Understanding Of Norms Research Articles

Beyond Death and Mourning in A Dark Song and We Are Still Here

Drawing on Ewa Domańska’s theory of necrovitalism (2017), Rosi Braidotti’s works that engage with life/death ‘dichotomy’ (2006; 2008; 2013), and affect theories, I hope to show how normative understanding of death and mourning, typical for horror cinema as such, are questioned and transformed through an affective engagement with spectral soundscapes in two recent horror films – A Dark Song (2016) and We Are Still Here (2015). To a large extent, both films replicate normative understanding of what constitutes a reasonable occasion for grieving: the sudden and seemingly unjust death of a child. A child’s lost life, often seen as the pinnacle of felt grief, is then mourned passionately by the mother (rather than the father), whose determination and intuition guide her over the life-death threshold in order to reunite with her dead child or find some kind of closure. And yet rather than stopping at representing bereavement as a finite process, these films incorporate mourning into their cinematic language and use it to comment on the limits of Western definitions of death and life after death. In both films, encounters with otherworldly necropersons (to borrow Ewa Domańska’s term) disturb the zoe/bios distinction that organises Western mourning practices. More importantly, since these encounters rely on sound rather than vision, the protagonists (and the viewers) can no longer depend onscopic regimes of knowledge and are encouraged to think/feel about death differently.

Enacting alcohol realities: gendering practices in Australian studies on 'alcohol-related presentations' to emergency departments.

'Alcohol-fuelled violence' and its prevention has been the subject of recent intense policy debate in Australia, with the content of this debate informed by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. In particular, given the well-established relationship between masculinities and violence, the meagre attention paid to the role of gender in alcohol research and policy recommendations stands out as a critical issue. In this article, which draws on recent work in feminist science studies and science and technology studies, we focus on the treatment of gender, alcohol and violence in Australian research on 'alcohol-related presentations' to emergency departments (EDs), analysing this type of research because of its prominence in policy debates. We focus on four types of 'gendering practice' through which research genders 'alcohol-related presentations' to EDs: omitting gender from consideration, ignoring clearly gendered data when making gender-neutral policy recommendations, methodologically designing out gender and addressing gender in terms of risk and vulnerability. We argue that ED research practices and their policy recommendations reproduce normative understandings of alcohol's effects and of the operations of gender in social arrangements, thereby contributing to the 'evidence base' supporting unfair policy responses.

Visual and non-literal representations as academic literacy modalities

The normative understanding of academic literacy relates mainly to textual reading and writing. While texts might well be dominant, other literacies such as numeracy and visual literacy are equally dominant in higher education studies. The context of academic literacy is here located within five first-year diploma subjects where visual literacy and numeracy emerged as dominant modalities for subject content representation. Lecturers’ perceptions of reading requirements for their respective subjects and a review of summative assessments provided the data for content analysis using academic literacy specifications as data codes. Literature on academic literacies and disciplinary literacies provided the framework for data analysis and discussion. The findings revealed a constellation of textual-visual-numeracy modalities that necessitated modal shifts in translating and transforming subject content across modalities. This study foregrounds the need to support first-year students with discourse analysis of visual and non-literal representations to provide epistemological access to the field of practice.

The Essence of the Fundamental Rights to Privacy and Data Protection: Finding the Way Through the Maze of the CJEU’s Constitutional Reasoning

AbstractIn the constitutional shaping of the concept of essence of fundamental rights, the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU (“CJEU” or “the Court”) in the field of privacy and data protection plays a crucial role. The Court’s interpretation of this notion had a considerable impact not only jon perception of the essence in other fields of law, but also on the constitutional doctrine more generally. This Article focuses on specificities of the notion of essence of fundamental rights to privacy and the protection of personal data from Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. After a general analysis, situating this notion into the framework of multi-level protection of fundamental rights in Europe, the Article addresses further interpretative challenges relating to the essence in the Court’s case law. At the core of the analysis are the Schrems and Digital Rights Ireland cases, where the CJEU developed, for the first time, the modalities of the breach of essence of fundamental rights to privacy and data protection and laid down constitutional foundations for interpretation of this notion. Further jurisprudence, including the Tele2 Sverige and Opinion 1/15 cases, is analyzed as an example of fine-tuning of the CJEU’s approach towards the normative understanding of this concept. Against this backdrop, the Article elaborates on the importance of insights in the fields of privacy and data protection for the general constitutional understanding of the concept of essence and proposes a generalized method for determination of infringement of essence in fundamental rights jurisprudence.

Discourses of (hetero)sexism in popular music

AbstractThis article analyses interview data to explore how participants negotiated discourses of (hetero)sexism in relation to the controversial pop songBlurred Lines.Our previous work, based on questionnaire data, interrogated interpretations ofBlurred Lines(Handforth, Paterson, Coffey-Glover & Mills 2017) and showed how participants drew on discourses of sexism in their responses. Several participants experienced significant conflict in their interpretations, and here we focus on these more complex interpretations, considering the “small stories” (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) identified in follow-up interviews with participants. Individual narratives acted as mechanisms through which participants linkedBlurred Linesto wider issues such as rape culture, drawing parallels between these and their own lives. Following research in queer linguistics (King 2014;Leap 2014;Motschenbacher 2010) our use of thematic analysis, corpus linguistic tools and narrative analysis highlights the various subject positions that participants negotiated in their storytelling, and how these positions both echoed and challenged normative understandings of gender and sexuality.

“Let's Call Ourselves the Super Elite”: Using the Collective Behavior Tradition to Analyze Trump's America

The mid‐twentieth century “collective behavior” school asserted that (1) collective behavior—the actions of crowds, movements, and other gatherings—had distinct dynamics; (2) such action was often “nonrational,” or not governed by cost‐benefit calculation; and (3) collective behavior could pose a threat to liberal democracy because of these features. While this tradition fell out of scholarly favor, the 2016 election has given us empirical reasons to revisit some elements of collective behavior approaches. We argue for three key orienting concerns, drawn from this tradition, to understand the current political era. First is a focus on authoritarianism and populism, particularly among those who feel disaffected and isolated from political institutions, pared of psychologistic determinism and geared more sensitively to their manifestations as a political style. Second is a focus on racialized resentment, strain, and perceptions of status decline, especially in how such feelings are activated when people are confronted with disruptions to their lives. Third is an analysis of “emergent norms” and the extent to which political actors produce normative understandings of contextually appropriate action that are distinct from traditional political behavior. We elaborate on these themes, apply them to examples from current politics, and suggest ways to incorporate them into contemporary sociological research.

Habermas, Taylor, and Connolly on Secularism, Pluralism, and the Post-Secular Public Sphere

The main purpose of this paper is to explore and understand the relationships between secularism, pluralism, and the post-secular public sphere in the thought of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and William Connolly. The three authors develop a thorough critique of secularism which implies a radical break with the dogmatic idea of removing religion from the public sphere. My main objective is to show that this critique is related to a normative understanding of our post-secular situation and requires a rethinking of the boundaries of the public sphere in relation to the predicament of pluralism. Arguing against the post-metaphysical conception of secularism, Taylor develops a critique of Habermas’s “institutional translation proviso”, and Connolly stresses the agonistic dimension of the post-secular public sphere. I take these criticisms into account, while arguing that Taylor and Connolly are unable to provide a sound basis for the legitimacy of our institutional settings. In contrast to Taylor and Connolly, I propose a reading of Habermas’s theory based on the internal relationship between universal justification and the everyday contexts of pre-political solidarity. I conclude with a focus on the need to take into account the agonistic dimension of the post-secular public sphere.

Keep score and punish: Brandom’s concept of responsibility

Although seldom examined and not explained by Robert Brandom himself, the concept of responsibility is as important as the concept of inference for Brandom’s account of discursivity. Whereas ‘inference’ makes explicit the propositional content of concepts as the inferentially structured totality of their relations of material incompatibility, ‘responsibility’ makes explicit the normative force of these relations. ‘Responsibility’ thus becomes the paradigm of understanding normativity’s binding force – and my critical reading demonstrates that it fosters a moralizing, juridifying and economizing understanding of normativity’s binding force. Furthermore, a diagnostic interpretation of Nietzsche’s genealogy of ‘responsibility’ reveals that Brandom’s concept of ‘responsibility’ is not an exception but exemplary for how ‘responsibility’ is used in philosophy.

Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship throughImperial Eyes

The contact zone is described as the space of imperial encounter. Against a backdrop of work that has used Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the contact zone to examine culture-making, and destabilize normative understandings of division, distinction, and bordering, the paper interrogates the value of utilizing the concept in multispecies contexts. To do so, the paper considers the relationship between the contact zone and the concept of encounter, noting how they overlap and depart as approaches to questioning embodied difference, colonial histories, and immanent potential. Turning to the BBC documentary series Blue Planet II, the paper uses the concept of the contact zone and discourse analysis to examine its dominant ideas, frontiers of difference, and the means through which alternative geographies are both foreclosed and enabled. It demonstrates how the concept of the contact zone can draw attention to the ocean as the documentary's site of production, where different forms of knowledge, technology, people, elements, and non-human life grapple with each other in conditions of uneven power. In moving between narrative and oceanic contact zones, the paper raises questions about practices of knowledge-making, uneven structures of power, and decipherability, to demonstrate what can be gained from staying with the postcolonial framing of the contact zone as a critical tool of analysis in multispecies scholarship.

Queer postmemory

Drawing on 10 years of activism in Turkey’s trans movement and seven months of fieldwork in Istanbul on mutually formed mother and daughter relationship among trans women, this article looks at alternative understandings of ‘inter-generational’ transmission of memory. How can we engage alternative family making processes and non-normative formations of time with memory transmission rather than merely identify ‘inter-generational’ memory in advance with pre-established non-normative systems? Or can we talk about ‘inter-generational’ memories without knowing what ‘generation’ really means? Inspired by these questions, Marianne Hirsch’s work on postmemory and narratives of self-identified trans mothers and daughters, in this article the author discusses the conceptualization of ‘queer postmemory’ in order to think critically on unmarked temporal and familial dimensions in the study of collective and personal memory. While refusing to position memory as an outcome of predetermined temporal frameworks within normative understandings of family, the author looks at strangely remembered things through glimpses of other types of time, other types of relationalities and other types of inheritability.

Listening to the literature: a case for centering writing in critical sociology of sport pedagogy

ABSTRACT This article argues for a pedagogical approach to the sociology of sport and physical education that centers writing. Drawing on student reflections from my first year seminar in academic writing ‘Social Inequality and Sports,’ I demonstrate that students are more inclined to entertain the imperatives of critical pedagogies in the context of sport – the development of critical consciousness and transformative praxis – when they are empowered to take greater ownership over their own learning through intensive writing that is guided by principles of rhetorical listening. Writing assignments – including reading responses, a literature review paper, and a work of original analysis of an empirical site or text of their own choosing – that require students to listen to the academic literature on sport and social inequality challenge them to reevaluate their preconceived notions about sport, facilitating outcomes sought by critical pedagogies. Responses to an automatic writing prompt at the beginning and end of the semester reveal that this approach can yield a dramatic perspectival shift in students who enter the course with typical investments in normative understandings of sporting cultures, prompting them to leave it with a newfound openness to critique.

Words that Rape: A Normative Quest for What Rape is and is Not

Although the legal discourse on the offense of is vast, perhaps more so than regarding any other offense, is still an elusive normative concept. The doctrine of has evolved and expanded significantly throughout the years, to include diverse physical interactions and different social settings. The academic discourse on the offense typically focuses on one form of rape, or even on a small element of one form. This essay provides a significantly broader observation that could deepen the normative understanding of rape. Can we, by observing the diverse doctrines of rape, coercive sex, incompetent sex, uninformed sex and unconscious sex, extract a clear and coherent normative message? Philosophically speaking, what is and why? This tackles these very difficult questions, by examining these forms of in an analytic normative way, an innovative intricate academic task. In order to better understand the normative foundations of and extract the precise normative message from the law, this task requires a thorough analysis of notions of and their doctrinal boundaries, and an examination of what counts, and what does not count as rape, and most importantly: why. To do that, this essay presents an innovative dichotomy, analytically dividing the perpetrator-victim interaction into major facets: the physics of rape, the settings of rape, and the accurate legal labeling of rape. While unfolding what constitutes rape and what is excluded from rape, this unprecedented analytic observation reveals significant normative dissonances and cracks in the modern conceptions of rape. After the thorough analytic journey, having identified major normative dissonances in current doctrines, the conclusion is the offense is normatively shattered. This article proposes to abolish the designation and start anew, categorically dividing sexual offenses into sexual coercion and sexual abuse, and offering subcategories and key parameters regarding the measuring of severity.

Unequal Youth Migrations: Exploring the Synchrony between Social Ageing and Social Mobility among Post-Crisis European Migrants

This article explores how symbolic boundaries between youth and adulthood shape experiences of upward and downward social mobility among EU migrants. Drawing on 56 biographical interviews with Italians who moved to England after the 2008 economic crisis, and focusing on three individual case studies, the article reveals that normative understandings of adulthood emerge as a central concern from participants’ biographical accounts, and that they mobilise unequal forms of cultural, economic and social capital to maintain a feeling of ‘synch’ between social ageing and social mobility. Drawing on Bourdieu and the sociology of adulthood, the article proposes the notion of synchrony to explore how tensions in the relationship between social ageing and social mobility shape experiences of migration. This allows for an innovative theoretical bridge between cultural class analysis, adulthood studies and migration studies, and for a better understanding of how intersections of class and age shape intra-European migrations.

The Occidentalist Imaginary of Istanbul Modern: A Case for Social Imaginaries in the Age of Global Contemporary

This article discusses the ways in which Occidentalism, as a dialogical making of Turkish modernity associated with a non-Western context, extends to the contemporary era as the social imaginary of the artistic field. The social imaginary, as defined by Charles Taylor, is the shared structure of meanings, and provides a basis for generating common practices while, at the same time, granting a sense of legitimacy for a group of people. In this respect, the article claims that Occidentalism, which ultimately refers to the boundary management of what is imagined as West and East, underlines the myth of the artistic social imaginary. The Occidentalist imaginary sanctions artists as the competent performers of the boundary management between the West and the East, past and present, local and global, with its shifting associations. As Taylor notes, the ways in which people imagine their social existence are carried in images, stories and legends. This article investigates the narratives of art museum exhibitions to grasp both factual and normative understandings. To understand the interplay between change and continuity in the Occidentalist imaginary, the article focuses on Istanbul Modern, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Istanbul founded in 2004. The analysis of narratives produced through exhibitions and the interpretation of the museum’s collections not only reveals the patterns and shifts in the ways of producing the Occidentalist imaginary, but also illustrates the logic that sustains its extension to the global contemporary era.

Eros against empire

Abstract This article explores arguments for erotic freedom made by three prominent leftist groups in the Dutch Antilles, illuminating an anti-colonial tradition that centred embodied pleasure over and alongside political sovereignty. Returning to the rich written legacies of Kambio and Vitó ‐ groups that emerged from the radical student movements of the 1960s ‐ as well as Union di Muhé Antiano (Union of Antillean Women, UMA), an anti-colonial feminist group active on Curaçao in the 1970s‐1990s, this article engages archival sources, oral history interviews, and unpublished ephemera spanning three decades of radical activism in the Netherlands and Curaçao. It meditates on why ‐ despite the richness of these archives ‐ few have commented on the inspired defence of erotic expression that resonates across them. Building off of Caribbean and Black feminist theory, this article suggests that radical Antillean conceptions of freedom have eluded scholarly detection because they eschew normative understandings of decolonisation premised on national independence and territorial sovereignty.

Queer Politics of Boycott at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine

AbstractIn 2012, Palestinian anticolonial-queer activists organized a workshop and conference at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine in Porto Alegre, Brazil, titled “Queer Visions at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine.” Queer Visions brought different activists together who had been organizing against Israel’s state-sponsored pinkwashing campaign and for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Since 2010, Palestinian queer activism has publicly engaged with the Palestinian Call for BDS and has urged the Palestinian BDS movement and those in solidarity with it to mobilize around Israel’s pinkwashing campaign and work to better understand Zionism’s underlying settler-colonial sexual politics. Taking the WSF: Free Palestine as a crucial moment in queer engagements with the politics of boycott, this essay reflects on the challenges faced by anticolonial-queer activism in the context of Israel/Palestine and the challenges it poses to Zionist settler colonialism and normative understandings of queer politics and Palestinian liberation.

Queer Polyfamily Performativity: Family Practices and Adaptive Strategies Among LGBTQ + Polyamorists

This research explores LGBTQ+ (queer) polyamorous family practices. This work is critical for family studies, as queer polyamorous families challenge heteronormativity, resist assimilationism, and broaden cultural understandings of family. This article presents findings from a larger qualitative study on queer polyamory that involved in-depth interviews with 55 queer adults of diverse identities and backgrounds who had experience with polyamory. Queer polyamorists engage in and value a variety of non-normative family practices, or queer polyfamily performativities, and formulate creative adaptive strategies to monocentric cultural constraints. Yet, their family narratives focus on cultural symbols that are central to conventional understandings of family such as households, children, and support. These findings suggest that queer polyamorous families challenge heteronormativity, but not necessarily by rejecting normative understandings of family. Rather, they expand conventional notions with their unique family performativities. These findings speak to current political struggles, contemporary family practices, and changing meanings of family.

Questions of life and death: (De)constructing human rights norms through US public opinion surveys

AbstractPublic opinion polls on national security issues are often seen as indicators of the strength of international human rights norms. By contrast, we hypothesise that the very act of answering poll questions can weaken citizens’ understandings of important international human rights laws and norms in the very moment they are being measured. We ground this discussion empirically by analysing a new dataset of post-9/11 survey questions on two US national security policies at odds with international human rights norms: ‘enhanced interrogations’ and ‘targeted killing’. In so doing, we encourage a widened research agenda on how international legal and normative understandings are transmitted to the public through surveys. We conclude by highlighting substantive implications for norm scholars and policy implications for norm advocates.

“Equal Opportunity Violence”: Hope Solo and the Rhetoric of Domestic Violence in Sports Media

In 2014, American soccer player Hope Solo was accused of domestic violence. Controversy over Solo’s participation in the upcoming 2015 Women’s World Cup tournament flooded news and sports media. Most interestingly for scholars of gender and communication, these conversations equated Solo with National Football League (NFL) players, such as Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, who had also been accused of domestic violence and punished to varying degrees. This discourse both forwarded claims of reverse discrimination and rhetorically masculinized Solo to fold her into normative gendered understandings of violence. The effect was a discursive degendering of violence. This article is concerned with the way that gender and violence are made sense of in sports discourse. I argue that coverage of Solo—specifically, the discourses that tether her to what appear to be her male counterparts and the resulting sense of gender equality—alters cultural understandings of gender and violence in dangerous ways.

Men’s Performance and Image-Enhancing Drug Use as Self-Transformation: Working Out in Makeover Culture

ABSTRACTThis article investigates how men who inject performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) describe their experiences of embodiment and masculinity, locating that analysis in the context of contemporary ‘makeover culture’ and the imperatives of self-transformation. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews we conducted with 60 men who inject PIEDs in Australia, our analysis suggests there is a pragmatic logic associated with PIED use that challenges much research concerning this population, which tends to pathologise men who use PIEDs as disordered in their relationship to their bodies and cultural norms of masculinity. We unpack how the men interviewed describe everyday practices of doing gender in the context of illicit drug use, the implications in normative understandings of maleness and masculinity, and how PIED consumption practices encouraged particular attention to working on the self. Our findings suggest that drug injecting practices can be understood as forms of self-transformation in makeover culture that have the potential to make new, unexpected possibilities for being in the world, and can inform harm reduction measures, including the de-stigmatisation of drug use more broadly.