Social Constellations Research Articles

The Polish milky ways A socio-historical case of the human-nonhuman relationship

This article discusses the socio-historical case of the human – non-human networks of Polish farmers engaged in milk production and cow herding. “Milky ways” is a term referring to var­ious ways, networks and social constellations which determine the socio-political landscape of Polish milk and dairy production and cow herding. The analysis includes ways in which, in various timeframes (before the Second World War, during Socialism, in the present time), milk is remembered to have linked a farming community and served as ways of sustenance for various types of farmers and local inhabitants (e.g. Jews, townspeople). The article explores what actors (people, products, spaces, and politics) formed the milky-way network, bringing into question the well-being and coping strategies of present-day farmers. Data for this study was collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Poland in the summer of 2019, as well as between 2010 and 2014 in villages around a small Podlachian town.

Visualization as irritation: producing knowledge about medieval courts through uncertainty.

Visualizations are ubiquitous in data-driven research, serving as both tools for knowledge production and genuine means of knowledge communication. Despite criticisms targeting the alleged objectivity of visualizations in the digital humanities (DH) and reflections on how they may serve as representations of both scholarly perspective and uncertainty within the data analysis pipeline, there remains a notable scarcity of in-depth theoretical grounding for these assumptions in DH discussions. It is our understanding that only through theoretical foundations such as basic semiotic principles and perspectives on media modality one can fully assess the use and potential of visualizations for innovation in scholarly interpretation. We argue that visualizations have the capacity to "productively irritate" existing scholarly knowledge in a given research field. This does not just mean that visualizations depict patterns in datasets that seem not in line with prior research and thus stimulate deeper examination. Complementarily, "irritation" here consists of visualizations producing uncertainty about their own meaning-yet it is precisely this uncertainty in which the potential for greater insight lies. It stimulates questions about what is depicted and what is not. This turns out to be a valuable resource for scholarly interpretation, and one could argue that visualizing big data is particularly prolific in this sense, because due to their complexity researchers cannot interpret the data without visual representations. However, we argue that "productive irritation" can also happen below the level of big data. We see this potential rooted in the genuinely semiotic and semantic properties of visual media, which studies in multimodality and specifically in the field of Bildlinguistik have carved out: a visualization's holistic overview of data patterns is juxtaposed to its semantic vagueness, which gives way to deep interpretations and multiple perspectives on that data. We elucidate this potential using examples from medieval English legal history. Visualizations of data relating to legal functions and social constellations of various people in court offer surprising insights that can lead to new knowledge through "productive irritation."

Alone together? Solitary and shared visiting practices of pairs in the art museum

ABSTRACT As most visitors attend museums accompanied, this paper investigates visiting practices in the art museum by asking: How do visitors, coming as a group of two, explore the exhibition space and reflect upon their visit? The paper draws on an empirical study at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere with data collected through the Visitracker app, combining Tracking and Timing, survey, and Social Meaning Mapping. Our findings show how the entanglement of spatial and social constellations shapes movement patterns and practices such as walking, looking at art, reading labels and talking. The 7:3 ratio of solitary versus shared interactions demonstrates that visitors, on average, act more on their own than together in the art museum. Yet, frequencies differ widely among pairs (from independent to intimate ones) and practices (i.e., being more social on the go and less while focused) pointing toward the benefits of being alone and together in the art museum.

Sociologija religije Hansa Mola: dosezi identitetske teorije religije / Hans Mol’s Sociology of Religion: The Scope of the Identity Theory of Religion

The subject of this paper is the Hans Mol’s sociology of religion, which is also known as the “identity theory of religion”. The aim of the paper is to show Hans Mol’s contributions based on the analysis and critical assumptions of the identity theory of religion. In order to shed light on contemporary social constellations that necessarily imply the presence of religion in the “public sphere”, the paper proves the plausibility and scientific usability of the identity theory of religion in the analysis of religion and its connection with identity, politics and culture. In accordance with the saying, the paper shows that the sociology of religion by Hans Mol in toto should be observed and understood in its own interpretative range. In this sense, identity theory of religion does not represent just one innovative platform for understanding religion as “sacralization of identity”; it must be understood in the context of its methodological and paradigmatic significance for the sociology of religion as a whole. For this reason, the paper highlights the theoretical coordinates of Hans Mol’s sociology of religion, which is found at the intersection of sociological, anthropological and secularization theories of religion.

Utilizing outdoor quiz game in secondary school

Outdoor play is a natural way for children of all ages to do physical activity. The advantages of being outdoor in an educational setting have been elaborated. For instance, the social constellations may change when outdoors as the social structures defined in the classroom setting no longer apply as the pupils may display different skillsets outdoors as to indoors. Using games for learning purposes have been employed for several decades. As far back as in 1904, the Landlord’s Game was used to teach people about real estate and taxation. Since then games have mostly been developed for leisure purposes, but some also for educational purposes. In this paper, we elaborate on the use of a Norwegian developed quiz game called ‘ZippyGO’. Most of the research on ZippyGO have been focusing on students’ perceptions of the use of this quiz game. In this paper, however, we focus on the teachers’ perceptions and use of an outdoor quiz game for educational purposes. In this particular case, four teachers have collaborated on developing questions for the quizzing. We conducted mixed method ways of collecting data, surveys and semi-structured interviews. Our investigations have focused mainly on how the teachers perceive working on developing adequate questions for the quiz and how they perceive pupils may react to using the quiz game. We have also challenged the teachers on their perceptions of games for learning purposes in general and about being outdoor during class.

Learning in the Field. Didactics of Learning

Following the slogan “From seeing to understanding”, this paper will focus on a Roman colony. A visit to the Archaeological Park Xanten (APX), the area of Colonia Ulpia Trajana (CUT), provides lasting insights into everyday Roman life and urban culture of the Roman Empire, the political environment of the New Testament. The perspective on living in the colony emphasizes a deeper understanding of the socio-political framework and social constellations in early Christianity. Through the unique combination of reconstructions of entire building complexes such as a Roman hostel, currently ongoing archaeological excavations and the new museum of roman archaeology with its innovative concept, new ways of conveying information are being pursued and access to the Roman world is being opened up in a very vivid way. On the one hand, the paper will show possibilities how the APX can be used practically as a place of learning as learning in the field according to the subject of this paper. On the other hand, the didactic approach to the reconstruction of antiquity using the example of the CUT will be critically discussed.

Creativity, transcendence, and social constellations

As happens in the very notion of social creativity that presents itself objectified in different figures over time, in the same way the types of transcendence -as condition of posibility of creativity- change over time. We are going to analyze four socio-historical constellations of the creativity-transcendence binomial: The first of them is the one represented by a myth-ritual structure embodied by Homo Sapiens in primitive cultures; the second of them is the one that arises 500 B.C. ago with the “axial revolution” in China, India, Iran, Palestine and Greece supported by new carriers of creative action; the third of them is configured at the beginning of modernity in the 18th century, with the Protestant Reformation and immediately afterwards with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, supported by new carriers of creative action; the fourth constellation of creativity-transcendence emerges today with the convergence of technologies - nanotechnology, biotechnology, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence - where the sense of human nature as a vector within a hybrid cognitive collectivity made up of humans and things is altered.

An exploratory study of children’s peer touch in a Swedish preschool: touch forms, bodily arrangements, and social constellations

ABSTRACT This study explores children’s peer touch in a Swedish preschool using video observations. Two main aspects of children’s touch in focus: (1) to what extent do children use touch within the peer group and with whom and (2) in what ways do children touch each other (i.e. what touch forms are used and what areas of other children’s bodies are touched). Data consists of 10 hours of video recordings, featuring 35 children aged 1–5 years. The results suggest that touch is available for children in a range of social arrangements: it was common in children’s peer-group interactions, and it was not limited to specific child constellations. The most prominent categories were affectionate touches (embraces, holding hands, or pats), but the children also used touch to control their peers’ conduct (grabbing, pulling, and pushing) as well as adult-like embodied directives (shepherding moves). The social and material context of a preschool may contribute to practices where touch is part of ordinary interactions and cultural practices within the peer group. The study demonstrates some differences between educator-child, and children’s peer touch thereby highlighting the importance for educators to consider children’s specific touch cultures when attending to, supporting, and shaping children’s peer – relations.

Shifting Patterns of Antisemitism in Latin America: Xenophobia, Exclusion, and Inclusion

AbstractThis article analyzes several patterns of antisemitism in twentieth-century Latin America. It identifies historical moments when carriers of social and political ideas projected negative images of Jews, sometimes pushing anti-Jewish policies and at times leading violent actions against Jews. Thus, antisemitism served to mobilize in defense of national identity; as a reaction to Jewish peddlers perceived as a threat to national economies; as a basis for the generalized rejection of “undesirable refugees” during World War II and the Holocaust; and as a Cold War phenomenon, along with anticommunism and neo-Nazism. Like other forms of xenophobia, antisemitism was grounded in prejudice and the demonization of a supposed enemy rather than being based on verified evidence. Analysis suggests that antisemitism has been deeply rooted in Latin America and has manifested over time with changing historical and social constellations. At the same time, while Judeophobic prejudices and actions have been intimidating and have at times precluded the legal immigration of Jews, antisemitism has rarely become dominant or led to systemic social discrimination, massive expulsion, or mass genocide, unlike in Europe.

A beautiful place: Postmigrant trajectories in and around Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld

Tempelhofer Feld, in Berlin, Germany, is a large urban park located in the south of the city. Returned to the residents as a public green area in the early 2000s, the park has since become increasingly popular. Plans for a development of the area (including turning part of the area into a residential compound) have been consistently met with strong opposition. This paper looks at how regular users (with a background of migration) engage with the park, across a variety of activities and social constellations. Even though, to a casual observer, the park doesn’t seem to offer much more than a flat sequence of grassy lawns and asphalt lanes, there is, among regulars, a strong consensus on the beauty of the place. It’s an experiential (as opposed to contemplative) beauty, that enhances people’s sense of emplacement, of being present in space, as well as their affective entanglement with it. Through their relationship with the park, and among themselves, the research participants reorient themselves as Berlin residents, negotiating and reconfiguring the often narrow confines of their situation as migrants.

‘Who likes kidneys?’ ‘Fried in the pan?’

Taking a video of the Serbian paramilitary Scorpions unit recording killing as a starting point and drawing upon my own research on WWII and the German genocide, the purpose of this essay is to probe the methodological and ethical challenges of visual sources (videos, photographs) that mediate acts and experiences of violence. Today’s viewers might first notice the striking violence and horror of the Scorpions unit video, reacting in many cases with shock, alienation, or empathy. Once we engage with the gaze of the videographer, it becomes clear that the recorded scenes follow a completely different logic. Despite its indisputably violent content, the video manages to convey the impression of male bonding, fun, and bravado in a fiercely violent and racialised armed conflict, in which ethnic, religious, and national categories were murderously conflated. The Scorpions unit, like many other professional killers, was embedded in a climate of impunity and an economy of violence with significant gendered dynamics at stake that we need to question. The act of recording is a highly performative and self-referential endeavour that calls us for investigating not solely social practices but also postures and gesture as acts of visual mediation. A first section reflects on the social constellations of collective violence of perpetrators as ingroups. In the second part, the focus shifts from the violent action itself to the semantics of violent gestures, before turning in the third section to reflect upon (audio)visual recordings of violence. Visual and audio-visual sources as media hence invite us to think about the complex relationship between artefact and actors. Methodological and heuristic questions about how we deal with images of violence, particularly those captured by perpetrators, constitute, as this essay argues, one of the major challenges of studying the twentieth-century photographic age and even more so, our current digital era.

The expanding beauty regime: Or, why it has become so important to look good

In contemporary societies, physical appearance is more important to more people than ever before. This article sketches the expansion of this contemporary beauty regime. Drawing mainly on European data, I argue that since the late 1800s the societal importance of appearance grew, as a result of expanding media and consumer cultures, social democratization, a shift to a service-based economy and the rise of new media. People came to have more developed and diverse tastes in human beauty and more opportunities to cultivate their appearance. It became more important to be beautiful, for men and women, across the course of life, in more domains of life. Drawing on the tradition of process sociology inspired by Weber and Elias, I interpret this gradual raising of cultural standards as the emergence of a beauty regime involving new standards for social control and self-control, standards for moral and aesthetic evaluation and standards for social worth and self-worth. The beauty regime is demanding and constraining for individuals but contributes to the emergence of durable social constellations that people might consider progress. The beauty regime makes appearance more central to many domains of life, and thus more consequential for identities and inequalities, self-worth and social worth.

New constellations of mnemonic wars: An introduction

This special issue titled Mnemonic Wars: New Constellations has two objectives. First, it maps some of the current memory conflicts in different parts of the world, focusing on their topics and novel political, cultural and social constellations. Second, the issue problematizes how the different currents of revitalized national politics and globalization processes influence and sometimes even trigger memory wars. Who are the contemporary memory agents fostering confrontational memory politics? What tools, media and practices do they use to promote their interpretations of the past? How are these memory wars being played out internationally? In what ways do global developments, such as the spread of social media, the emergence of transnational memory politics or the establishment of transnational networks of memory activists, influence today’s memory conflicts? Finally, how do these discursive struggles translate into real-life conflicts? In their introductory article, the guest editors discern between the older and more recent approaches to research on memory conflicts and set the conceptual agenda for the entire issue.

Using Correlation to Explore the Impact of Corona Virus Disease on Socioeconomics

In the 21stcentury, the tragedy of the pandemic shocks the world. This non-natural disaster is called COVID-19. Its dominant effect is also worrying about social and economic conflicts at local, national, and even international levels. The orientation of this research is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the socioeconomic aspects in Indonesia from 2020-2022. We set the research using official/secondary publications. Data analysis was interpreted in three formats: Pearson, Kendall’s, and Spearman’s correlations. It channelled empirical testing through Microsoft Excel and SPSS v.25. Social items include migration, mortality, domestic violence, and sexual harassment, while the nine economic items are per capita spending, well-being, unemployment, poverty, and labor productivity. Then, statistical instruments were reviewed based on the correlation coefficient and level of significance (5% for Pearson and 1% for Kendall’s and Spearman’s). The results are not much different between Pearson’s approach, Kendall’s and Spearman’s. In Pearson model, it proved a negative correlation when COVID-19 increases, so migration, unemployment, poverty, and labor productivity decrease. COVID-19 has had a positive impact on mortality, domestic violence, sexual harassment, per capita spending, and well-being. In Kendall’s and Spearman’s tests, poverty and labor productivity have actually increased because of COVID-19. Implementing semi-lockdown is a priority so that the social and macroeconomic constellations continue without ignoring the latent dangers of COVID-19. The limitations of the study are discussed in the future. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2022-SPER-012 Full Text: PDF

Does emancipation devour its children? Beyond a stalled dialectic of emancipation.

Emancipation serves not only as a midwife for progressive agendas such as greater equality and sustainability but also as their gravedigger. This diagnosis underpins Ingolfur Blühdorn’s ‘dialectic of emancipation’, which depicts a dilemma but offers no perspective on how to deal with it. By drawing on Foucault, this article suggests conceiving of emancipation as a task moderns are confronted with even if a given emancipatory project has come to devour its children. Claiming autonomy from given social constellations is key to this task; key also is judging between legitimate and illegitimate claims to autonomy. In late modernity, the criteria for such judgement are no longer universally given. Instead of regarding the latter as entry into mere subjectivism (Blühdorn), this article presents judgement as a key political, ‘world building’-activity (Arendt), a critical social theory may join in, by not only observing the world but by also taking sides in it.

Brokers in the tea trade between China and West Africa

Brokers have played important roles in the trade of green tea between China and Mali, from the 19th century when tea first came to Mali up to the present. They mediate between tea buyers and sellers, work on their own account, use soft skills, knowledge and networks and make a living from the commission they gain. This article examines the work of brokers in the tea trade, the social constellations in which they are active and the scope of their activity. Based on extensive field research in Mali and China, this article shows how brokers create their own jobs in a dynamic business landscape, which is often delimited by governmental policies, competing entrepreneurial activities and social movements.

Authoritarianism as pathology of recognition: the sociological substance and actuality of the authoritarian personality

The rise of the notions of authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality is directly linked to pathologies of early modernity and to social constellations that systematically produce dispositions of character that ultimately form the base of Nazi fascism. The aim of this article, thus, is to explore sociological actuality, i.e., the explanatory power and informative value of the concepts of authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality. Therefore, throughout the article, authoritarianism is framed as a social, i.e., relational approach, similar to that of recognition. However, as authoritarianism does not point towards autonomy, it can be read as a pathology of recognition. The text starts by presenting authoritarianism and authoritarian personality as introduced to the academic debate by early Critical Theory, including a description of the historical and intellectual conditions of the time. It then explores three essential elements of these concepts and how they have changed from then to now; namely, authorities, authoritarian measures, and psychological dispositions used to accept both. The sociological tools thus laid open are then used to respond to current questions about authoritarianism using the example of the impact of experts on crisis discourses. Pointing towards discursive mediation, I ask when and how the need to rely on experts fosters authoritarianism. There are basically two ways of understanding authoritarianism as still present in our society. The first is as a backward-leaning ideology of the good old times. Especially in politics, we can find a wish to overcome complex democratic decision-making procedures with strong, authoritarian leadership. The second form involves understanding authoritarianism not as a personal authority but as a swarm authority in the modern and (digital) panopticon. This pathology of recognition leads to alienated relations with others as mere anonymous providers of evaluations.

Queering Kritische Psychologie

This paper aims at connecting the Berlin school of Critical psychology with queer feminist theories by focusing on the concept of condition-meaning-reason (Bedingungs-Bedeutungs-Begründungsanalyse, BBBA). To this end, we will first discuss basic aspects of the BBBA concept, which forms an important analytical tool of German Critical psychology. Second, we will present possible connecting lines to queer feminist approaches. In so doing, we will argue that the concept of conditions offers links to feminist theories of New Materialism and (Neo)Marxist Critique. The concept of meaning contains parallels to the Foucauldian concept of discourse, which is central to Butler’s theories of performativity and various subsequent queer feminist schools of thought. In turn, the concept of reason provides an opportunity to understand why subjects who live in similar material conditions and social constellations of meaning act differently. The fictional example of single mothers serves to illustrate the facets of the BBBA concept and the condition/meaning/reason analysis. In this way, we want to emphasise the potential of Critical psychology for queer feminist approaches and break new ground methodologically by integrating the previously divergent insights of Marxist, poststructuralist and psychosocial critiques.

Globalization, Secularization and Collective Identities

The diverse and paradoxical nature of globalization processes has given rise to new social constellations that shape transnational, national and local spaces. The historicity of identities, their past and present conditions, the changes they went through, the ways they influence the feeling of full membership in a community and the differentiation derived from cultural diversity and pluralism underscore the need for revisiting theoretical explorations. This paper addresses past and present social, cultural and religious processes in an era of transformations derived from the complexity of today’s interconnected world and on the light of historical encounters. The need for revising the singularity of social and cultural trajectories and the religious trends gravitating in society is approached through snapshots of a twofold historical encounter: between Modernity and Latin America, and between Judaism and Modernity. Both express entrenched dilemmas of the binaries periphery-center and universal-particular. While one of them raised the issue of the dominant program of Modernity as a Western project, the other was entailed in the assumptions of one hegemonic religious constellation.

From ‘identity’ to ‘belonging’ in social research: Plurality, social boundaries, and the politics of the self

This text develops a theory of belonging critically building upon identity-research - while doing more justice to the dynamic nature of social constellations and to the multipositionality of social actors. The concept of ‘belonging’ is introduced as a combination of commonality, mutuality, and attachments. A vital opposition is made between the collective constellations of belonging and the individual navigations through multiple collective assemblages during the life course. It is argued that these navigations entail tackling manifold forms of boundary dynamics as collective belonging creates regimes that guard collectivities against the outsiders and also against the members’ attempts to abandon ‘their’ collectivities. The analysis draws upon ethnicity research, immigration research and globalisation research, i.e. in fields where issues of belonging are as vital as they are challenged, and therefore, they are often politicized. Rather than taking a specific collective belonging for granted, e.g. ethnic, religious or national, this contribution addresses the situated nature of individual positionings, the possibility of combining different dimensions of belonging, and the necessity to belong together in contemporary societies.