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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 takes up Axel Honneth's suggestion that we, in the 21st century Western world, should revisit the Marxian idea of reification; unlike Honneth, however, this paper applies reification to the ways in which humans relate to non-human animals, particularly in the context of scientific experiments. Thinking about these practices through the lens of reification, the paper argues, yields a more helpful understanding of what is regarded as problematic in those practices than the standard animal rights approaches. The second part of the paper offers ways of overcoming reification that go beyond Honneth's idea of recognition by introducing Iris Murdoch's idea of attention. This proposed strategy makes the ethical relevance of reification more salient and makes it possible to counter reification through a practice such as attention which, unlike recognition, can be consciously established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of scholarship examining the impact of courts' social rights judgments, especially their distributive impact (ie the extent to which they deliver social rights-related goods and services to the poor and marginalised). Commentators have used this impact to evaluate the effectiveness of courts in realising citizens' social rights. This paper contributes to the scholarship by adding a new 'relational' dimension to our understanding of such impact. It uses the literature on the concept of trust from philosophy, sociology and other disciplines to analyse the impact that social rights judgments have on the relationship between citizens and the political branches of government, and argues that social rights judgments can modify two elements of this relationship that determine the dynamics at play in it: citizens' vulnerability to the political branches with respect to the relevant goods and services; and citizens' uncertainty about the political branches' exercise of control over the goods and services (which can promote the political branches' trustworthiness). By broadening our understanding of these judgments' impact, the paper offers a valuable lens through which to analyse social rights judgments and adds needed nuance to current debates about courts' effectiveness in realising citizens' social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, human trafficking has become the battleground for competing discourses on human rights and penality. While rights solutions are generally presented as in opposition to crime-control measures, in the context of anti-trafficking interventions, rights-based initiatives and criminal governance are often linked together both discursively and in practice. Drawing on the findings of Discourse Analysis of 120 texts about trafficking, this paper explores how dominant discourses and alternative voices construct the relationship between human rights and penality. It is contended that penality is framed as a crucial tenet of human rights. Dominant discourses (the 'law enforcement' and the 'victims first' discourses) link human rights to state coercive action, seen as a necessary component of their effectiveness. Alternative voices (the 'incompatibility' and the 'transformative justice' discourses) reject the appropriateness of penal intervention, but they end up preserving what they denounce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residents of care homes across the globe are affected by the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as they have been identified as a high-risk group and because they experienced strict social isolation regulations during the first wave of the pandemic. Social isolation of older people with poor physical and mental health is strongly associated with mental health problems and decreased life expectancy. Other research has shown that older people managed to adapt to the changes brought about by the pandemic and have linked this to the concept of resilience. The aim of this research project was to investigate how this applied to residents in care home settings during the first phases of the contact ban in Germany from sociology, developmental psychology and environmental gerontology perspectives, and to gain in-depth understanding of residents' experiences. This paper draws on structured interview data collected from residents in two care homes during early June 2020 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The findings show that their experiences were shaped by three factors: care home settings and the approach of staff to handling the contact ban; biographical sense of resilience; and a hierarchy of life issues. The findings highlight the importance of locally specific response mechanisms in care homes, agency and belonging of residents despite health-related limitations and the importance of a critical (gendered) lens on understanding their experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In settler colonial states such as Canada, tax is central to political ideas that circulate about Indigenous nations and people. The stories that are told about Indigenous peoples by 'taxpayers' often involve complaints about budgets, welfare, and 'unfair' tax arrangements. The paper theorizes how informal 'tax imaginaries' and 'taxpayer' subjectivities are forged through state policy and how ostensibly fiscal concerns are imbricated with white political entitlement that erodes Indigenous legal and political sovereignty. By tracing the construction of taxpayer concerns and tax myths as forms of fiscalized racism, the paper demonstrates the importance of tax to settler colonialism and the shape of Indigenous‐settler relations. Taxpayer subjects are not just legal or material positionings in relation to tax and the state, but powerful subjects that refigure political problems as 'fiscal' and construct Indigenous people and nations through racialized repertoires of property and possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and responds to On the Heels of Ignorance, a sociological study which identifies five fundamental epistemological paradigm changes in American psychiatry in the service of its survival and details several tactics that have been employed to facilitate these professional reinventions. Issues raised in this presentation include the relationship between psychiatry, society and the state, and the nature and significance of psychiatric expertise. The dynamic of these relationships and the complexities of the required expertise create their own challenges for the advancement and professional accountability of the specialty. The conclusion suggests some future imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the presence of lonely, isolated and impoverished older citizens in Japan's prison population, many of whom have turned to petty crime only recently and arguably lack a genuine need for corrective services. The paper offers empirical evidence drawn from a mixed-methods study that appears to confirm their compliant, 'law-abiding' attributes. It argues that their influx into prisons can be seen, at least in part, as citizens who are already socially excluded and stigmatised leveraging law to assert an additional risk-laden and stigmatised identity, which provides protection. The outcome is the subversion of prisons as de facto aged-care communities. This analysis resonates with an emerging body of literature that Chua and Engel (2018; 2019) have described as the 'Identity' school of legal-consciousness scholarship. This literature centres on empirical studies of marginalised cohorts who leverage legal structures to embrace an identity that complicates their stigma while providing desired protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a legal-consciousness approach, this paper discusses the issue of stigma and law from the perspectives of a group of older homeless people in Singapore. Focusing specifically on the Destitute Persons Act 2013 Rev. Ed. (DPA), the paper shows the different ways in which homeless people make sense of, negotiate, resist or succumb to the stigma of a homeless identity ascribed by the DPA. From these experiences, two fundamental problems with the DPA are highlighted. First, the DPA imposes a homeless identity that is entangled in archaic legal definitions that often do not relate to contemporary experiences of homelessness in Singapore. Second, the enforcement of the DPA legitimises a differential treatment of homeless people, without addressing the broader complexities of homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which 'leftover' women navigate legal and social discrimination. 'Leftover women' is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual 'leftover' women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: 'buying a licence to be deviant' and 'identity-hopping'. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. 'Buying a licence to be deviant' refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. 'Identity-hopping' is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU has progressively introduced antidiscrimination enforcement measures like the duty to set up Equality Bodies (EBs) that applies to the ground of racial or ethnic origin, among others. Until recently, however, EU law only envisaged vague standards for EBs that allowed a wide range of national configurations. Building on international benchmarks, this paper draws a set of dimensions considered necessary to improve promotion-type EBs responsiveness to discrimination. These dimensions are applied to the British and Spanish EBs to illustrate how the gaps left by EU law may lead to the design of ineffective bodies. The paper argues that EBs can contribute to effectively tackling discrimination if they are designed to be responsive at individual and systemic levels. The 2018 EU Recommendation on Standards for EBs makes a step forward in that direction, but its practical relevance may be limited by its non-binding nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s the traditional Hippocratic term excited delirium was transplanted from the bedsides of febrile, agitated and disoriented patients to the streets of Miami. Deaths in custody of young men who were intoxicated with cocaine and who were restrained by the police because of their erratic or violent behaviour were attributed to excited delirium. The blood concentrations of cocaine in these subjects were approximately ten times lower than the lethal level and other factors which might have contributed to the fatal outcome, such as the police use of neck-holds, choke-holds or 'hog-tying', were relegated to a minor role compared with the reframed 'diagnosis' of excited delirium. Over the course of the next few decades 'excited delirium' might be applied to virtually any highly agitated person behaving violently in a public place and who subsequently died in custody while being restrained or shortly afterwards. Expert witnesses, mainly forensic pathologists, testified that the deceased's death was probably inevitable given the perilous nature of excited delirium, even though this diagnostic entity lacked any consistent neuropathological basis and depended entirely on observed behaviour. This history of the rise and fall of this disputed diagnosis is a partial response to the sociologist Phil Brown's 1995 paper asking who benefits, or at least avoids trouble, by the identification and use of a diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While access to civil-law institutions has been a traditional area of socio-legal research, access to administrative justice still constitutes an underresearched field. In the field of administrative law, public ombuds institutions represent an important pathway to resolve disputes without invoking a court. To date, we have little knowledge about who uses these ombuds institutions and which factors facilitate access to the ombuds. In this paper, on the basis of our survey among users of the Austrian Ombudsman Board (n = 8,274), we explore the effects of institutional design on the user population. The findings suggest that the two outreach measures – regular consultation days and a weekly TV broadcast – contribute to reducing existing inequalities with regard to users' sociodemographic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to characterize the culturalist theory of the nation by Florian Znaniecki. Opposing the sociological theory dominated by Western, particularly Anglo-Saxon, thinkers, Znaniecki rejected the view of the nation as a state society. He believed that the nation is a type of community constituted by a specific culture that is created by its intellectual leaders. To derive his findings, he used the knowledge gained from the experiences of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. He believed that their specific history required the development of a sociological theory that was adequate for such research, not dominated by the findings of Western sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on creating age-friendly cities to accommodate the changing needs of older people and to promote their overall health and wellbeing. This paper focuses on some of the urban planning implications related to maintaining the social health, as a main component of overall health and wellbeing, of older people. Specifically, we look at the role and accessibility of third places (popular public places where many people go to socialise) in relation to older people living in different neighbourhood built-form patterns, and how these factors impact on the formation of absent, weak and strong social ties. The data draw upon interviews with 54 older people living in different neighbourhood built-form patterns on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. Our findings demonstrate the significant role third places have in affording older people opportunities to engage in the social lives of their local communities, thus contributing to their social health and overall wellbeing. This research supports previous studies relating to the accessibility of amenities by re-emphasising the importance of planning for the provision of third places that are conveniently located and easily accessible by older people. The paper concludes by arguing for the planning of transport and third-place interventions in Australia's sprawling suburban landscapes to allow older people more opportunities to be socially connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument: This paper examines the early institutionalization of sociology in Belgium. It displays how different intellectual and social contexts bred their own research interests and research approaches. It shows, more particularly, how ideological affiliations and divisions defined the setting within which this new discipline had to develop in Belgium in the decades around 1900. As a consequence of the ideological controversies, sociology had difficulty gaining legitimacy as a theory-driven analysis of society. Most scholars in Belgium could not avoid taking an explicitly normative position on society. This paper also displays how secularization and the reinforcement of the international level and its infrastructure gradually allowed for more academic autonomy for sociology in Belgium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to identify and document social mobility barriers for Roma. We have identified two types of social mobility barriers: the cost of exit from the traditional Roma community, and the cost of entry into the mainstream society. Most of the existing policy and academic debate on the social and economic marginalisation of Roma has focused almost entirely on entry barriers. The main contribution of the current paper to the existing literature is to draw attention to exit barriers, which usually are neglected in the public debate and the academic literature. In the current paper we show that understanding both types of social mobility barriers for Roma is crucial for designing effective policy measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite sociological understanding that bodies are social and morphological, material and discursive, there is a persistent, prevailing tendency within sociology to approach the old body – particularly in ‘deep old age’ – as non-social. No longer amenable either to reflexive (consumerist) choice, or expressive of the self, it is viewed rather through a biomedical explanatory framework in which it is held to succumb to ‘natural’ physiological processes of decline that lie outside culture. This paper critically questions such assumptions which it links to sociology's acquiescing in modernity's age ideology rather than taking it as a starting point for critique. This means that sociology's sensitivity towards ageing is displayed not in challenging models of the older body but in diverting attention away from the body altogether and focusing on structural and cultural determinants which are not considered to encompass physiology. Arguing, however, that biology and society do not exist on separate plains, and that the body in deep old age is, like other bodies, first and foremost a social body, the paper draws upon feminist methodology and epistemology for the purpose of dismantling such essentialism. It suggests that the sociological imagination will benefit from the eradication of age ideology through a clearer understanding not just of ageing but of embodiment at all stages of the lifecourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper sets out the findings of an exploratory study that, drawing on the so-called ‘new sociology of childhood’, has theorised the child as a competent social actor and conjectured that, on this basis, whilst they might lack formal legal capacity, children may nevertheless possess legal capability. Taking a child-first (as opposed to a law-first) approach, the study has sought to assess children's legal understanding using digital gaming as a research tool. We have identified as an area of particular strength children's attitudes to gender equality, and we have determined that many children demonstrate competency to deal with consumer-related issues appropriately. However, at the other extreme, we have established that children demonstrate considerable uncertainty concerning the levels of force that adult authority figures are permitted to exercise over them. We have found in the course of this study that children are competent and willing to express their views on matters that concern them. However, they do not expect to be invited to do this in their day-to-day lives. Related to this we have found a vast lack of awareness among children concerning the rights afforded to them under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes logical investigations in Poland in the years 1945–1975 conducted by logicians living and working in the country. We concentrate on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. Thus, we omit works in semantics (except logical model theory) and methodology of science; that is, other branches of general logic (logic sensu largo). We also skip investigations into the history of logic, one of the favorites of Polish logicians, except for mentioning reconstructions of some earlier systems. We also try to outline sociological circumstances relevant for the development of logic after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks whether where someone lives bears any association with their attitudes to inequality and income redistribution, focusing on the relative contribution of neighbourhood income, density and ethnic composition. People on higher incomes showed higher support for redistribution when living in more deprived neighbourhoods. People with lower levels of altruism had higher levels of support for redistribution in neighbourhoods of higher density. People living in more ethnically mixed neighbourhoods had higher levels of support for redistribution on average, but this support declined for Whites with low levels of altruism as the deprivation of the neighbourhood increased. Current trends which sustain or extend income and wealth inequalities, reflected in patterns of residence, may undermine social cohesion in the medium- to long-term. This may be offset to some extent by trends of rising residential ethnic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]