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The extraordinary social and economic impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic has generated many claims about the middle‐range future—the period beginning in the late summer or early fall of 2020 and projected to last for some months or years. This paper surveys those assertions and seeks to explain the factors that led to them. Exploring questions about future claims can expand the scope of social problems theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy is an increasingly popular term in the public sphere and in academia. Although the common belief is that empathy is a 'psychological' topic, sociologists have made important contributions to this conversation. The goal of this article is to provide a theoretical effort in advancing the sociology of empathy. In the first part of the paper, I review classical and contemporary statements on empathy. I identify Charles H. Cooley as an important precursor of the sociology of empathy, and discuss how contemporary interactionists have further developed this notion. Based on these previous insights, I next propose a preliminary framework for the study of the social construction of empathy. This framework is presented in two steps. First, I introduce a vocabulary based on interpretivist concepts: empathy frames, empathy rules, and empathy performances. Next, I coin the idea of empathy paths. I theorize three ideal-typical empathy paths: self-transcendent, therapeutic, and instrumental. Throughout this presentation, I use empirical cases to illustrate the applicability of this framework. In the conclusion, I show how sociologists can inform public understandings of the meaning of empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways people construct and signify deities. Utilizing responses from an ethnographic study as well as analyses of existing studies of religion, we elaborate ways people construct the existence and characteristics of deities by engaging in 'deity work,' which we define as the work people do to give meaning to deities as well as to themselves, others, or social phenomena related to deities. In so doing, we demonstrate how people may accomplish this in many settings by engaging in strategies of identity work including (1) defining, (2) coding, and (3) affirming the meanings of a given deity in social interaction. In conclusion, we draw out implications for understanding (1) the importance of examining deity work, and (2) some ways a focus on deity work processes may expand existing religious and interactionist studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although social constructionists now study emotions, they neglect what emotion feels like and how it is experienced. This paper argues that social constructionists can and should study how private and social experience are fused in felt emotions. Resurrecting introspection (conscious awareness of awareness or self-examination) as a systematic sociological technique will allow social constructionists to examine emotion as a product of the individual processing of meaning as welt as socially shared cognitions. Examining introspection as a sociological process, this paper argues that introspection can generate interpretive materials from self and others useful for understanding the lived experience of emotions, Findings from four studies--one, self-introspective, and the other three, interactive introspective examinations with co-investigators--provide information about the subjective part of emotion. They demonstrate the advantages of introspection in dewing with the complex, ambiguous, and processual nature of emotional experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study is designed to demonstrate that sociological imagination can feed on personal experience, that research practice interpolates our biographical circumstances, and that a systematic inquiry into the interplay between our professional and everyday life offers a fruitful avenue for sociological analysis. The discussion focuses on Erving Goffman's treatment of mental illness. The argument is made that the evolution of Goffman's constructionist views on mental disorder had been influenced by his family situation and personal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article notes an enduring ambivalence in medical sociology concerning the epistemology and ontology of disease and shows this is precisely an ambivalence concerning whether biomedical disease categories are best understood as topics of, or as resources for, medical sociological research. The first section critically reviews the topic/resource debate in ethnomethodology. The second section elaborates upon the pertinence of this debate to sociological debates directly concerned with the epistemology and ontology of disease. The article concludes by demonstrating how framing the epistemology and ontology of disease in terms of the topics and resources of medical sociological analysis serves to clarify the work of thinking sociologically about disease and helps overcome protracted theoretical challenges that have persistently troubled medical sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self‐narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self‐narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture—especially “bitch” imagery and sometimes racialized discourse—to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre‐making can be a method to resist organizational narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between being a sexual woman and a good mother in The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park. Considering the sexual criticisms of women in the 'Mommy Wars' which continue to be fought across the United States, we find that these three programs reproduce conservative assumptions about women's sexuality and motherhood. Through critical constructionist theories of humor and motherhood, mothers from each program are analyzed and the relationship between their sexuality and motherliness is examined in detail. We conclude with a discussion of the social constrictions of reality that humorous popular culture both exposes and reproduces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vision plays a privileged role in social interaction and the construction of intersubjective reality. Given that one of sociology's tasks is to problematize the taken for granted, research that examines rarely foregrounded non-visual modes of sensory perception is a powerful resource. This article draws on twenty-seven interviews that explore blind people's perceptions of male and female bodies. I highlight several distinctive features of non-visual sex attribution (salience, speed, and diachronicity), and argue that conceptions of sex as 'self-evident' primarily reflect visual perception. These findings suggest the need to explore the sociology of perception as a new approach to the sociology of the body, and more broadly highlight the role of sensory perception in the social construction of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate the analytical utility of social movement theory for understanding the framing efforts of the anti-biotechnology movement. We content-analyzed electronic and printed documents from the anti-biotech watchdog group, the Council of Responsible Genetics to identify the movement's diagnostic and prognostic framing efforts. Our findings suggest that while the organization blends frame extension and frame translation strategies it aims for a more radical frame transformation project. Moving the public debate away from overly technical and scientized frames toward issues of social utility and democracy, it tries to recast biotechnologies as a violation of individual and collective rights. Drawing from our findings we offer a number of suggestions for how future research can help further illuminate the interactive and discursive realities of modern technological developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a social constructionist approach to the study of a seldom considered subculture--the "world" of drumming. I describe this subculture from both the "etic" and "emic" perspectives, showing how drummers and drumming are perceived and experienced by the musicians themselves (insiders) as well as the "outside" public. The main focus is on the drummers" intersubjective "mental maps" of their world, specifically exploring how they create musical and personal identities by adhering to a rigid classification scheme surrounding "styles" of drumming. I demonstrate how drummers use drumming equipment, personal appearance, education, and "purist" attitudes to separate styles of drumming and to construct distinct social selves. Of special interest is how drummers are cognitively socialized into "thought communities" which teach and reinforce attitudinal and behavioral norms. I conclude with a discussion of the possibilities of applying my analytical framework to other worlds of music and art, as well as some forms of occupational and avocational specialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]