Forms Of Sociability Research Articles

From Distant Horizon to the ‘Uncoercive Rearrangement of Desire’: Institutional Pedagogy and Collaborative Learning in an Instance of Arts and Curatorial Education

AbstractIn politics and philosophy, the question of horizons, the vanishing point that is always out of reach, but provides direction and guidance, underpins utopic thinking. This is a strange phenomenon since, as Jodi Dean suggests, horizons are ‘real’ insofar as they exist both spatially and temporally. Dean invokes the Lacanian concept of the real to demonstrate how horizons are omnipresent, even when we are unable to see them. Here, we disagree with Dean. Rather than view them as a fixed and constant entity, with Deleuze & Guattari we agree that horizons, understood as spaces of possibility, must be constructed through communal enunciations of desire. Following Dean's (re)formulation of horizons alongside of Deleuze & Guattari's concept of desire, we propose that Foucault's idea of ‘heterotopia’, a real, but inverted and potentially uncomfortable counter‐site, is a better schema for thinking the possibilities of arts education's horizon. This article thinks through the construction of other, emancipated, spaces of learning in arts education through the methodological approach of institutional analysis and the work done by the Institutional Pedagogy movement in post‐war France. Drawing from this movement, the work of Fernand Oury and Aïda Vasquez and Félix Guattari, ‘institution’ here is understood loosely as anything that institutes forms of sociability. As such, institutional analysis seeks to radically transform institutions from within and without by creating spaces to facilitate the reconfiguration of desire. Our analysis will be grounded in our own pedagogical practices in universities where we have made use of the techniques of Institutional Pedagogy.

ENSINO DE LÍNGUA PORTUGUESA E TECNOLOGIAS DIGITAIS: ANÁLISES SOBRE DOCUMENTOS OFICIAIS

This research aims at examining how the use of DICT is part of school curriculum and teacher education by analysing and comparing the following documents: “BNCC de lingua portuguesa do Ensino Medio” (BRASIL, 2018) and “DCN para formacao inicial” (BRASIL, 2015). Besides considering the prescribed curriculum for primary and secondary education, teacher training cannot overlook the documents which change the organisation of education cycles, such as “Reforma do Ensino Medio” (BRASIL, 2017). This analysis has shown that BNCC aims at approaching DICT in its pedagogical proposal when suggesting multimodal discursive genres (ROJO, 2017), observing the new forms of sociability (SALOMAO, 2018). We intended to encourage discussions about the importance of considering teacher education through a new perspective, as well as about the need to articulate this to investments in public education, taking into account that BNCC implementation is something that teachers will have to be prepared for.

\u2018If they weren\u2019t in the Pub, they Probably wouldn\u2019t Even Know each Other\u2019: Alcohol, Sociability and Pub Based Leisure

While the form and function of pubs is diverse and has changed over time, there remains an at least notional consensus that the pub plays an important social function by providing a place for people to come together in pleasurable and meaningful social interaction. Drawing on qualitative research involving focus groups with pub goers and interviews with pub staff, this paper examines the forms of sociability that take place in UK pubs. Pubs are shown to be sites for varied social interactions which differ in form, intensity and meaning. This includes regular pub going rooted in customer routines but also occasional pub going linked to a wider range of events and associated leisure activities. A common theme across these forms of pub sociability is the value placed on feelings of social connections provided by different forms of social interaction and sociability which are facilitated by the hospitable atmospheres many pubs offer. Pubs are therefore cast as important sites through which various forms of sociability are enacted and enabled. The article contributes to ongoing debates about the social role of alcohol based leisure practises but also stresses the decentring of intoxication apparent in many of these accounts and, further, indicates an increasing diversification of pub based leisure.

Los jóvenes lectores de la derecha argentina. Un acercamiento etnográfico a los seguidores de Agustín Laje y Nicolás Márquez

Este artículo aborda la relación entre edición y política a partir del estudio de la producción, circulación y recepción de autores y libros circunscriptos a la ideología de derechas. Recientemente, los autores Nicolás Márquez y Agustín Laje, publicados por la editorial de derechas Unión, han logrado una visibilidad inusitada, reflejada en la circulación y venta de sus libros y la masividad de los eventos y presentaciones. Argumentamos que el circuito de comunicación que produce y reproduce sus discursos tiene a los libros como objetos que se difunden y permiten que sus autores se conviertan en referentes intelectuales, culturales y políticos con “autoridad” y que crean comunidades de lectores. Éstos compran, leen y los utilizan como fundamento y como modo de asegurar sus creencias, sentimientos y opiniones políticas. A partir de entrevistas y seguimiento del público de estos autores exploramos las formas de sociabilidad y de subjetivación política que estos autores y sus libros habilitan en un espacio de circulación de ideas de derechas en la Argentina actual.

The Impact of Facebook on Serbian Society

ABSTRACT The paper discusses the virtual social networks as new forms of sociability, with a special focus on Facebook and its impact on the everyday life of citizens in Serbia. The focus of the paper is on identifying social changes that result from the massive use of virtual social networks, as well as at the participants themselves, through which these changes are implemented, but also at those who are not, but who feel the indirect impact of social networks. The research was carried out on a sample of 1109 respondents. The sample consisted of experimental and control groups. The experimental sample, consisting of people who use Facebook, included 954 respondents. The control sample, consisting of people who do not use Facebook, included 155 respondents. The paper presents the results we obtained on the basis of the research on the impact of Facebook on the everyday life of citizens in Serbia.

Alone Together: Finding Solidarity in a Time of Social Distance

This is an article about quarantine and the paradox of propinquity. There is a common assumption in sociology that people who interact and are in close physical contact develop social relationships. It is also believed that proximity and the socius of being with others allows for the coordination of activities and construction of society. During the COVID-19 lockdown, social distance measures made physical interactions near impossible. And the onset of these changes to everyday behaviors prove that society is not limited to propinquity. In order to better understand alternative forms of sociability, this article will introduce two concepts: banality and neighborship. The analysis of these ideas will confirm that interactions are preceded by social feelings, such as conviviality and togetherness. There will also be two short case studies of everyday life that show how, in the time of COVID-19, social feelings existed without physical contact.

INDIVIDUALS, COLLECTIVES AND SOCIABILITIES IN SOCIAL NETWORKS: promoting new forms of inclusion and active job search

The digital revolution has instigated the paradigm of the networked society, mediated by technology, with an impact on lifestyles, increasingly more virtual and online, stimulating new forms of sociability between individuals and collectives. In this text, we present a reflection on the relationship between digital social networks, active job search and social inclusion. Moreover, we present the case of the Project “REviver na Rede”, which has been enabling us to conclude that social networks, like Facebook, are valid tools for the integration, socialization and active job search, helping to improve the employability and also the economic and social development of local communities.

Virtualidades e educação

O segundo número da revista ETD – Educação Temática Digital do ano de 2020 chega à leitora e ao leitor em meio a um contexto histórico inédito. Mistura de um episódio do universo tecnológico-distópico de Black Mirror com o panorama camusiano da Orã acometida pela Peste, vemos a aparente antinomia entre distanciamento e proximidade reconfigurar-se e converter-se em novas formas de sociabilidade e interação. Ao necessário isolamento social imposto pela disseminação virulenta de uma pandemia emerge mutatis mutandis um ser humano que não apenas media suas relações sociais via aparatos tecnológicos, mas agora se realiza (em termos ontológicos) através e, em enorme medida, na dependência deles. Potencialmente libertadora e subversiva na mesma medida que repressora e submissa, a virtualidade se impõe antes como necessidade que como escolha...

COM UM LAÇO DE FITA VERDE AMARRADO NA GARGANTA: COSMOLOGIAS E RITUAIS DE INTERAÇÃO SIMBÓLICA DOS XUKURU NA CONTEMPORANEIDADE

Neste artigo procuramos explicar e compreender as cosmologias e rituais de interação simbólica do povo Xukuru tomando como objetivo o resgate de uma abordagem (des)construtivista das teorias clássicas acerca do Sul. Trata-se de um exercício preliminar que toma como foco de análise das relações que estas populações mantêm com o sagrado no mundo contemporâneo através de festividades. Recorrendo à antropologia visual e à análise de conteúdo de documentos videográficos, almejamos contribuir para um aumento do conhecimento das dinâmicas, dos espaços e das formas de sociabilidade corporizadas no Toré e na festa do dia de São João junto dos Xukuru como reveladoras e atualizadoras de memórias, de heranças e de reconstruções identitárias.

LITERACIES AMONG YOUTH FROM CAMPO (RURAL) COMMUNITIES: WHAT IS REVEALED DURING VIDEO PRODUCTION

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of the research study, “Literacies in rural communities: social practices of reading and writing in school and non-school situations”, conducted from 2015 to 2017. This study investigated how forms of sociability and communicative circuits in the daily lives of the rural youth constitute social practices of reading and writing. Initially, the use of the word “literacies” in the plural is justified. The context for this research is the Araçuaí Family Agroecological School in Vale do Jequitinhonha, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Analyses are based in the New Literacy Studies (STREET, 2014) and the methodology assumes a qualitative approach from an ethnographic perspective (HEATH; STREET, 2008) in which students collaborated in the production of videos with themes related to their communities. Video production was adopted as a methodological strategy to achieve literacies involved in the collective actions of the process. The results show that the use/non-use of digital technologies does not stand as a factor of differentiation between rural youth and urban youth, definitively breaking with the idea that rural communities are social spaces that lack literacy practices or that are disconnected from the virtual world, which shows that schools should broaden their concepts of literacy, not only by pluralizing practices, but mainly by incorporating them as a constitutive element of their teaching and learning project.

Mobilizing From Scratch: Large-Scale Collective Action Without Preexisting Organization in the Syrian Uprising

Core social movement research argues that large-scale challenges to authority build upon preexisting organization and civil society resources. How do dissenters mobilize masses in repressive settings where, given curtailment of civil society, autonomous associations scarcely exist and norms discourage trust more than encourage it? Testimonials from the Syrian uprising illustrate how protest can become widespread under such conditions, yet occurs through processes different from what dominant theory expects. Activists get demonstrations off the ground by planning around awareness of their organizational deficits. Once in motion, contention propels both organization and increasing organizational sophistication. To be effective, mobilization sometimes evades or obscures established social relationships, even as it produces new forms of sociability. Bridging literatures on mass and clandestine mobilization, this research reconsiders the assumed sequential logic of movement development from organization to protest, rather than vice versa. It also shifts attention from movement antecedents toward the resourcefulness and strategy that enable mobilizing both from scratch and at grave risk.

Razões da ausência de associação entre sucesso escolar e capital social na Escola Judith Bezerra de Melo - Natal/RN

A literatura registra uma associação positiva entre o sucesso escolar e o capital social de alunos da educação básica. Causa estranheza a inferência, lastreada em parte dos achados empíricos resultantes de pesquisa realizada na Escola Estadual Professora Judith Bezerra de Melo – Natal/RN, de que não haveria associação entre o bom desempenho em língua portuguesa dos alunos da 2ª série do ensino médio dessa escola e o capital social existente na rede pessoal deles. Para realizar uma espécie de crítica interna aos inusitados achados empíricos dessa pesquisa, o arcabouço teórico e metodológico da análise de redes sociais mostrou-se o mais apropriado. As repostas mais prováveis para essa ausência de associação entre sucesso escolar e capital social admitem a seguinte discriminação: i) o sucesso escolar depende da natureza da relação que o aluno mantém com o saber; ii) as métricas de capital social podem ser insuficientes para captar, em sua plenitude, a associação entre as duas variáveis; iii) a singularidade, a diversidade, a incerteza, as trajetórias inesperadas que afloram do campo das possibilidades individualizantes, tecido pelas conexões entre espaço e redes pessoais, sinalizam certos fatores de ordem socioespacial que condicionam e singularizam as distintas formas de sociabilidade; e iv) as pesquisas referentes à aplicação dos princípios educativos da nova pedagogia em alguns países europeus revelam como principais fatores do sucesso escolar a pedagogia do esforço e a qualidade do professor.

James Petiver's ‘joynt-stock’: middling agency in urban collecting networks

This article explores the complexities of James Petiver and Hans Sloane's relationship with one another and their shared contacts, examining the ways in which their networks overlapped but also, crucially, differed from one another. It shows that, though they had common interests and institutional memberships, Petiver ultimately occupied a different urban world from Sloane, a middling, trade-orientated stratum of society with its own forms of sociability and business, credit and advancement. It was this position that helped Petiver bridge a range of gaps in elite scholarly exchange, making himself indispensable through his effective mediation between different urban groups and access to spaces beyond Sloane's reach. It argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the imbrication of middling interests and agencies that operated across London's natural history communities, in order to prompt us to think more carefully about the strategies and interests of those who tried to navigate them.

Experiencias de desigualdad. Trayectorias de detención, condiciones de encierro y selectividad intramuros en el acceso a la educación secundaria de jóvenes y adultos privados de su libertad en Santa Fe, Argentina

Este trabajo se propone desligar algunos procesos que permiten explicar el acceso desigual a la escolarización secundaria de jóvenes y adultos privados de su libertad en unidades penitenciarias del Servicio Penitenciario de la Provincia de Santa Fe, una de las jurisdicciones más pobladas de Argentina. El referente empírico es un grupo de jóvenes y adultos varones detenidos en las Unidades Penitenciarias 1 y 3, quienes entre 2015 y 2017 se encontraban transitando el nivel secundario dentro de las Escuelas de Educación Media para Adultos que funcionan en dichos establecimientos. A partir de sus experiencias se describirán algunos mecanismos de selectividad escolar asociados a las formas de encierro en los distintos espacios de reclusión (pabellones), donde las condiciones materiales de vida son diferentes y se producen distintas rutinas y formas de sociabilidad que inciden en las posibilidades de los detenidos para desarrollar las actividades escolares. Asimismo, en torno a vivir en un determinado pabellón se enlaza un conjunto de sentidos sobre los atributos y características de los detenidos –auto percepciones y percepciones de los “otros”– que forman parte de la producción de la desigualdad en el acceso a la educación.

Heteronormativity, Masculinity and Prejudice in Mobile Apps: The Case of Grindr in a Brazilian City

ABSTRACT In this study our goal was to examine the masculinity associated to heteronormativity in a gay app from the users’ point of view, which was made through an inductive study based on semistructured interviews with app users. Main results suggest that Grindr is used as a contemporary form of sociability, mainly because it provides comfort and distance from segregated spaces. At the same time, it allows discretion in sexual encounters, which only happen between “equals”: white, young, athletic, handsome, and not effeminate men, and all those who differ from this profile are repelled. Heteronormativity imposes a pattern of masculinity that has overwhelmed everyone indiscriminately. Those who do not fit this profile can only be resigned to a secondary role at virtual community. Thus, technologies like this can aggravate marginalization of those already on the society fringes if forms of sociability continue to reproduce the oppression of prevailing heteronormativity.

Sense and Sensibility: The Theme of Friendship in the Russian Portrait Painting of the Enlightenment Era

In the policed society of the 18th century, the phenomenon of friendship, as M. W. Reddy asserts, evolved into a new form of sociability which offered an emotional refuge from the code of honor and became central for the culture of the Enlightenment. Although there was no necessary contradiction between reason and emotion, sense and sensibility were understood as opposite poles and the concept of friendship was oscillating between them. The present paper reveals the peculiar features of perception of friendship in the second halfof the 18th century in Russia when its importance for culture rapidly increased on the material of double portrait painting. The specifics of the Russian Enlightenment defined by V. Zhivov as “primarily mythological performanceof the state power” were expressed in the idea of the state. This was reflected in male double portraitpainting developing the traditions of parallel depiction and the iconography of gestures which first emerged in the Russian art of the first half of the 18th century in allegorical compositions celebrating peace treaties. In contrast, the European understanding of male friendship visualized in portrait painting was broader, embracing emotional aspects as well (creative friendship, admiration of art). While male friendship in Russia was understoodas a political union or collaboration, the notion of sensibility, i.e. friendship as union of hearts, was usuallyassociated with the female portrait. Models for female friends portraits were always unmarried young ladies: the family life was perceived as dominated exclusively by the responsibilities of a caring wife and mother. Overall, both the female and male friends portrait painting in Russian art, in contrast with European, appears to be inseparable from the family portrait painting in its reduced variant, i.e. portraits of brothers or sisters. The few exceptions are connected with the corporate friendship of young people inside closed educational institutions established by the will of Catherine II in order to breed “an ideal man and a perfect citizen”.

Epilogue 1: Early Modern Ottomans

Epilogue 1: Early Modern Ottomans Joanna Innes (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Ottoman Empire, Periodization The phrase “early modern” caught on among Anglophone historians of Britain and Europe in the 1970s. It resolved a tension between two accounts of when the modern era began: in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation and the “rise of capitalism,” or, as it was then becoming increasingly common to argue, with the industrial revolution—the latter account all too easily entailing the relegation of all that came before to the realm of the “pre-industrial” or (still worse) the “traditional.” The French had already developed a way of making the distinction: the first watershed marked the birth of “histoire moderne”; whereas the Revolution inaugurated “histoire contemporaine.” Anglo-phones by this means acquired a similar tool. The phrase allowed the sixteenth century and after to be “modern,” but a different kind of modern. Though a vision of modernity (with detachable components) remained implicit, by and large the effect was to free the “early modern” period to be modern in its own way. The phrase was attractive to non-Marxists, because it offered an alternative to “feudalism to capitalism” schemas: it opened the way to a characterization of the economic structures and practices of the era in fresh terms. The period thus demarcated was understood to have been characterized by change and crisis—the much debated “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” This in turn was commonly argued to have been at least in part a political crisis, associated with the rise of new kinds of state keen to develop new forms of relationship with society, and also with struggles for pre-eminence between these states—not least those that were developing world-traversing “seaborne empires.” In some tension with these emphases, interest in structural-function-alist anthropology encouraged constructions of “early modern society” as a broadly static system, a meaning-drenched hierarchy, which could be thrown into disorder but tended to reassemble itself back into something like its equilibrium state. In parallel, Malthusian demography encouraged the modelling [End Page 74] of population and the environment as a homeostatic system: crisis-prone but constantly reverting to equilibrium. It is clear from the think-pieces assembled here that, by the time Ottoman-ists embraced the “early modern” in the 1990s and still more during the early twenty-first century, the phrase had acquired somewhat different baggage for Europeanists, and therefore offered different opportunities, and posed different problems. This was partly because of broader changes in historiographical fashion, and partly because understandings of the period were inflected by increasingly upbeat, future-oriented accounts of the eighteenth century, in which interest boomed around this time. As historians responded to sloganizing about “globalization” with their own accounts of and approaches to the “global,” more attention was directed to the many more and less benign forms of European outreach and contact, and to Europeans’ importation and consumption of new exotic commodities, also, to new forms of learning and the impact of “print culture,” and to changing forms of sociability. Analysis of the logic of social roles gave way to stories about “self-fashioning.” While developments in the forms of states were still imagined as having created tensions with subject populations, these were subsumed into a longer narrative about the rise of powerful “fiscal-military” states, which succeeded only inasmuch as they forged effective relationships with their societies. Ottomanists wondering how far to try to locate themselves within this narrative have approached that question with needs and hopes that also distinguish them from the first generation of Europeanist adopters. Contributors to the current discussion repeatedly identify two main drivers: the desire to escape from a narrative of Ottoman history which posits “decline” from the battle of Lepanto onwards, and the desire to enter into more equal comparative or transnational conversations with Europeanists—which have become more possible as Europeanists for their part have become keener to stage such conversations. This contrast (no doubt over-schematized) between two episodes of adoption reminds us that the meaning of phrases such as “early modern” is always changeable and context-dependent. By my reckoning, a small majority of contributors to this discussion see merit in using...

Entre el arte digital y el activismo político

Desde la insurrección Zapatista en México en 1994, algunas prácticas digitales han experimentado con formas de sociabilidad en las que se borran las distinciones entre arte digital y activismo político. Este artículo revisa casos notablemente distintos como Mejor Vida Corp. (1998), sitio*TAXI (2004), El Rancho Electrónico (2013) o Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (2016) que, en el periodo de auge del neoliberalismo en México y su sistemática privatización de las telecomunicaciones, han puesto en el centro de sus estrategias modos singulares de producir formas de sociabilidad mediadas digitalmente. Los comunes será un concepto clave para dilucidar la especificidad de esos procesos de sociabilidad, lo que permitirá caracterizar cómo se producen y mantienen relaciones sociales en los intersticios de la lógica de mercado. Como conclusión, se señalará que en estos procesos de comunalización digital la comunidad no aparece como un presupuesto sino como el incierto resultado de las mediaciones digitales.

Distopia linguistica e isole felici in Carlo Dossi e Giovanni Faldella

Dossi and Faldella are two prestigious figures of one of the most important protest movements, known as the Scapigliatura. However, by analysing their two novels La colonia felice and Sant’Isidoro, I show that there is a crucial contradiction in their work, between the linguistic style (that I call linguistic dystopia) and the content. Thus, I investigate the expressionistic use of language that the two writers employ to criticize the mediocre style of the paternalistic novelists. Meanwhile, I argue that the theme of the happy island they choose is indeed a charming topos in utopian literature, but far from corresponding to a location in which a different form of sociability could be experimented.

Distopia linguistica e isole felici in Carlo Dossi e Giovanni Faldella

Dossi and Faldella are two prestigious figures of one of the most important protest movements, known as the Scapigliatura. However, by analysing their two novels La colonia felice and Sant’Isidoro, I show that there is a crucial contradiction in their work, between the linguistic style (that I call linguistic dystopia) and the content. Thus, I investigate the expressionistic use of language that the two writers employ to criticize the mediocre style of the paternalistic novelists. Meanwhile, I argue that the theme of the happy island they choose is indeed a charming topos in utopian literature, but far from corresponding to a location in which a different form of sociability could be experimented.