Social Narratives Research Articles

What would a human-centred ‘social’ Circular Economy look like? Drawing from Max-Neef's Human-Scale Development proposal

The Circular Economy (“CE”) has emerged as a concept to radically transform how resources are used and managed, with promise to solve the ecological turmoil of the prevailing linear economy. Circularity has since been framed as an important concept to contribute to achieving sustainable development. Thus, the CE is increasingly being adopted as key a strategy by various stakeholders, including large corporations and political institutions. Despite seemingly high interest and growing uptake demonstrated by an influx of new business models and policy guidance, there is concern amongst scholars that current interpretations fail to consider the social impacts and implications of this circular shift. There is a notable lack of theoretical contribution to address this void, and without robust theorising this can be an obstacle to effective and transformative practice. This research contributes to addressing this problematic shortcoming by utilising an existing development framework to identify a theoretically grounded direction for the formation of an alternative Social CE. We use the key features of Max-Neef's Human Scale Development (“H-SD”) proposal to illustrate how reframing the CE to take account of this perspective can provide a basis for articulating and developing a compelling social narrative. We argue that human needs satisfaction should be both the objective of a Social CE, but also embedded into the means as to how it is achieved. Grassroots initiatives that enable self-reliant communities should balance the current disproportionate influence wielded by powerful institutions and businesses. Equilibrium is required between different components and actors, including between humans and the environment, which ultimately represents a version of circularity that adheres to the limits of the biosphere.

Identification Narratives, Local Stories, and Virtual Communication

In this article the author summarizes some conclusions drawn following her field research on narration and identity. Language itself is approached language itself as a guardian of ideas, structuring society, using humor as an integrative barrier. It is introduced the term identification narrative as crucial for understanding the self in the context of the community. The author briefly describes the cases of a popular local story that changed local oral practices and of a less popular local story that preserved local oral practices. She analyzes the natural transformations of local stories compared to their translations into the “language” of virtual communication. The author research the impact of new forms of communication on local cultures and how the narrative of the desired identity comes to replace the traditional social narrative of the self.

Cats in Palace Museum: A narrative of cultural heritage and empathy of youth.

While research in heritage tourism tends to focus on cultural and anthropogenic motivations and drivers, this paper seeks to examine how social-media narration amidst a broader backdrop context in Chinese mass culture creates, perpetuates, and reinforce feline-focused narratives and practices among social media young followers. Drawing on text and image-based analyses of postings of cat sightings within the official Palace Museum account on a key Chinese microblog, this study reveals the application of three vital narrative strategies at work and corresponding empathic responses: ambassadorial, bounded, and broadcast. The Palace Museum has achieved an enhancement of interaction and emotional exchange between the heritage of Palace Museum and youths and generated a process from attention to emotional engagement and eventually to emotional identification on the part of youths in their attitude toward the heritage of Palace Museum through the workings of three key narrative strategies on Chinese social media. In doing so, this research illuminates the potential of social media-based narratives and charismatic animals in the revitalization of cultural heritage sites and the contributions of setting narrative strategies in engaging the younger audiences while also revitalizing the cultural heritage of the Palace Museum.

Popular and Scholarly Primordialism: The Politics of Ukrainian History during Russia's 2022 Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract While nationalism theorists have mostly rejected primordialism, politicians and the wider public typically have a primordialist and essentialist understanding of national history. On the eve of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin invoked several primordialist tropes so as to justify military action, which is unsurprising in a politician. Yet Western scholars criticizing Putin's historical narratives in newspaper editorials or in scholarly talks posted to YouTube only rarely suggest modernist or social constructivist historical narratives. Several posit counter-primordialisms instead. Primordialism, then, enjoys more support than is widely realized, even among scholars who ought to be familiar with its problems. Meanwhile modernist theorists of nationalism, however popular among nationalism theorists, require more vigorous promotion in academic circles.

Telling a Compelling Story: An Exploration of Cognitive Simplicity in Comic Book Design and Characterisation as Visual Communication for Political, Cultural and Social Influence

The objective of this article is to discuss the role of comics as a source of political and social influence, to understand the challenges in modern comics upholding of aesthetic simplicity and cultural authenticity. To explore comic’s significance and value as a cultural art-form, several aspects of comic design and characterisation development through modernisation are discussed through literature and case studies, based on the problem statement: Can comics be a source of political and social influence? For primary research, qualitative interviews and a survey were conducted among Malaysia’s art and design communities using sequential mixed method research. The aim was to examine target audiences’ perceptions of comic design and shifts in characterisation, and how global cultural trends such as media convergence and entertainment marketing affect comics’ authenticity. Findings suggest that comics are not time-bound products; hence their immense capacity to engage fans despite shifts in characterisations. Significantly, comic art fans in Malaysia seem to adopt a conservative attitude in desiring characters to maintain aesthetic simplicity and cultural authenticity. Overall analysis suggests that maintaining original essence in characterisation enable audiences to understand artists’ authentic cultural experiences through graphic storylines documenting the issues addressed. Results suggest that mainstreaming of comics propel the industry’s future growth through diversification and inclusiveness of social narratives, but audience’s perceptions of comics as a source of political and social influence maybe affected. Future research could probe the degree in which comics’ aesthetics appeal and cognitive simplicity contribute to extending comics’ role as an authentic global cultural art-form.

Transnational Couples: The Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, Nativity, and Gender

ABSTRACT Over one in ten heterosexual married couples are interracial and close to 10% of marriages are transnational. Even with the increasing rates of intermarriage there continues to be opposition to such marriages and their families. This study aimed to explore the lived experiences of transnational couples, where both partners hail from different countries, as they navigate life in the U.S. Six heterosexual transnational couples across the country were interviewed separately and together using a phenomenological design, and within and across case analyses were conducted. Race, skin color, visibility, nativity, gender, and language interconnected to engender experiences that were different across every couple as they conceptualized how best to protect their families while navigating through varying social narratives, and familial and societal expectations about their relationship. The emergent themes organized into three intersecting processes -internal, intermediary, and external- as these couples navigated their different values, each other, and other systems in their lives. Implications for research and clinical practice follow.

Muslims, Islam, and Organ Donation: Righting Social Narratives and Designing Ethically Balanced Educational Interventions.

The popular narrative about Muslims and organ donation, especially about Muslims in the diaspora, is that Muslims have unfavorable sentiments about organ donation. Furthermore, this skepticism is associated with Islam in the sense that pious Muslims are regarded to be more averse to organ donation, and Islamic edicts that judge organ donation to be religiously forbidden are thought to be erroneous. Based on this narrative, public health leaders encourage organ donation by teaching Muslims about the social advantages of organ donation and linking these advantages to religious edicts that consider organ donation to be lawful. We examined the factual and moral foundations of this narrative of Muslims, Islam, and organ donation. Our analysis demonstrated that the narrative is undermined by methodological flaws in existing empirical research and misconceptions of Islamic normativity. We contend that Muslim concerns about organ donation extend beyond whether it is religiously allowed and that contextual circumstances produce diverse and equally acceptable Islamic viewpoints on organ donation. As a result, we advocate that educational initiatives aid informed decision-making by debunking misunderstandings about organ donation and promoting plurality of Islamic ethicolegal positions on the practice.

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Opening Conversations that Matter in Public Music Studies

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Opening Conversations that Matter in Public Music Studies

Computer Vision and Internet Meme Genealogy: An Evaluation of Image Feature Matching as a Technique for Pattern Detection

ABSTRACT Internet memes are a fundamental aspect of digital culture. Despite being individual expressions, they vastly transcend the individual level as windows into and vehicles for wide-stretching social, cultural, and political narratives. Empirical research into meme culture is thriving, yet particularly compartmentalized. In the humanities and social sciences, most efforts involve in-depth linguistic and visual analyses of mostly handpicked examples of memes, begging the question on the origins and meanings of those particular expressions. In technical disciplines, such as computer science, efforts are focused on the large-scale identification and classification of meme images, as well as patterns of “viral” spread at scale. This contribution aims to bridge the chasm between depth and scale by introducing a three-step approach suitable for “computational grounded theoretical” studies in which (1) an automated procedure establishes formal links between meme images drawn from a large-scale corpus paving the way for (2) network analysis to infer patterns of relatedness and spread, and (3) practically classifying visually related images in file folders for the purpose of further local, hermeneutic analysis. The procedure is demonstrated and evaluated on two datasets: an artificially constructed, structured dataset and a naturally harvested unstructured dataset. Future horizons and domains of application are discussed.

Solo‐living and childless professional women: Navigating the ‘balanced mother ideal’ over the fertile years

AbstractOne in five women are childless at midlife, and for an estimated 90 percent of these women, childlessness is not actively chosen. In this article, we explore how solo‐living and childless professional women navigate the ‘balanced mother ideal’ over their fertile years and what this means for organizations and organization studies. Drawing on biographical narrative interview data from solo‐living professional women in the UK, we argue that identifications with the balanced mother ideal change over the life course as a result of futurity, ambivalence, and suppression of negative emotions—part of the logic of both postfeminism and neoliberal feminism—and the ‘disenfranchized grief’ of contingent childlessness. At the point of late fertility, the absence of alternative social narratives to the balanced mother ideal appears to create a crisis point for childless women, including in the workplace. We conclude our article with recommendations for how organizations can better cater to the needs of this significant, yet largely silenced, demographic group.

What’s Blood Got to Do with It? A Culture of Cinema Horrors at the Precipice of an Abyss

At a cultural moment in which the horrifying is central, what are the pedagogical options available by which to teach and think with our students? Horror movies, like all media, are mythmakers; media and culture reflect and reproduce but also create or consolidate. Teaching horror leads to new conversations, makes the familiar strange, and gives students new language and tools through which to assess and rewrite cultural and social narratives. This conversation bridges sociology, gender studies, and media studies to highlight the importance and usefulness of film analysis and theoretical texts that fall outside of sociology in developing robust sociological and interdisciplinary dialogue. We review the films, texts, themes, and approaches that we have used to get students to read difficult theory, think collaboratively and critically, and write in ways that push their voices and ideas beyond that with which they are accustomed and comfortable.

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

Bad Realism

Bad Realism

A West African Spider-Man and the Enduring Concept of “the Stranger”

A West African Spider-Man and the Enduring Concept of “the Stranger”

Expanded authenticity? Changing standards for identifying longjing tea

Due to the power of premium brand identities, West Lake Longjing tea (西湖龙井茶), the most famous representative of Chinese tea varieties, faces competition around the matter of its authenticity. The 2001 adoption of production area classifications by local governments promoting rural economic and social development has fueled the expansion of the Longjing tea brand. By introducing the idea that Longjing tea (龙井茶) could be identified with areas outside West Lake, this policy has made room for new views of varietal authenticity. For China's new consumer society, traditional standards of authentic taste and appearance have also been challenged. Based on long-term observations and interviews, this paper explores the conflict and compatibility between politics and markets, land and technology, tradition and innovation. It analyzes how Longjing tea has created a social narrative for “expanded authenticity", which provides a case for the development of China's consumer society under market demand and policy management.

Off the Mat: The Practice of Yoga and Mindfulness To Foster Hope and Resilience for Adolescents in Homes and Classrooms

An individual's sense of self and identity is a developmental cognition informed by the balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, proximal others, and systems of belief. Today's identity-seeking adolescent may internalize pressures and expectations from a growing base of social narratives that extends beyond the reach of family and friends. Cultivating daily practices that foster hope and resilience can support positive well-being outcomes for individuals, families, and communities who are faced with distress or traumatic events. Overall well-being within a classroom can be nourished through collaborative growth mindsets, positive coping skills, and cognitive reappraisals. Hope and resilience can be fostered through daily habits of awareness, gratitude, and simple meditation exercises. An off-the-mat approach to the practice of yoga-inspired philosophy can be used in the classroom or at home to support the skills necessary to foster the constructs of hope, develop resilience, and support flexible cognition that builds and sustains positive social, emotional, mental, and physical well-being.

A Geo-Social Characterization of Health Impact from Air Pollution in Mexico Valley

The impact of the air pollution phenomenon has been long studied, but most often with a fragmented approach, without closely looking at the relationship between different components that characterize it, such as sensor-based data, health data from institutional databases, and data on how it is perceived by human beings in social media. The research developed in this study introduces an integrated methodological framework that analyses sensor data on air pollution distributed in space and time, combined with health data and social data narratives that reflect how different communities perceive this phenomenon in space and time; exploring how these different heterogeneous sources can be combined to better understand the impact of air pollution phenomena at the large-city level in the Valley of Mexico. We introduce a Spatio-temporal data integration and mining framework that aims to discover trends and insights regarding the distribution of the impact of an air pollution phenomenon in terms of human health and perception. The main peculiarity of our methodological framework is the integration of different large data sources by combining a series of methods: NLP (topic modeling), data mining (data cubes, unsupervised learning, and clustering), and GIS capabilities (spatial interpolation, choropleth maps) that together provide a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative patterns emerging at a different spatial scale and temporal granularity. Overall, this shows how social data, when combined with quantitative data, can provide a better understanding of the impact of a given phenomenon, such as air pollution.

Madness and the Social Link: The Jean-Max Gaudillière Seminars 1985–2000

This essay examines two recently published collections of seminars, Madness and the Social Link, and The Birth of a Political Self. The seminars were run by Jean-Max Gaudillière at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in France, and transcribed by his wife, psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine. The two collections elucidate their pioneering approach to psychoanalysis of psychoses and trauma. They firmly place madness within the social and political circumstances of historical events traced through generations, and argue for the role of psychoanalysis in uncovering the “counter-history” of the official social narratives.

Becoming Celebrity Girl Activists: The Cultural Politics and Celebrification of Emma González, Marley Dias, and Greta Thunberg

Young girls have historically been symbols to be conjured by social movements to garner sympathy for social causes, but are frequently silenced as political agents. This study addresses the celebrification of non-celebrity girls such as Emma González, Greta Thunberg, and Marley Dias and analyzes how backlash politics promote their fame. Some ordinary girls become celebrity activists in part because the trolling and negative media coverage helps propel their visibility, while others enjoy relatively positive experiences with fame. Both of these types of representations of celebrity girl activists - whether fueled by backlash or not -can serve as cautionary tales or as inspiration for girls who wish to engage in activism. Through an intersectional feminist lens, I address the complex social media narratives that emerge about girl empowerment and negotiation of risk - emphasis on self-care and struggle - when girls are famous activists.

‘Knocking at the door of humanity’: using co-creation and community-based participatory research to foster citizenship for individuals with lived experience of dementia

ABSTRACT The lived experience of dementia includes loss of identity due to the negative and pessimistic social narratives that are stigmatizing and socially isolating. In the community-based participatory research (CBPR) project Raising the Curtain on the Lived Experiences of Dementia, eleven individuals living with dementia participated as ‘peer collaborators’ in weekly co-creative workshops over two years. The purpose of this study was to investigate how peer collaborators described their involvement in Raising the Curtain in relation to their social participation and ability to effect social messages about dementia. Data gathered from the workshops, including transcripts (8) and one-on-one evaluation interviews (103), were used for analysis. Research findings revealed that the participants’ engagement as peer collaborators fostered their ability to enact resistance and social citizenship, including sharing lived experiences, combating the stigma of dementia, engendering inclusion and belonging, and promoting advocacy. Using CBPR to foster social citizenship suggests that meaningful and purposeful approaches to leisure are possible for individuals living with dementia.