metapragmatic comment. The hashtag #eiku is being used to contextualize non-serious stance, polyphony and irony. A tweet with turn-final #eiku discusses moral boundaries and in conversation, is used to express humour, togetherness or critique towards a news topic presented in social media.

Articulating Logics of Social Rights

This chapter uses temporalities of migration as a conceptual tool to explain its manifestation among Taiwanese immigrants as they consider intimate relations with their home and host societies. It analyzes the way aging immigrants reconsider their worthiness for “social care” provided by both the US and the Taiwanese governments. It also points out how older immigrants constructed moral boundaries to govern their use of public resources and how they attempted to justify their right to government-sponsored entitlements for senior citizens and claim moral superiority over newcomers by denigrating other migrant groups. The chapter explores how temporal variation offered aging immigrants new options and resources for organizing their lives across national borders. It mentions public benefits programs that offer older returnees a new means for overcoming the difficulties they had encountered in the United States.

Counter-talk as symbolic boundary drawing: Challenging legitimate cultural practices in individual and focus group interviews in the lower regions of social space

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out.

Freeride Skiing—Risk-Taking, Recognition, and Moral Boundaries

Freeride skiing is an activity that is, or at least can be, quite dangerous. Risk-taking in high-risk sports has usually been understood within a psychological framework. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, this article highlights the social dimension of risk-taking in freeride skiing by scrutinizing values within a freeride culture. A central question in this article is: what kind of actions are given recognition and credibility in freeride skiing? The findings show that there is a clear link between risk-taking and credibility and that risk-taking might be seen as a form of capital. However, risk-taking's link to recognition is not straightforward—it is limited by the skiers' skill level. To further develop our understanding of the social dimension of risk-taking we use Michelle Lamont's theory of symbolic boundaries. By expanding the Bourdieusian understanding of social practice with Lamont's work, we gain insight into how risk-taking is socially regulated by social conventions within a subculture. This means that we in this article describe three social dimensions of risk-taking: (1) The link between risk-taking and recognition, (2) The limits of the risk-recognition nexus, and (3) The moral boundaries of risk-taking.