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This paper aims to discern, clarify, criticise, and advocate some uses of phenomenology in sociological research. Phenomenology is increasingly evoked or implicitly employed in sociological endeavours. Little attention, however, is paid to what is entailed in taking a phenomenological approach, and whether it is employed to advance empirical or theoretical knowledge. I build an analytic typology of different empirical and theoretical uses of phenomenology, criticise a range of these uses, and argue that other uses bear significant potential for the advancement of theoretical and empirical knowledge. The paper's main contribution lies in comparing and contrasting the many invocations of phenomenology in contemporary social scientific research to discern their benefits and shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a debate on why Bourdieusian scholars have never fully embraced the "Introduction/Literature review/Data & methods/Results/Discussion" (ILDRD) article format which is mainstream in North American Sociological publications. This paper attempts to argue that Pierre Bourdieu, Jean‐Claude Chamboredon, and Jean‐Claude Passeron developed a different writing format – inspired by Gaston Bachelard's "applied rationalism" ‐‐ and which became more influential among French scholars. The Bourdieu inspired different writing patterns and reasoning, I argue, can be traced in the flagship journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. This paper invites further debate on the differences in approaching article formats in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being a central topic, current theories of motivation in sociology remain underdeveloped. This paper supplements existing sociological theories on motivation with insights from affective and cognitive neuroscience to address this issue. The resulting sociological affective model of motivation treats affect as an independent force that sometimes coordinates with cognition while taking charge at other times. Drawing on recent work in the neuroscience of motivation and reward, the paper shows how two affective mechanisms—wanting and liking—can shed light on various behavioral outcomes of interest while allowing for sharper theorizing of key distinctions that need clarification in the literature. By examining the distinctive contribution of each process, the paper reveals a proactive, desire‐driven agent often overlooked by prevailing sociological models emphasizing a reactive actor responding creatively and deliberately when internal meanings and external cues are incongruent. The paper concludes by outlining the broader implications of this synthetic affective model of motivation for sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines vulgarity's cultural significance among the Zeliangrong Naga of Nagaland, Assam and Manipur. It is a sociological analysis of the ritual and social statuses maintained by senexes through ritualised vulgarities. The paper contends that vulgarities are not inherently vile. Vulgarities are believed to have divine power to protect humans by repelling evil spirits and causing them to despise humans who revel in utterly filthy vulgarism. Understanding the mythology of creation by divine intervention and propagation through sexual reproduction necessitates understanding ritualistic vulgarities. Men give something bad, like vulgarity, a divine meaning by giving it a good purpose and controlling how it is used in culture to keep their highest social and ritual statuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional ethnography (IE), a term coined by sociologist Dorothy Smith, explores the nuances of institutions and their complex relationships in sociology. IE is an approach to studying and analysing social organization, and it provides a more holistic understanding of 'invisible' relationships that govern institutions and how those relationships interact with each other. Health sciences researchers in patient care, patient experience, and allied health professionals have recently become more interested in the use of this methodology and how to incorporate it into their research. However, in health professions education (HPE) there is little use of IE. We hypothesize this may be because of limited practical knowledge of this methodology. This paper serves as an introduction to the use of IE in HPE, describing the differences between IE and traditional ethnographies, recognizing the common pitfalls when utilising IE, and incorporating texts into IE. While ethnographies may be daunting to researchers less familiar with these approaches, the tips in this paper will provide an introduction and help educators and researchers successfully navigate the use of IE in health profession scholarship and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an argument for a geography of girlhood, located at the intersection of historical geographies of globalisation and empire on the one hand, and feminist interventions in the geography of childhood and youth on the other. A focus on girlhood, I argue, opens up a debate on the discipline's own implication in a debate on climate science, moral hierarchies of civilisation and reproductive health at which intersection the category of 'girl' was materialised in the 19th century. This focus extends and historicises the argument made by scholars like Nicola Ansel that geographies of childhood speak not only to intimate scales of experience ‐ such as the home and neighbourhood—but instead suggest the ways in which everyday life is implicated in the scale of the global and the geopolitical. Drawing on an inter‐disciplinary scholarship, the paper argues that debates on gender and maturity—converging on the figure of the 'girl'—shaped raced and classed imaginaries of progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through this, the paper demonstrates that 'girlhood' is at the heart of historical geographies of urban planning, social care, and health, as well as indexing the continuities in the transition from a colonial discourse of civilisation to a mid‐20th century concern with development. Finally, the paper asks how to write about girls through an archive that is almost obsessively fixated on them as subjects of education and reform, even whilst they rarely appear in it as speaking subjects. I argue that both an emergent focus on non‐textual objects as sources, as well as the use of ephemeral material—including notes, creative writing exercises from the classroom, school diaries etc.—alongside the official archive might open the scholarship up to a multi‐scalar analysis of girlhood as imbricated in larger global and national discursive and material practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As previous research has observed, medical students and physicians alike confront vast amounts of knowledge in their education and practice, such that no one clinician can know everything there is to know about biomedicine. Even before clerkships, medical students learn to cope with this impossibility by prioritizing certain information based on its perceived utility for exams and clinical practice. Many factors can shape this process, including teamwork, wherein individual medical students rely on one another to address gaps in knowledge at the level of the group. This paper will draw on qualitative data from two allopathic medical schools in the American Midwest to demonstrate that peer-to-peer learning, a widely utilized pedagogical modality in North American medical schools, is amongst the earliest places where future physicians learn how to rely on their peers in the profession as they make choices about what to know and what not to know about biomedicine: cultivating a culture of "intraprofessionalism" between students with different knowledges and values, as they prepare to enter the same profession. The paper will also consider how differences in the student populations at two field sites impact intraprofessional development. Drawing on scholarship of peer-based learning strategies and the sociology and anthropology of medical education, the authors argue that peer-to-peer learning is a key site in the professional socialization of medical students toward the effective management of medical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excerpted from my book Generally Speaking, this paper introduces "concept‐driven sociology," a special way of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. As such, it examines the methodological process by which we can "distill" generic patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a "generic sociology" that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, we need to collect our data in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi‐culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross‐contextual commonality, concept‐driven sociology tries to reveal formal "parallels" across seemingly disparate contexts. The paper features the four main types of cross‐contextual analogies concept‐driven sociologists tend to use—cross‐cultural, cross‐historical, cross‐domain, as well as cross‐level—disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the image of a silhouette of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois which was featured in the cover of the journal. They discuss the reasons that Du Bois's image is a meaningful choice, their deep appreciation for Du Bois's approach to social analysis, and information on a journal's paper and what happens when one submits a paper to the journal.

The digital age has rekindled popular and academic interest in immortality. While the idea of immortality has long been recognized as fundamental to human societies, unlike death, within the field of sociology, immortality has not yet established itself as a distinct and autonomous field of study. This paper contributes to the recently emerging scholarship promoting a sociology of immortality. Drawing inspiration from C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination (1959) and building upon significant research in the field of immortality, we offer to use the concept of the immortological imagination as an analytical and conceptual tool for further developing a sociology of immortality. We refer to the immortological imagination as a complementary concept to Penfold-Mounce's thanatological imagination, seeing both concepts as stemming from two different lineages and academic traditions. After defining the immortological imagination and how it differs from and complements the thanatological imagination, the paper moves to discuss examples in popular culture establishing the potential impacts and influences of the immortological imagination, particularly within the digital context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses a structured peer mentoring scheme for Early Career Academics (ECAs) in Sociology during COVID-19 and post-Brexit, the pedagogical framework adopted and programme challenges, benefits and learning. Internationally, structured peer mentoring schemes for ECAs are sparse and discussions of ‘what works’ in the context of dedicated peer mentoring programmes for ECAs are limited. This programme, designed and executed by the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI) and a professional mentoring trainer in 2022, involved 8 peer mentors, all of whom were senior and mid-career academics and 10 mentees comprising PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. It encompassed formative sessions for peer mentors and mentees and a final joint session, which took place online. Subsequently, peer mentors facilitated online peer mentoring sessions, with mentees supporting them to explore, plan and achieve their professional goals. The authors discuss the pedagogical content and active methodologies adopted in relation to reflective practice and knowledge-exchange, whilst illuminating that more investment in and research on structured peer mentoring programmes in Higher Education can lead to better outcomes for ECAs. We underline the potential of similar inter-professional mentoring schemes for ECAs and key learning, which could benefit future programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholarship on postfunctionalism in European integration has drawn attention to how processes of Europeanisation are not restricted to policymakers, but exist equally (if not more significantly) in the quotidian. The 2016–2020 Brexit process and debates on the relationship between national identity and 'Europeanness' urge a new consideration of how Europeanisation is narrated in everyday discourses. This paper analyses British fictional portrayals of the EEC and EU and posits a new theoretical framework of 'Imperial Gothic 2.0'. Pre-2016 representations of the EU were entirely dystopian. But post-2016, Brex-Lit fiction has reversed this trend and the EU now appears as a flawless utopia. Early twentieth-century 'Imperial Gothic' saw popular fiction defined by themes of British decline and oppression by foreign powers; a century later, Brex-Lit has resurrected these themes by narrating Britain in terminal decline, reflecting cultural anxieties, a reversal of Self and Other, and a loss of identities. This 'Imperial Gothic 2.0' reveals anxieties which reflect and influence political action, and reveals the extent to which imaginations and narratives of the EU have transformed from depictions of a distant, technocratic entity used for comedy or conspiracy, into a site of intense emotional affiliation, nostalgia, anticipation, and regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has the Europeanisation of football at the level of governance (due to for example the effects of the Bosman ruling and the formation of the UEFA Champions League) – influenced the identities of football fans? This paper explores how such structural Europeanisation in football is influencing identifications among fans. Based on an analysis of articulations in selected online message boards, we distil the positioning of fans towards 'Europe' in football, and the factors which shape it. We control for three main avenues of impact: the club level, the league level, and the societal context. Our inquiry is based on a set of paired comparisons of fan scenes for football clubs in four different European countries. Results show that the factor carrying the most explanatory power is the club's participation in European-level competition. Although this broadly confirms a 'contact hypothesis' – according to which the more fans are exposed to cross-border contacts, the less relevance they attribute to aspects of national belonging – significant variations of how frequent exposure to European-level competition translates into more Europeanised perceptions do exist. For European identity studies, the work corroborates that a lifeworld arena such as football can foster Europeanised identifications, albeit not in a uniform manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing nationalisms and Euroscepticism, this paper develops the original concept of 'Everyday Europeanhood' on a theoretical level, building on related concepts, such as Skey and Antonsich's 'Everyday Nationhood', Billig's 'Banal Nationalism', Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' and Beck's 'Cosmopolitan Vision'. It applies the concept to the European Universities Initiative (EUI), seen as a tool to promote European identity, based on a common sense of belonging conveyed through everyday practice, among students and staff in European University Alliances. It is argued that, in the light of previous top-down European initiatives designed to symbolically reinforce a sense of shared European identity, the EUI seems more in phase with bottom-up 'everyday' processes of identity development. Taking the European University Alliance 'FORTHEM' as an example, core features, aspects, actions and outputs achieved so far within this alliance are categorised in the light of four dimensions of 'Everyday Europeanhood': 'Talking Europe', 'Choosing Europe', 'Performing Europe' and 'Consuming Europe'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-border regions are often deemed laboratories for initiatives to increase Europeanization. Our paper examines the German-speaking Community of Belgium in the Euregio Maas-Rhine to assess the relevance of everyday cross-border activities to the perception that living in a border region presents a unique opportunity to feel and think as a European. Departing from the assumptions of both Deutsch's transaction theory and Allport's contact hypothesis, we analyze Eurobarometer data (population-level surveys) and use data from focus groups with regional MPs. Results from quantitative data analysis suggest that perceptions of life in cross-border regions are positively influenced by frequent cross-border movement (functional dimension) as well as general trust in other people (emotional dimension). Our qualitative data from focus groups support the findings from the quantitative analysis and demonstrate further that it is not merely the quantity but the quality of contacts that contribute to a gradual 'growing together'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in examining climate change adaptation has arisen in many disciplines in the past two decades; however to date, sociologists have given only sparse attention to the issue. This is both a missed opportunity for sociologists and a detriment to the study of adaptation. In this paper, we set out the following research agenda: bringing core concerns of sociology into the critically important conversation of how society will respond to climate change. We identify five broad themes in which sociologists can begin their work on adaptation: (1) structures and resource access, (2) social cohesion and future planning, (3) constraints of social stratifications, (4) power and agency in decision‐making, and (5) justice in process and outcomes. After summarizing existing sociological work on adaptation and detailing our research agenda, we draw examples from our own work in Bangladesh to illustrate how this agenda might be taken up. In doing so, we point to several places where sociological insights come into play in questions related to development, organizations, expertise, migration, gender, and labor. We believe a robust sociological analysis can produce a clarified, reparative, and just conceptualization of adaptation that will contribute to the growing global discourse on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the symbolic political phenomenon of Karaeng power in Jeneponto, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The main objective of this research is to understand how Karaeng traditional symbols of power are maintained and utilized in the local political context. Qualitative research methods are used by conducting in depth interviews with community figures and content analysis of related primary and secondary data. The research results show that traditional Karaeng symbols of power still have strong relevance in influencing local political dynamics, even in the modern era and ongoing democratization. The discussion in this paper highlights the importance of understanding the role of symbols in the local political context, as well as its implications for power dynamics and community political participation in Jeneponto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Living Capsules is the umbrella name the authors give their art pieces, which are born from an ongoing collaboration between an artist and a sociologist who share interest in the relations between senses, bodies, and technologies. This reflective paper tells the story of the works' cocreation. The authors first introduce the notion of biohybrid systems as their sociotechnical inspiration. Second, they mark out the conceptual space in which they began to prototype Living Capsules. Third, they reflect on how and why they blend their disciplinary practices. And finally, they share and discuss prototype pieces, sketching future directions for their continued collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to nearby countries, Jordan achieved a unique situation in mitigating the covid-19 outbreak. The privileged situation lasted for a few months. After that situation, Jordan became one of the worst countries all over the world. Drawing on a conceptual framework derived from Blau’s theory: exchange and power in social life, this paper reevaluates the dynamics of combating covid-19 in Jordan as an exchange process between government and people. Jordan’s government employed maximum power to control people’s movements and gatherings. However, it failed to meet people’s expectations of keeping their lives safe and fulfilling their basic needs. The government tried to legitimize the situation by providing fake information. It has lost the trust of society which supported the efforts of the government. It could not maintain its control of people’s gatherings and movements, resulting in a rise in the number of cases. Transparency, trust, awareness, and society’s efforts are crucial in fighting pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 20 years, divorce has increased in Indonesia. Indonesian statistics show that divorces initiated by women exceed those by men. One issue that is often neglected is how socioeconomic differences also play a role in this matter. Drawing on our collaborative research on Muslim divorces in Indonesia, this paper focuses on the interplay between divorce strategies and socioeconomic differences among Muslim couples. Our in-depth interviews with 93 Muslim men and women and 19 judges from Islamic courts show that class differences shape distinctive dynamics of divorce among Muslim Indonesians. Couples from less educated, lower-income backgrounds accept marriage dissolution more easily, with women becoming much less tolerant of men's behaviors such as infliction of domestic violence, infidelity, and failure to provide financial support. Educated, middle-class urban couples divorce for similar reasons but tend to experience a lengthier process accompanied by complex layers of conflict. Many educated women's narratives emphasize their ability to support themselves through working, and a desire to be free of a bad marriage at any cost. Class and education thus contribute to significant differences in the experience and trajectories of divorce in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social care to assist with the activities of daily living is a necessity for many older people; while informal care provided by family members can be a first step to meeting care needs, formal care provided by professionals is often needed or preferred by older people and their families. In England, the number of older people paying for formal care is set to rise, driven by an ageing population and the limited resources of local authorities. Little is known about how older people and their families experience the potentially disruptive processes of deciding upon, searching for and implementing such care, including the financial implications. This paper explores accounts of seeking self-funded social care in England, told by older people and their families in 39 qualitative interviews. These accounts, which we call 'care chronicles', include stories about the emergence of care needs and informal care-giving, the search for formal care, including interacting with new systems and agencies, and getting formal (paid) care, either as the recipient or an involved family member. Stories are analysed through the lens of biographical disruption, and analysis demonstrates that such disruptions can occur for older people and their families across the entirety of the care chronicle. Needing, seeking and getting care all have the potential to cause practical and symbolic disruptions; moreover, these disruptions can be cumulative and cyclical, as attempts to resolve or minimise one disruption can lead to new ones. While the concept of biographical disruption is a mainstay in medical sociology, it is less frequently applied to issues relating to social care, and most often takes embodiment as a key focus. This study is novel in its application of the concept to experiences of seeking self-funded care, and in its introduction of the concept of 'care chronicles', which invite a longer and broader view of biographical disruptions in the lives of older people with care needs and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores modes of expectation among care‐experienced young people when navigating educational success. Luhmann's theoretical framework is used to conceptualise experiences of educational success and the role of uncertainty. We identify three modes of expectation: trust, risk and danger. To illustrate these modes, we draw on selected examples from an interview study with 28 care‐experienced young people focusing on their experiences of support and aftercare while transitioning out of care. The trust mode of expectation is based in a confidence that the future entails a positive outcome—in the case of this study, regarding educational success. This expectation is characterised by the young person's feelings of belonging, underpinned by a safety net of unconditionally supportive caregivers. The risk mode of expectation is characterised by the young person's feeling of being overwhelmed and burdened by the complexity of the educational system in combination with unknown future circumstances when leaving care. The battle against child welfare services to keep supportive measures increases levels of uncertainty. The danger mode of expectation emerges when educational success is disrupted by the interference of child welfare services. The system is seen as unpredictable and powerful, making the young person withdraw from formal support. We conclude that educational success for care‐experienced young people is closely linked to their mode of expectation with regard to managing the uncertainty of the future and that their mode is highly dependent on their social, institutional and biographical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the necessary complementarity between a translanguaging and named language-perspective by critically examining risks of 'overshooting' when a translanguaging view is theoretically posited as the ultimately superior (sociolinguistic) theory of language use and learning in today's multilingual world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I attempt to systematically reconstruct Theodor Adorno's account of the relationship between the processes of authoritarian subject formation and the processes of political formation of the democratic common will. Undertaking a reading that brings Adorno into dialogue with contemporary philosophical perspectives, the paper asks the question of whether it is possible to think of a "democratic We" in nihilistic times. In order to achieve this aim, I will analyze in reverse the modifications that the concept of narcissism has undergone, from Adorno's use of it to account for the symbolic obstacles to the formation of democratic subjectivities after the Holocaust, to the initial formulations of Freudian psychoanalysis. Finally, I will attempt to outline an affirmative answer to the initial question, formulating the potentials and merits of what I will call a politics of negativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand social issues and practices such as those related to climate change and technological change that are clearly future‐oriented – collectively experienced events that are "not yet" – and co‐constructed by different actors, we need nuanced conceptualizations of how people think about, negotiate and co‐create futures that allow us to understand not only what people (can) think and do about future‐related issues but also how that happens, what for and with which implications. However, so far, one of the key theoretical approaches that has conceptualised how people make meaning in situations of change and uncertainty – the socio‐psychological social representations theory (SRT) – has not often engaged with the future or with different forms of temporality. By contrast, the French pragmatic sociology of engagements and critique (PS) has engaged with these notions, conceptualising them in relation to materiality and a plurality of moral orientations – two dimensions often seen as key to how collective futures are made and imagined. To offer a more nuanced and systematic conceptualization of how people represent the future and with what consequences, this paper will present, compare and synthesise SRT and PS, as a first step towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on social change and representations of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists tend to see G. H. Mead's conceptualization of self as fundamentally correct. In this paper, we develop a critique of Mead's notion of the self as constituted through social interactions. Our focus will be on Mead's categorial distinction between the socially constructed self and subjective experience, as well as on the tendency of post‐Meadian sociologists to push Mead's position in ever more radical directions. Drawing inspiration from a multifaceted understanding of selfhood that can be found in Husserlian phenomenology, we then propose that the most basic level of selfhood is anchored in irreducible subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of diagnosis has shown that diagnosis not only serves to label the underlying cause of disease but also to provide access to services and resources. Elaborating on this double‐affordance of diagnosis, this article examines how precision medicine reconfigures diagnosis as a label and as a process in regulatory and clinical settings. Reporting from an ethnographic case study of the introduction of immunotherapy for lung cancer, the paper unfolds the uncertainties involved in dissecting diagnosis into layers and examines the efforts and negotiations it takes to enable these layers to work both as clinical entities and regulative entities with the purpose of delineating access to treatment. I suggest that the work of subdividing diseases into molecularly defined categories for the purpose of delineating treatment‐eligible populations can be labelled 'diagnostic sub‐stratification' and argue that it is pertinent to understand the political capacity of this strategy. Diagnostic sub‐stratification involves a push of diagnosis from the clinic 'up' into the regulatory system and 'out' into the laboratories, obscuring who is accountable for the diagnostic categories employed to define patients' treatment access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facilitated communication (FC) has been a heavily debated and documented topic across multiple disciplines, including sociology, education, psychology, pediatrics, speech-language pathology, and disability studies. Although many professionals from various disciplines and advocates have offered opinions, suggestions, and research on the topic, there has been minimal input from the occupational therapy (OT) profession. The lack of OT input is noteworthy as OTs are experts in enabling upper extremity performance and independence through a variety of training, adaptation and modification strategies, and use of external supports. Because of their professional code of ethics and a specific knowledge base, OTs are uniquely positioned to provide a host of ethical and evidence-based strategies that enable independent access to communication technology. The consideration of multiple access options is contrary to the typical facilitated encounter where facilitators exclusively choose to manipulate an upper extremity in order for letters to be selected on a display or keyboard. The purpose of this paper is threefold: (a) To offer insight into the standard of care by OTs including their ethical standards; (b) to identify varied accommodations that enable access using a feature-matching standard of care that eliminates the need for a facilitator; and (c) to highlight how to increase independent assistive technology/augmentative and alternative communication access, thus dissuading the need or use of facilitated access to letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social ontology studies the nature and properties of social reality while social metaontology examines the relationship between ontology and the social sciences, which is often treated as a normative question. However, social sciences themselves contain ontological theses, raising the descriptive question of how these internal ontologies relate to the rest of the social sciences. This paper argues that important parts of sociology have an anti-foundationalist metaontology. This descriptive claim is used to build a normative argument against foundationalism and is supported by examining the works of Durkheim and Weber and how their metaontological beliefs continue to influence many sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the self-narratives of young nonbinary individuals in Italy, shedding light on the challenges they face, thereby contributing to a nuanced understanding of these phenomena and their societal implications. In pursuit of this research goal, an exploratory study was conducted between July and September 2021, involving in-depth interviews with 26 young adults aged between 18 and 30 who identify as non-binary. The qualitative data gathered was analyzed using a reflexive thematic method. The findings reveal specific forms of social unease and discrimination experienced by nonbinary individuals, with primary stressors including a lack of recognition, limited knowledge on the subject and a dearth of socio-cultural visibility. These stressors manifest in varying degrees of discomfort, shaping daily life and interpersonal relationships. At the same time, participants’ narratives underscore a strong desire for societal change and inclusivity. Some nonbinary individuals express determination to challenge and redefine societal norms related to gender identity, emphasizing the importance of education and awareness for fostering understanding and acceptance. Following the thematic analysis, the article concludes with critical reflections and potential policy recommendations to create a more inclusive environment for all sexual and gender identities in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple problems that the planet is currently experiencing—climate crisis, conventional and unconventional wars, planetary disenchantment with political systems, growth of inequality, increase in all kinds of intersectional violence, destructuring of the political economy of morality, etc.—are not a favorable scenario for thinking about hope. This paper nevertheless offers a summary presentation of the sociology of hope, presenting some of its central sources and components as well as a proposed study agenda for the future. This article seeks to foster discussion of what could be the central axes of a sociology of hope. To achieve this purpose, the following argumentative strategy was chosen: (a) the "place" of hope is explored in some classics of sociology, (b) the central components of a sociological investigation of hope are synthesized, and (c) an agenda is presented as a summary for a future development of a sociology of hope. The article seeks to draw attention to the urgency of hope as an important element for the future of sociology and social sciences in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows, first, how Sociology has approached the concepts of "hope" and "war" and how throughout the history of the discipline these terms have gone from being neglected to arousing considerable interest. Second, the paper analyzes how and why avant-garde artists understood the First World War as a motif of utopian hope to annihilate a civilization in crisis and to transform it through its aesthetic formalization. Third, the essay tries to find out whether that hope was preserved over time or, on the contrary, was soon dissolved as a result of the drama of the events. It is shown here that the savagery of the fighting dissolved all European values of modernity and progress, including artistic ones. In fact, theoretical and stylistic conceptions, aesthetic categories, ethical postulates, and artists' aspirations for conscience to rule the world were blurred. For the artistic avant-garde, utopian promises of a better world broke down. Consequently, this obliges sociologists to pay more attention to both phenomena—that of the war and that of the avant-garde—and to seek a more objective and critical interpretation of modernity, calling for its actualization, and of Sociology itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a fruitful tension in ethnomethodological work. On the one hand, real-world data are used to rein in analytical privilege. On the other, conceptual discussions necessarily take place in a more open analytical space. Describing settings in detail and thinking about things in the abstract are both essential components of the ethnomethodological project. What ethnographies might consist in complicates this picture. Garfinkel initially deflated the concept of 'ethnography', using it to refer to how all members of society make sense of their world. Sacks, on the other hand, initially construed his sociological project as a more rigorous form of professional ethnography. Ethnographic methods rightly remain an important tool for ethnomethodological analyses. They provide an empirical grounding for analysis and facilitate 'thinking about things' in a more open manner than some other forms of data. This paper argues that ethnographic analyses more generally can be used as ethnomethodological resources, (re)introducing the idea that others' fieldwork and analyses are legitimate resources for ethnomethodological work. Some materials from Elijah Anderson's classic ethnography A Place on the Corner are used to illustrate the possibilities taking this approach might offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on 2 years' worth of ethnographic observation of team meetings to explore decision‐making in an NHS clinical genomics service. The focus of discussions was on ambiguous genomic results known as VUS or Variants of Uncertain Significance, which may be pathogenic but which also may turn out to be benign. In examining decision‐making around such results, we note how, in contrast to much policy and promotional material in this area, clinicians in these meetings (clinical geneticists and genetic counsellors) place great emphasis on parental phenotypes and whether the parents of a patient share the symptoms and signs of the suspected condition. This information is then combined with the result of genomic tests to decide whether the variant a patient has is responsible for their condition. This article explores the way in which clinicians attempt to flexibly enrol parents into genomic explanations through informal diagnosis of their possible phenotypes and the way in which actually meeting parents allows some clinicians to trump explanations based on documentary or photographic data. The paper sheds light on the way that earlier scholarly understandings of such decisions (around, say dysmorphology) remain relevant and explores claims that laboratory tests overrule clinical decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the structure and substance of the Core Content Framework (CCF), a controversial document which stipulates content that providers of teacher education in England must incorporate in their programmes. We identify both a concept of instrumental trainability and a lack of coherence in the CCF which suggests it is unsuitable as a guide to a curriculum for teacher education. Drawing on Bernstein's work and its application by other sociologists of educational knowledge, we identify how the CCF embeds a 'generic mode' in teacher education that has roots outside of disciplinary structures of knowledge production and therefore foregrounds a type of official pedagogy that sees teaching as a technical performance and leaves gaps in the knowledge and understanding a new teacher requires to make sound educational judgements. Employing Muller's distinction between conceptual and contextual coherence, we argue that the CCF is based upon an imaginary notion of instructional practice that does not fully grasp the context of teachers' work. We illustrate the argument via an analysis of the language, structure, and three of the eight sections in the CCF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While money is centrally important to globalization, inequality, and social conflict, sociological globalization theories lack a macro theoretical framework for analysis of the international monetary system. Because studies of the US dollar by Hoogvelt (2010) and Vermeiren (2013) are directly relevant to the development of such a framework, in this paper I critically review their analyses in light of (A) post-Great Financial Crisis macroeconomic and sociopolitical trends, (B) recent theoretical studies of money, and (C) empirical studies of the international monetary system. My critique of Hoogvelt and Veirmeiren's analyses serves as a foundation for the development of a theoretical analysis of money that is both sociological and global in its orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rising influence of actors and worldviews from the Global South in contemporary movements calls for renewed approach, method and epistemology in social movement studies. It raises practical, theoretical, methodological and epistemological challenges. How to study global movements without ceding to the pitfalls of methodological globalism and epistemic extractivism? How to conciliate the diversity of struggles with the global dimensions of a movement? This reflexive paper draws on the author's previous research on global movements since 1999 to discuss these challenges and propose an approach built on four pillars: multi-site research, transnational analytical tools, dialogues with local actors and researchers, and an ethic oriented towards intercultural dialogues. Under these premises, global sociology becomes a collective project that combines researchers' and actors' reflexivities in a common quest for a better understanding of our world and the actors who seek to transform it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of an action research project conducted in one of the biggest university departments for sociology in a Central Eastern European capital during the first half of the 2000s. The paper shows that researchers' images of society have a strong impact on social scientific methodology, scientific explanations and narratives. I offer an example of how realist approaches to science and technology studies can be used in a field study and discuss the benefits and limitations of such an endeavor, which I define as an interpretive and explanatory social scientific work. The analysis shows ways in which latent knowledge structures influenced the wording of a questionnaire used in the research, the types of data that were gathered, and how the data were interpreted. These knowledge structures include notions concerning local policy discussions, different social policy traditions, and images of a Roma minority struggling with the effects of structural poverty and prejudices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion paper offers a critical provocation to my mental health nursing colleagues. Drawing upon David Graeber's account of bullshit work, work that is increasingly meaningless for workers, I pose the question: Is mental health nursing a bullshit job? Ever‐increasing time spent on record keeping as opposed to direct care appears to represent a Graeberian bullshitisation of mental health nurses' work. In addition, core aspects of the role are not immune from bullshit. Professional rhetoric would have us believe that mental health nursing is a therapeutically beneficent occupation organised around ideals of care and compassion and providing fulfilling work for practitioners. Yet, there are some key characteristics of the experience of mental health nursing work that afford alternative judgements on its value and meaningfulness. Not least of these is the fact that many mental health nurses feel quite existentially unsettled in the practise of their work and many service users do not recognise the professional ideal, especially when compelled into increasingly coercive and restrictive services. In this context, Graeber's thesis is explored for its applicability to mental health nursing with a conclusion that many aspects of mental health nursing work are commensurate with bullshit but that mental health care can possibly be redeemed from bullshitisation by authentically democratising reforms. Engaging with posthumanist ideas, this exploration involves a flexing of aspects of Graeber's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dilthey has no place in sociology because his Verstehen method was accused of psychologism. He fell into the trap of scientism, a positivist ideal of science to which even the German sociological tradition wanted to belong. The paper attempts to extend the sociological canon to the interpretive categories of 'life' and 'thought' theorized by Dilthey, and to demonstrate the valid application of his method, particularly in understanding human suffering and social needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is intended to be a humble attempt to redeem sociology, a discipline unjustly perceived as a handmaiden among the human sciences, from the secondary role to which it is inappropriately relegated in deference to an evergrowing trend of technicalization and formalization, even algorithmic, of economics and law and even of certain specialized branches of sociology itself. On the contrary, an attempt is made to demonstrate, keeping in the background the great work of Mireilles Delmas-Marti, that it is precisely the most general, historically-anthropologically compromised and culturologically oriented part of this discipline that is the one most capable of accounting for the complexity underlying the local/global dynamics in progress, deciphering the asynchronic and destabilizing forces that corrode the effectiveness of the rules redesigning scenarios and destinies of social actors, and partially motivating the reasons involved. It seems all the more significant and urgent to us to push academic reflection towards a revival of the "great sociology" traditionally understood, in a season of disturbing juridical nihilism and worrying déshistoricisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While theoretical approaches attempt to map ancient childhood, the material and incidental nature of children's lives in all their varieties and differences, are crucial for understanding ancient childhood. Recent investigations into children in their living environments have shown attention to their clothing, childhood care, social relations, leisure and play, health and disability, upbringing and schooling, and their experiences of death. Children's lives and activities were framed also by the agonistic nature of first-century society, making them susceptible to structural violence in various ways. The purpose of the paper is to track and trace children's experience and in particular their agency in the ancient Roman world that were often hostile to little lives and bodies, and to consider the value of such studies for the interpretation of the New Testament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that interreligious dialogue through study and friendships across the religious divide makes participants less susceptible to religious and cultural misinformation that is often used to maintain social bubbles, in which members draw clear boundaries between "us" and "them". Differences between social groups can culminate in a struggle between "good" and "evil" that can escalate into tension and violence. Preventing tensions and conflicts requires respect for differences, willingness to engage in dialogue, and a sound understanding of what religion is and the historical processes that have determined its development, distinguishing between empirical facts and images to which believers adhere. Because the author is a Dutch sociologist turned journalist from a conservative Christian family involved in interreligious dialogue in the Netherlands, Israel, and Egypt, the literature review presents contemporary religious developments in all three countries. The literature review is flanked by the author's personal narrative on the events that changed his views on truth and spirituality, making him more aware of the commonalities between peoples of different beliefs and leading him to a lifelong commitment to interreligious and intercultural dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the movie The War Is Over (La guerre est finie—France/Sweden, 1966, directed by Alain Resnais and a screenplay by Jorge Semprún). The idea is to point out a possible sociological discussion on exile, mobilizing the notion of mental images. The methodological approach is an internal analysis of the film to allow for the elaboration of sociological considerations along with the expressive elements of the film construction. To do so, we shall focus on the "leaps" within the movie's narrative order, in which a main character (Diego) anticipates, through imagination, a series of sequences and events that might or might not have occurred. To discuss the notion of mental images and their relationship with the imaginary, the theoretical reference will be Cornelius Castoriadis' book The Imaginary Institution of Society. This article will benefit from the discussions in the presentations about the film both at meetings in Brazil and at the last ISA Congress 2023 (International Sociological Association—Research Committee 37—Sociology of Arts). This text is one of the results of research supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how transphobia is understood and responded to in South African schools. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from in-depth interviews with teachers, school managers, and TGD school-attending youth, the findings show that while there are minimal efforts to respond to and dismantle transphobia, school managers and teachers increasingly reproduce cisnormativity instrumentalising TGD youth to either assimilate or change. The analysis crystalises that cisgenderism is highly institutionalised in South African schools, pointing to an urgent need for targeted strategies to include TGD learners. This article sets the stage for further research on transphobia in schools and its response [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with Manuel DeLanda's Deleuze-inspired 'assemblage theory' from a perspective sympathetic to Pierre Bourdieu's field theory. It first outlines DeLanda's proposed new 'philosophy of society', focusing on his major works in this vein, and registers some scepticism as to its originality for sociology. It then introduces and responds to DeLanda's critique of Bourdieu. Rather than simply reject assemblage theory outright, however, I draw on selected insights from DeLanda to push field theory in new directions. More specifically, I conceptualise the interplay of fields and assemblages and use notions of 'exteriority' and 'possibility space' to help conceive individual plurality of social positioning and its effects for subjectivity and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational discourses have embraced therapeutic discourse, a psychology-based system of assumptions about the self, its boundaries, development and social relations. While scholars have debated the virtues of this therapeutic turn, there has been little empirical study of therapeutic discourse in teacher pedagogical discourse. This article, using theoretical frameworks of teacher learning and the sociology of therapeutic discourse and employing linguistic ethnographic methods, features close analysis of therapeutic discourse in teacher workplace conversations. The focal case, in which a teacher consults with her colleagues regarding a non-compliant student, features four episodes of therapeutic reasoning (ETRs) in which various therapeutic logics are employed. Analysis uncovered three central manifestations of therapeutic discourse especially pertinent to education: the role of emotions; perceptions of the self; and temporality. Attending to these manifestations in each ETR reveals conditions under which they may enhance or impede potential for teacher learning and pedagogic action. When therapeutic modes of reasoning are deployed by teachers to discuss their problems of practice, they are found to be multifaceted, elastic, and to bear potential for agentive teacher action under certain conditions. This article calls for a more nuanced, temporally-sensitive perspective on therapeutic discourse in education, and addresses implications for theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how working-class activists challenged and overcame political fear narratives during the anti-water charges campaign in Ireland (2014–2016), with specific focus on the ‘sinister’ narrative, an attempt by the government and its supporters to frame working-class protestors as violent, irrational and extremist. Rather than subscribing to the position that political fear is ubiquitous or the reflection of a general societal malaise, this paper follows Jeffries’ argument that political fear is mediated, contested and contradicted. While political fear operates most effectively when targeting expectations for normal living, it is these same expectations that offer fertile ground for opposing fear threats. Drawing on interviews from activists, this paper shows how the ‘normal living’ becomes a key context in which ‘deviance framing’ around class and gender can be reappropriated/reframed by activists, particularly through the deployment of counter spectacles and through the reframing of what constitutes legitimate emotional responses to government-initiated fear threats. Finally, while political fear can have an individualising effect, this paper demonstrates how subjective and individual acts of transgression are mediated through a collective and community lens as the crucial element in overcoming political fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that race must be a central consideration in understanding migration in Korea, where international migrants are rapidly reshaping the national landscape. While migration scholarship on Korea has analyzed various policy trajectories, it has predominantly focused on three aspects—liberal democracy, ethnicity, and gender—largely overlooking the significance of race. First, it assumes that liberal democracy will eventually supersede xenophobia without critically examining its assumptions that are both racialized and teleological in nature. Second, by prioritizing ethnicity, it interprets discrimination against migrants through the notion of uni-ethnicity and a fear of foreignness without delving into Korea’s deeply rooted fixation on race. Third, it overemphasizes gendered migration, regarding Korea’s demographic crisis as a primary reason for accepting migrant women as biological reproducers. This paper contends that all three aspects are intricately connected to race, including Korea’s aspiration for whiteness and abjection of blackness, which significantly shape migration dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]