Forms Of Sociability Research Articles

"I Felt Everyone Was a Streamer": An Empirical Study on What Makes Avatar Collective Streaming Engaging

A novel participatory livestreaming genre, Avatar Collective Streaming, is gaining traction. Beyond traditional audience participation mechanisms, such as chat messages or commands, these livestreams allow viewers to join, socially interact, and participate through avatars in a software-driven virtual scenario without requiring the presence of a human streamer. From observations of livestreaming sessions and interviews with regular users (n=23), we define the main features of this novel form of livestreaming and we analyze what makes it engaging for participants, as well as factors that limit the user experience. The use of avatars affords a strong sense of presence and participation, and together with the absence of a streamer, it shapes new forms of sociability, being together, and belonging. Challenges include repetitive content and overcrowding. We provide design implications for synchronous collective participation scenarios and opportunities for software-driven content generation.

Branje Jamnice v času socialnih sprememb

Prežih’s “neighbourhood novel” Jamnica (1945), which was written under the influence of foreign and Slovene literary classics as well as of the genre model of the rural novel, met with success on its publication. In this collective novel the village community retains above all the various folklore forms of sociability, but rather than simply being narrative ornamentation the descriptions of these forms are woven into the social message of the novel. Another characteristic is the attachment of the members of the community to the land, a kind of natural vitalism. In a time of economic crisis and on the brink of the Second World War, the survival strategy of the community leads to a “social experiment”, i.e., entering into a social pact between the landowners and the crofters.

A CIDADE EM JOGO: EFEITOS SOCIAIS E URBANOS DAS POLÍTICAS PÚBLICAS NAS COPAS DE 1950 E 2014

The main objective of this article is to describe and analyze how the construction of sports equipment was carried out to meet the demands of mega sporting events, such as the Football World Cup and the Olympics. Thus, we seek to think about the results of public policies that aimed to establish new forms of sociability in urban space in the city of Rio de Janeiro to the detriment of mega-events. The hypothesis presented in this work is based on the idea that government rearrangements aimed to meet a demand from international capital, taking the city as a commodity. To do this, we start with a comparative analysis between the 1950 and 2014 World Cups. This article is inserted in the context of studies on the city, football and mega sporting events. Part of these studies demonstrate that the construction of sports arenas emerges as a tactic for producing new spaces of sociability under the control of a transnational entity, FIFA. The results are interference with the sovereignty of public policies, in urban, national and local spaces, generating a set of controversies between the effective demands of the population and the interest of international capital.

RETHINKING THE SOCIAL IN SOCIAL MEDIA

This paper makes an argument for the value of including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media. Building on interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi and Libertine.Center) devoted to nudity, sex, and kink, it examines the implications of defining sex platforms as social media and the analytical avenues that the inclusion of sexual sites opens up for understanding forms of sociability within them. We start by mapping the studied platforms as built infrastructures that shape and constrain sociality, with a particular focus on developer dialogue with the broader social media ecosystem. We then discuss how these built spaces are used and experienced as “socio-sexual silos” with a particular focus on notions of safety. Finally, we consider what this means for sociality on social media and propose “context promiscuity” as a conceptual aid for unpacking this.

The Sociability of Narrative: Freedom, Vulnerability, and Mediation in the Intercultural Novel

From the 1980s to the early 2010s, intercultural novels were often characterized by a liberal impulse to question prejudices and free characters from victim positions as well as cultural and identity-political constraints. This process has been analyzed and sometimes celebrated by scholars in countless literary studies claiming that hybrid actors and multivoiced narratives have replaced passive tales of suffering. More recent novels replace the heterogeneity and freedom of narrative agents with their experiential vulnerability and perceptions of discrimination. The central thesis of this essay is that this shift from freedom to vulnerability closely correlates with the disappearance of figural effects of mediation. The disappearance of a mediating function, which according to Georg Simmel is what makes face-to-face interaction social in the first place, fundamentally changes the intercultural narrative situation, the structure of encounter, and ultimately the forms of sociability in postmigration society. For the future of diversity-oriented and interdisciplinary research in German studies, it will be crucial to grasp this change precisely to develop new theories of inter- and transculturality from these insights.

Solitary Confinement, Aloneness, and Sociability in Sterne

Laurence Sterne develops his complex approach towards solitude throughout his fictional and non-fictional writings. Ranging between A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Bramine's Journal, Letters from Yorick to Eliza, and Sterne's sermons, this article explores how Sterne juxtaposes the pleasures of retirement with more painful loneliness, and the opportunities that each opens up for sometimes challenging self-contemplation. Various locations stimulate Sterne's engagement with this relationship in differing ways: simply, the enjoyable solitude of country retreat contrasts with the superficial busyness of city life; but for Sterne the opportunity to attain greater self-knowledge comes through his interactions with others. Alone, he must construct imaginary forms of sociability, especially with his beloved but absent Eliza, whom he brings into a fictive conversation through his writing. In the process, the quixotism of Sterne's sentimental authorial persona leads not to a performance of feeling, but to an embrace of human frailty and hopefulness alike.

Anna Maria Van Schurman’s Chinese Calligraphy

Calligraphy is an understudied aspect of the reception of Chinese art in early modern Europe. Chinese visitors to Middelburg (1601) and Amsterdam (1654) first demonstrated it as a cultural practice. Other written samples circulated in the Dutch Republic, an emporium for Chinese goods. This article focuses on a previously unknown participant in this exchange: Anna Maria van Schurman, Europe’s first female university student, who had mastered various Asian scripts and was expected to try her hand at Chinese and Japanese. In 1637 Andreas Colvius sent her samples of East Asian calligraphy to copy ‘by her own hand’. This exchange makes possible a transcultural study of the calligraphic gift. Via the popular writings of Matteo Ricci, Van Schurman’s correspondents may have learned about the role of calligraphy in fostering social relationships in late Ming China. Some of the visual and material qualities of East Asian writing must have made it look like a fitting tribute to a female European scholar of high profile and, in being exchanged as a gift, calligraphy acquired new meanings even while remaining illegible. In seventeenth-century China and Europe, the friendly exchange of calligraphy expressed new forms of sociability.

:The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage

:<i>The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage</i>

Migrants are the city: commentary on “London: diversity and renewal over two millennia” by Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li

ABSTRACT By querying the social connections that underlie Heath’s and Li’s overview of the peopling of London over the millennia, it becomes clear that London was made as people from elsewhere settled, maintained multiple networks of connection and created local forms of sociability. Generations of migrants built London, as those in power extracted wealth from colonies around the world through the African slave trade, theft of land from native peoples, indentured labour from South Asia, and the dispossession and cultural subordination of Irish, Scottish, Welch and English rural classes. To trace the history of London must be to explicate the intertwined processes of racialization, women’s subordination, Orientalism and the cultural hierarchies of difference. As all comprehensive urban histories can do, if they address the relationships between migrants and city making, Heath and Li’s account of London teaches us that underneath politically constructed migrant non-migrant divides, over time migrants become the city.

Book Worlds as a Window to Analyze the Extreme Right Wing in Argentina

This paper examines how certain contemporary books and authors contributed to the formation of an extreme right political option in Argentina. The paper focuses on Nicolás Márquez and Agustín Laje, two authors who have achieved unprecedented visibility, which is reflected in the circulation and sales of their books, in the number of their followers on social networks, and in the magnitude of their events and conferences. In 2016, the publication of El libro negro de la nueva izquierda. Ideología de género o subversión cultural [The Black Book of the New Left: Gender Ideology or Cultural Subversion] established both authors as figures with “authority” in right-wing culture, and enabled the formation of communities of young readers from the promotional circuit of the work. Having attended different events and conducted a series of in‑depth interviews with young readers, we explore the forms of sociability and political subjectivation enabled by these authors and this book in the space of circulation of right-wing ideas in Argentina today.

A hipótese do desencontro

Abstract This article develops the following hypothesis: despite their differences, or better, precisely because of them, law and politics in Brazil comprise a system whose primary feature is its incapacity to form a totalization of the social world; that is, to formulate a public rule capable of including the diverse parts of society. Much the opposite: the characteristic of this system is the purposeful rupture, the strategic estrangement between the pole formed by law and the State (which is constructed against spontaneous forms of sociability) and the pole that includes politics and society (in which exchange modelled on the gift plays a central role). There is no higher plane capable of incorporating the two into a single unity, nor do they submit to a synthesis or to an encompassing value. The article argues that the relationship between law and politics is articulated as a dialogue conducted at a distance and through estrangement, such that one is constituted as the possible worlds of the other.

Соотношение индивидуального и коллективного в социальной философии Г. Д. Гурвича

The relationship between the individual and society is the leitmotif of Georges Gurvitch’s work. Beginning from the early Russian-language books on the philosophy of law and ending with the works on sociology published in France and the USA at the final stage of his career, Gurvitch studied the individual person and collective units as interacting sides of the collective social subject. He sought to overcome the struggle between individualism and collectivism which found its ideological expression in the rivalry of the French (Emile Durkheim) and German (Max Weber) schools of sociology. Gurvitch formulated the concept of society as dynamic interaction and mutual determination of the individual and collective unit. In his Russian-language works, written before his emigration, he maintained that it was in the sphere of law that one could determine how the individual and society mutually condition each other and determine the direction of social development. In the late 1920s and early 1930s in his teaching on social law, Gurvitch formulated the concept of sociability which enabled him to focus attention not on the confrontation, but on the interaction of the individual and society. In the concept of “normative fact” he defined the being of society and embodied the dialectical interaction between singularity and multitude. In the late 1930s in his teaching on microsociology, he introduced criteria of sociability, recording individual (intensity of the fusion of individual minds) and collective (the force of social pressure) aspects of the process of social development. Proceeding from these criteria Gurvitch developed a gradation of sociability, expressing it in the scheme “mass — community — communion” which enabled him to analyse the formation of collective units and determine the features of their existence. In his article “Mass, Community, and Communion” (1941) he presented the forms of sociability which enabled him to describe the mutual conditioning of individuals and collective units. Gurvitch’s article spells out the key principles of his philosophy and sociology of law which overcome individualism and collectivism in his account of society.

Between Strangeness and an Alternative Buddhist Lifestyle: An Expression of Religious Non-Conformity in Consumer Culture

This study contributes to the sociological understanding of the social perceptions of religious engagement and its self-presentation in consumer culture. Drawing on three years of comparative ethnographic research on the Buddhist lifestyle in five different organisations in France and the Czech Republic, it reveals that Buddhist engagement, through its practices, is considered peculiar or even potentially dangerous by the participants’ environment. Remarks of the people surrounding them reflect typical features of the popular understanding and the literature on sects, cults and new religious movements and express social pressure to respect different social norms. They also partly represent social demands to adopt a conformist lifestyle because of their often individualised and activity-centred character. At the same time, Buddhist practitioners’ self-presentation of their engagement is in line with alternative lifestyle discourses since it challenges different social practices, forms of sociability, ethics and other values. The importance, diversity and positive image associated with this alternative stance can be considered an expression of the value of non-conformity that reflects the individualism and disdain of conformism typical of consumer culture.

Ser paciente haitiano/a en Chile y vivir el racismo en centros de la red pública de salud

The present work is inscribed within the field of contemporary migration studies in Chile, a line of investigation initiated during the nineties. At the time, various people from South America and the Caribbean arrived to the country, which was undergoing a democratic transition and presented itself as a successful economic model. Twenty-five years later, migrants from Haiti began arriving. Despite not constituting the largest group of migrants, they have become one of the most targeted by Chilean society, the media, the political class and government authorities. Since the election of Sebastián Piñera in 2018, certain measures were taken that signaled a policy aimed towards reducing Haitian presence in the country: namely, a “humanitarian” return plan exclusively for Haitians and the creation of a consular visa as the main permit in order to enter the country. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they were singled out as disobedient to the measures imposed by the state of emergency and the sanitary restrictions put in place. Chilean society agrees with restrictive norms and policies and looks with suspicion at a migrant group that it perceives as different. Chile, a country colonized in the name of humanist and republican values, which upholds cultural homogeneity, does not look favorably on the arrival of migrants from elsewhere in the region, and even less so on a migrant group whose skin color has been negatively evaluated, to the point of linking it to physical, cultural and psychological characteristics. This work makes brief references of the context of migrating to Chile, of doing so from Haiti, and of some elements of Haiti’s history that make up this particular migratory situation. The proposed objective is to identify racism present within the interactions between public health workers and Haitian patients who approach them for help or treatment in the city of Santiago. This work stems from a larger project that analyzed the sociability and cultural skills of different public health professionals interacting with migrants. Employing a qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with professionals from the public health service and focus groups were organized with Haitian patients. The frame of reference focuses on racism as a system and as a social relationship, on racial discrimination and its effects on people. The words of patients and professionals are analyzed and conclusions are drawn in regards to racism and registered violence as forms of sociability, the latter understood as the way in which two actors interact when one of them is in a position of superiority. These processes need to be reflected upon in order to account for the damages caused to Haitian men, women and children seeking care in the public health network. Considering the importance of the right to migrate in current times and the multiple obstacles that impede it, Haitian life in Chile emerges as a “problem” when it comes to being attended, cared for or assisted to by health professionals, an issue that is linked to the fact that contemporary migrations have been repeatedly characterized as a “problem” and not as a social phenomenon that needs to be seriously analyzed with academic accuracy. Racist criticism emerges violently, offending and harming Haitian migrants who, in order to avoid it, sometimes prefer not to go public health centers, to look for alternatives when dealing with the ailments that afflict them, or straightforwardly abandon the possibility of being attended at all. Finally, some guidelines are advanced which may help to overcome these situations by training professionals in order to improve communications between them and Haitian migrants. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2023.40.1.22

Female friendship and care in a North Indian university

ABSTRACT The massive expansion of higher education in contemporary India has been accompanied by corresponding increases in the number of women students in colleges and universities. Given this backdrop, this paper discusses the experiences of young women students within the public and private spaces of their new lives in college. Some recent discussions concerning young women in urban India have privileged public spaces as sites of freedom to which they should lay claim. This paper is based on research on women students in Prayagraj, a city in North India, and shows how college and hostel spaces enable new forms of sociability, in which they form non-kin relationships. These are formed among students of diverse social identities but are shaped by their class locations as well within the social context of homosociality. Young women students create a new social world inside their colleges and hostels, build friendships and create certain kinds of intimacies. Cooking together and caring for each other in times of illness emerge as important aspects of their friendships. Hostel spaces, in particular, provide some freedom and comfort for the young women who reside in them. This article brings out the ways in which women students inhabit such spaces, creating social support systems and care networks.

As Transformações da Sociabilidade Gay no Rio de Janeiro no Século XX (1940-1980): Do Largo do Rocío a ‘Galeria do Amor’

The present article aims to analyse the different forms of sociability of the gay male population throughout the 20th century. The central objective would be to correlate the changes in the patterns of sociability of this group to the urban transformations experienced by the city in this period, marked by the reordering of the urban stain towards the southern vector of the cit and formation of sub-centers such as the neighborhood of Copacabana. It is also intended, on the basis of an analysis that privileges the social markers of difference (ethno-racial affiliation, social class and gender) to understand the content of these sociabilities and how they reflect this segmented and fragmented mode of production of the city of Rio de Janeiro in the twentieth century.

Les jeunes de la ville de Yaoundé et la sociabilité dans la pratique du parifoot

Taking a dynamic approach to the study of youth, this article draws on the results of a qualitative study&#x0D; of young people in Yaoundé to understand the logic behind their participation in sports (soccer) betting&#x0D; and explore associated forms of sociability. After presenting our theoretical framework and data&#x0D; collection methodology, we describe the factors encouraging young people to bet on soccer matches.&#x0D; We then review the various forms of sociability developed in the context of sports betting and explore&#x0D; underlying determinants. To begin with, reports of gambling winnings by friends and acquaintances, love&#x0D; for the sport and the richness of soccer culture, etc., serve as motivating factors. Furthermore, precarious&#x0D; living conditions and the perception of cultural capital acquired through these sports (soccer) betting&#x0D; shape forms of sociability that support strategies for addressing a range of challenges.

Virtual Sociability

Since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the term virtual has become one of the most used in media and everyday speech. There is an increasing amount of research done on this new reality, and the results are still to be published. However, it is insufficiently known in scientific periodicals that the concept of virtual reality, enabled by information technology, has existed in the sociological literature since the 1990s when Castells introduced it to the theory of network society. Therefore, the paper's primary goal is to consider basic concepts such as virtual reality, real virtuality, virtual communities, virtual sociability, and networked individualism. We will also briefly look at the forgotten classical notion of community as a fundamental form of sociability defined by the sociologist F. Tönnies, which re-enters the focus of scientific interest, without a clear and sociologically known classical definition. Starting from this framework, the paper examines the key question of whether these new virtual communities are indeed communities in the classical sense of the term or whether it is a form of networked individualism.

The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob Anna Tomaszewska The Secular Enlightenment. By Margaret C. Jacob. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. Pp. xi, 339. $29.95. ISBN 9780691161327.) The author of the seminal Radical Enlightenment (1981) has proposed another category encapsulating intellectual, social, and political metamorphoses spurred by [End Page 214] the "Age of Enlightenment." In eight chapters that take the reader through Western European and trans-Atlantic spaces and times spanning from the late seventeenth century until the 1790s, Margaret Jacob pictures the emergence of "the secular world" in which human life would increasingly center on the here and now without "a necessary reference to a transcendent order" (pp. 1–2). For Jacob, secularization does not imply a complete repudiation of religion, but redefining its meaning as a cultural practice, an approach traceable to The Religious Ceremonies and Customs (1723–43) by Jean Frederick Bernard and Bernard Picart. The secular Enlightenment turned toward science under Newton's auspices, witnessed budding sensitivity to social injustice and inequalities, criticized the alliance between church and state, and brought the development of the university culture. Clandestine literature and new forms of sociability, practiced in masonic lodges, city clubs, and cafés, created a global space of shared ideas and ideals: equality, cosmopolitanism, universal brotherhood. Inventions, such as that of the pendulum clock, prompted changes in the perception of time dedicated more and more to this-worldly activities. The secular ways became manifest in the lives of countless travelers, publishers, industrialists, academics, scientists, and poets—both minor figures, some of them female, and the leading protagonists of the epoch. France prepared the ground for the outbreak of its 1789 revolution: the deism, materialism, and atheism of the philosophes provided a setting in which the absolute monarchy and priestly privilege could be challenged. The Scottish enlighteners favored pragmatic topics: taxes, commerce, and how to counteract poverty, which would set the background for the development of capitalism and the conception of historical progress. Germany staged the advocacy of secular ethics and politics, the publication of subversive writings attacking organized religion, conflicts between rationalist philosophers and state authorities, and finally the resurgence of Spinozism that constituted the naturalist underpinnings for "a universal humanism" (p. 197). The Italians, overcoming tensions between the Catholic Church and the enlightened values, contributed to political economy with theories of money and trade, and to political theory by laying the foundations for a constitutional republic that would later serve as a model for the Americans. The way was also paved for abolishing torture, slavery, and eventually death penalty. Social and political unrest accompanied the demise of the Enlightenment, which set in motion the "creation of the democratic citizen," necessitating a "personal transformation … often transgressive of customs and mores" (p. 236), particularly those related to family life. The Enlightenment, which persisted in the writings of the Romantics, brought along "the secular" that "had become all pervasive" (p. 264). Jacob's fascinatingly many-layered and multifaceted account of the Enlightenment unfolds the extent to which its ideas have shaped our times, yet occasionally her usage of '"enlightened" slips from merely descriptive into normative. Jacob does not side with the proponents of the "religious Enlightenment"—the claim that religious controversies could have triggered the secularizing impulse (Jeffrey D. Burson) or that the "Age of Reason" made possible new forms of belief (David Sorkin). Her allegiance stays with those who, like Peter Gay, link the Enlightenment with the [End Page 215] secular. However, although Jacob's account expresses attachment to the secular values which have come to be associated with liberal democratic culture that some believe to prevail nowadays, it also perpetuates the view of those critics of the Enlightenment who would see in it a movement of dissent from Christianity. Anna Tomaszewska Jagellonian University in Krakow Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press

Identidade e outras formas de sociabilidade

The third issue of Revista Aurora is published with the Identity Dossier and other forms of sociability. Continuing our editorial project, this section presents themes that are part of the debate proposed by the Culture, Identity and Memory line of research - linked to the Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences. The articles discuss issues of relevance to the area, such as the question of the religious identity of Candomblé followers; the normative foundations of Critical Theory and the debate surrounding the legacy of Jürgen Habermas; and also, a discussion about daily life in the Resocialization Centers. Guided by the fruitful dialogue between the four lines of research of our Postgraduate Program, the Miscellaneous section contains articles that will certainly contribute to the continuity of debates. The special section is more than special. Here is a small tribute from Revista Aurora to Odirlei Dias Pereira who completed her master's degree in this Program last October, but who unfortunately passed away on December 4th of this year.