Social Reality Research Articles

Echoes of silence.

Communication is an integral part of nursing practice-with patients and their relatives, other nurses and members of the healthcare team, and ancillary staff. Through interaction with the 'other', language and silence creates and recreates social realities. Acceptance, rejection or modification of social realities depends on what is expressed and by whom. Narratives that are offered can tell of some experiences and not others. Some nurses choose to be silent while others are silenced. In nursing situations recognising and allowing silence to speak is a challenging but uniquely personal experience that embraces reflection in and on experiences, practice and self as a person and a professional. If enabled and truly heard, silence can speak more loudly than the hubbub of daily practice, allowing us to collectively question and challenge inherent assumptions and biases as professionals, and as a profession. Through a microcosm of Newly Graduated Nurses' lived experiences of nursing situations and expressions of silence individuals' discomfort and private efforts to ascribe meaning to experiences are reflected on. Returning to silence is to return to a constant process of professional transformation that can enable ways of knowing and being that can reform our profession from within and enable us to cast off shackles that bind us to a shameful cultural underbelly.

Forms of Translation, Translation of Forms: From Gorky’s Mother to Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the Bengali novel হাজার চুরাশির মা (Mother of 1084) by Mahasweta Devi to read it as a rewriting of Maxim Gorky’s The Mother. It contends that Mother of 1084 recasts Gorky’s radical and gendered bildungsroman for the context of India where it not only documents the development of the radical consciousness of Sujata, the mother of the revolutionary Brati killed by the Indian state, but also the patriarchal structure of the Indian/Bengali family. Furthermore, it argues that the Bengali novel recasts the socialist realism of the Russian novel into modernist Bengali prose. It examines Mahasweta’s deployment of the modernist aesthetic while locating Mother of 1084 in a broader tradition of actually existing communist artistic praxis in South Asia to illuminate the tradition of committed modernism.

Exploring Stylistic analysis of lexical layer: An In-depth Study of Abdul Qayum Qawim's Poetry

The 'multi-layered stylistics' approach is a contemporary method for examining and evaluating the lexical, phonetic, syntactic, rhetorical, and ideological aspects within a text. Through the application of multi-layer stylistics, it is possible to discern the distinctive characteristics of an individual's style, thoughts, and ideologies that shape a poet or writer's written compositions. The aim of this study is to analyze and assess the lexical characteristics of a poem compilation written by Abdul Qayum Qawim. The objective is to determine the degree to which a thorough analysis and study of complex notions, such as sensuous, abstract, wonderful, slangy, and others, has been conducted at the level of language. The research employed a descriptive-analytical strategy by utilizing the library technique. This work meticulously analyzes the lexical layer of Abdul Qayum Qawim's poetry using a comprehensive stylistic analysis approach. The research is structured into two primary sections: initially, a comprehensive analysis of the poem's lexical layer is undertaken, followed by a meticulous examination of the poem's theoretical aspects. This study explores the concepts of ideology and investigates several themes like moral evaluation, societal dissatisfaction, pessimism, the passage of time, lack of mutual comprehension, concern towards instability, and the avoidance of hypocrisy. Its aim is to enlighten the general public through the use of uncomplicated poetry that highlights the abundance and vitality of spring. The research indicates that the poet exhibited a profound comprehension and extensive knowledge of contemporary affairs by skillfully portraying diverse social realities through the significance of his verses. Furthermore, the poet's method demonstrated a keen focus on the underlying meanings inside the text, highlighting the convergence of time, conceptual ideas, and human experiences, alongside the utilization of descriptive language that appeals to the senses.

Makna Generasi Sandwich Pada Film Cinta Pertama, Kedua, dan Ketiga (Analisis Semiotika Charles Sanders Peirce)

Indonesia is facing the phenomenon of the sandwich generation, which plays a dual role in the financial affairs of three generations at once. Data from the March 2022 National Socio-Economic Survey shows that 8.4 million Indonesians (62.71%) belong to the sandwich generation. The movie "First, Second, and Third Love" reflects this reality, directed by Gina S. Noer based on a true story. This study applies Charles Sanders Peirce's Semiotic method to analyze triadic signs. The research shows that individuals give meaning to societal experiences by using the Social Reality Construction Theory. The movie becomes a representation of social reality, helping to understand the complexity of the sandwich generation's life in the context of Indonesian families. To break the chain of the sandwich generation that can damage the next generation, priority awareness, implementation of life limit setting, role as an entrepreneur, and increased educational awareness are needed to change the toxic culture.

Co-producing composite storytelling comics: (counter) narratives by academics of working-class heritage

Composite storytelling as a social qualitative research method represents a growing spirit of creativity to explore themes of social injustice. This article discusses the potential methodological affordances and challenges of such approaches when used to collectively unsettle, interrogate and (re)imagine what it means to become an academic of working-class heritage. The participatory project discussed in this paper involved eight social science and humanities academics in UK-based elite higher education institutions. In a series of storytelling sessions, the participants created narrative encounters to foster moments of critique and analysis to explore the complex social realities of their routes into and through academia as people of working-class origins. Working alongside an illustrator, the participants used empirical insights to create composite stories in multimodal comic formats. Through this work, we seek to prompt further discussions about the generative possibilities of pursuing similar methods in the social sciences and beyond to challenge forms of social injustice.

“Post-Pandemic Political Television and the End of One Day at a Time”

This article analyzes “The Politics Episode” of One Day at a Time, an animated very special episode produced and aired during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on two aspects that prompt broader considerations about the role of scripted television in responding to pressing social issues. First, I demonstrate how the episode’s narrative structure appeals to democratic deliberation as an idealized form of conflict resolution. Second, I consider how its production and airing timeline responded to—and failed to account for—the current events its narrative attempted to incorporate. Although the disjuncture between these two elements demonstrate the pitfalls for fictional television to address social issues in a time of constant crisis, I conclude by proposing that these “failures” can also serve to illustrate a specific “post-pandemic” structure-of-feeling, one where futures are perpetually deferred and where dealing with new social realities requires constant speculative iterations.

The Body as a Social Construct: The Kosovan Context on ‘Beauty’ and ‘Look’ from the Perspective of Women and Girls in Kosovo

The inclusion of the study of the human ‘body’ in sociology abandoned the view that ‘nature’ constitutes the absolute premise that explains human interactions and social phenomena. The sociological perspective offered a new project of conceptualising the body, which enabled its reshaping and modification. In the new context of understanding the body, “the life of the body” was transformed from a technical and reproductive mechanism into a way of living, as well as an identity. This paper will address the main theoretical approaches to the study of the body, which at the same time reveals the context of the social realities that built the epistemology of sociological and gender studies in researches related to the body. Further, the paper introduces the results of an empirical research carried out with women and girls in Kosovo regarding the understanding and appreciation of the body, including their position about the image of the body that will help deconstruct the standard of the idolised body of women and girls in Kosovo. The research methodology applied is focused in two main parts: the online survey with 350 women and girls aged between 16 and 65 coming from both urban and rural areas, through a structured questionnaire technique compose of three parts with a total of 42 questions. Data collection and processing were done through the application of the SPSS program No. 24 and Excel. The second part of the research included the qualitative approach, by utilization of two focus groups with 14 girls of different ages and coming from different geographical areas of Kosovo. The research will highlight their attention and sensitivity towards ‘beauty’ as predefined by social, cultural, and the economic context. The overall results of the research show that 55.5 percent of the respondents agree that beauty plays a roles in the success of a woman/girl's life in Kosovo, whereas 22 percent neither agree nor disagree with this, whilst 33 percent do not agree that beauty plays any role. Additionally, approximately 55 percent of the respondents indicated that beauty influences a woman/girl's success in life, 60 percent believe that beautiful women/girls find it much easier to get hired, and about 70 percent stated that beauty affects self-esteem in both women and girls.    Received: 4 January 2024 / Accepted: 9 April 2024 / Published: 5 May 2024

The Making of the Celt. Ethnogenesis, Culture and Politics in the Atlantic Arc

The theme of Celts and Celticism has attracted fierce controversy over more than two centuries. Passing over the question of ancient origins, this article places the birth of Celticism in the modern period, in line with current understandings of nationalism. Examining the construction of the Celt in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia and Cornwall, it traces a movement from culture into politics in the course of the nineteenth century. Political pan-Celticism was ultimately a failure not because it was ‘artificial’ but because of the political conditions of the times and the force of competing projects. Like other nationalisms it relies on myth and tradition but these are social realities not easily to be dismissed by appeal to scientific history. After two hundred years, moreover, Celticism has a history of its own and continues to resonate both in culture and in politics.

The ideological and artistic features of the travelogues about Turkey in the Russian parent state literature of the 1920s (based on Summer in Angora by E. Lanceray and Istanbul and Turkey by P. Pavlenko)

The article discusses the travelogues of Turkey by E. Lanceray and P. Pavlenko. If, until 1917, the Russian literature had described Turkey from the ethnographical and geographic perspectives or had made it a part of modernist vision, in the 1920s, the authors wrote mainly about its political, social and cultural changes. The aim of the article is to analyze Turkey’s image in the parent state literature of the 1920s, close the lacuna in its Asian text and form a more complete understanding of the Russian literary process of that period. The article uses the descriptive, biographical and culture-historical methods of research. It concludes that so different writers as Lanceray and Pavlenko representing the unlike generations and artistic worlds and making different accents in their writings – on ethnography and the formation of a new statehood, respectively – are prone to interpret the revolutionary changes taking place in Turkey optimistically. Therefore, the Turkish motive and thematic vector should be viewed as a relevant stage of forming the ideology and aesthetics of a new artistic method, which is to be known as socialist realism subsequently.

The Social Realities of Tausug Women in Tausug Contemporary Kalangan

Tausugs, one of the Muslim tribes in the Philippines, express themselves through their kalangan (songs). To explore the rich and vibrant colors of the Tausug culture, this qualitative research study employed a descriptive-analytic approach in the analysis and interpretation of thirty-one (31) Tausug Contemporary Kalangan. Through Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study revealed and discussed the literary devices evident as a textual practice in the select kalangan; the social realities about Tausug women that were being communicated by these literary devices; and the perceptions of Tausug women about their social realities. The findings revealed that there was a total of five (5) literary devices evident as a textual practice in the select kalangan. These literary devices paved way to unveiling and explaining the social realities of Tausug women evident in the select kalangan. Despite the rich and colorful cultures of the Tausugs, the social realities of Tausug women prove that a social problem exists in the Tausug society hence must be addressed and resolved. This study proved to be an original contribution to feminist studies aimed at gaining liberation and empowerment for Tausug women.

티베트 역사 기억과 민족의 정체성

This study examines the historical memories and national identity of Tibetans in the novel 『Turbulent Shambhala』, written by Tashi Dawa, a contemporary Tibetan author. The lives and history of Tibetans have undergone major changes through the Democratic Reform Movement in 1959 and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Using a unique Magical Realism technique, Tashi Dawa tries to recall the historical memories of Tibetans from that time and to find their identity in those memories. In particular, he utilizes the concepts of ‘reincarnation’ and ‘karma’ from Buddhism as magical elements. Thus, he uses magical elements to show how Tibetans view their forgotten history. It was confirmed that the loss experienced by Tibetans in the face of historical difficulties and social realities caused deep divisions and conflicts within Tibetan society, manifesting as neglect and indifference towards history, as well as conflict and criticism. The ambiguous delineation between reality and fantasy served as a means to induce change and reflection in the real world, ultimately reflecting the Tibetan desire to transcend the wounds and pains of reality.

Meaning as referential work

Abstract This epilogue to the Special Issue on Interactional Semantics discusses the contributions to the Special Issue in relation to other research to support three arguments. (i) The choice of Interactional Semantics to take the referential function of language (Jakobson) as its object of research is a welcome choice. (ii) The use of the term ‘meaning’ for this research object is potentially confusing and could be replaced by ‘referential work’. (iii) A research topic which could be included in Interactional Semantics and has not been articulated as such, is the way in which the choice of a referential expression establishes the referent as a particular social reality and is a tacit proposal to the interlocutors to talk about this referent in these terms.

Understanding the role of a ‘large’ family in the teaching of Pope Francis

Family is perceived as the most important environment in which humans develop and satisfy their basic needs. Therefore, the issues concerning the family are still current and of great interest for numerous theoreticians and researchers of various fields of science. Pope Francis also devoted a part of his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia to the issue of the ‘larger’ family. In the teachings of Pope Francis spouses and parents should make a responsible use of their freedom, both with regard to procreation, taking into account the social and demographic reality, as well as to the possibility of bringing up their offspring. Conjugal love, which, in Catholic families, is expressed in fertility, is a reason for great joy for the Church. What is innovative in the Pope’s approach to the tasks of the ‘large’ family is mainly the help provided to the people who are victims or to those who are experiencing difficulties in their family homes. Another important issue concerns proper building relations and mutual respect between people creating a ‘large’ family. To achieve this, we must remember to provide mutual assistance and recognise the dignity of each of its members as persons.Contribution: This article holds that apart from the small circle formed by spouses and their children, there is also a ‘large’ family that cannot be ignored. It is necessary for the development of the society and it is a great opportunity for their future. In the teachings of Pope Francis, it is a family that is not afraid to take on current challenges. The basic task of a ‘large’ family is to provide support and love to the people who belong to it.

A Jurisprudential Conclusion of New Criteria Regarding the Recognition of the Existence of Family Life and Relationships between Parents and Children Resulting from Surrogacy

Article 8, paragraph 1 of the European Convention enshrines the right to respect for private life, the right to respect for family life, home and correspondence. As it is always seeking to provide solutions to new social realities, the ECHR created an evolutionary interpretation of the notion of private life that also included (in addition to the rights to the person's physical and mental identity, marital status, health and so on) aspects regarding the abortion, the homosexuality and the trans-sexuality, as well as those related to the impact of technical progress (the interception of telephone conversations, the access to databases and so forth). Also through the jurisprudence, the content of the right expanded, leading to the recognition of the right to one's own image and the right to a healthy environment.

Atrocity in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: A Critical Discourse Approach

This paper examines the discursive tactics employed in The Handmaid's Tale to (re)produce social reality. Using critical discourse analysis, the study reveals the ideological polarization between a favorable self-presentation and a negative portrayal of the other. Through the analysis of excerpts and the application of Van Dijk's framework, the pervasive use of discursive techniques is uncovered, emphasizing the ideological division between a positive self-portrayal and a negative depiction of the other. Pronouns and adjectives play a crucial role in conveying optimistic self-representations and pessimistic other representations, highlighting the characters' struggle against the inherent sexism and patriarchy within legal systems. The findings demonstrate the significance of polarization, lexicalization, positive and negative representation tactics, and the proximity of contrasting stages, illustrating the tension between the individual and society. Considering these results, the paper recommends fostering awareness and critical analysis of discursive tactics, promoting diverse narratives to cultivate empathy and understanding, encouraging dialogue and critical engagement, and actively addressing and challenging gender inequality. These recommendations aim to deepen our understanding of how discursive tactics shape social reality and promote a more equitable and inclusive society. By recognizing and interrogating these discursive strategies, individuals can navigate and challenge the manipulation of language and narrative. The study's insights contribute to a broader understanding of the underlying gender inequality and societal tensions portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale, shedding light on the power dynamics and systemic oppression present in society.

Reflection and Refraction: Multivalent Social Realism in the Work of Joaquín Sorolla

Joaquin Sorolla’s Social Realist work Sad Inheritance! provides the grounds for this cross-sectional case study into Social Realism in Spain, Spanish politics at the turn of the twentieth century, and affect theory in art. By formally analyzing this work, presenting its differing receptions in France and Spain, and discussing the identity crisis that Spain experienced at the end of the twentieth century, all within the frame of Jill Bennett’s conception of practical aesthetics and affect in art, this article will show how Sorolla produced an image that had differing valences of affect depending on the context in which it was viewed. Through his singular pictorial strategies, Sorolla successfully created an image that was political and sentimental, controversial and appealing, fraught with emotion, and ultimately affective.

“Sindhi literature in post-partition India: marginalization, challenges, and digital interventions”

ABSTRACT Sindhi, both as language and literature, has had a precarious position in the Indian literary canon. In the aftermath of Partition, various social, educational, and political realities resulted in Sindhi being on the periphery of literary scholarship. Given the historical background of Partition and resettlement in a new social and geographical space, this article aims to explore the current status of Sindhi literature produced and distributed in India. Specifically, it seeks to assess the readability and dissemination of Sindhi literature, particularly among the post-Partition generations within the Sindhi community. To uncover the present ground realities in the canon of Indian Sindhi literature, the research incorporates deep-focused interviews with Sindhi intelligentsia, mainly comprised of Sindhi writers, scholars, and publishers. The selected interviewees represent the last Sindhi generation of writers and scholars that is entirely conversant with the practices of Sindhi culture and literature due to their educational and historical background; they articulate their first-hand experiences and perceptions concerning the challenges in the overall expansion and development of Sindhi literature in post-Partition India. The research employs an autoethnographic approach as it is useful to draw from the personal academic experiences of the researcher, who comes from the third generation of post-partition Sindhis. The autoethnographic approach aids in performing a comprehensive analysis of the interviews, which contributes to locating the challenges restricting the maintenance, accessibility, and utility of Sindhi literature among the young Sindhi generations in India. The interviews underscore irrevocable literary and cultural damage that is being caused due to the marginalization of the Sindhi language and education in India; they also discuss the existing challenges and opportunities in developing Sindhi literature. The study concludes with the possibility of employing digital methods to facilitate access to and comprehension of Sindhi literature and cultural history among the young Sindhi generations.

How Law’s Nature Influences Law’s Logic

Abstract Classical logic is based on an underlying view of the world, according to which there are elementary facts and compound facts, which are logical combinations of these elementary facts. Sentences are true if they correspond to, in last instance, the elementary facts in the world. This world view has no place for rules, which exist as individuals in the world, and which create relations between the most elementary facts. As a result, classical logic is not suitable to deal with rules, and is therefore unsuitable to deal with legal reasoning. A logic that is more suitable should take into account that law is a part of social reality, in particular a part that consists of constructivist facts, and that rules play a central role in law. This article gives a superficial description of how social reality exists and of the place of law and legal rules in it. It uses this description to argue that traditional techniques to reason with and about legal rules provide a better logic for law than classical logic. These techniques can be accommodated in a logic that treats rules as logical individuals.

De-centring the human: Multi-species research as embodied practice

This article focuses on embodiment and the centrality of embodied methods to multi-species research. We argue that taking the body as our methodological starting point is essential to researching human–animal relations but that bodies engage with and are engaged by the research process in a multiplicity of ways. In this we follow Vinciane Despret’s analysis of the partial affinities between animal scientists’ bodies and the animals they are researching and suggest that sociology’s distinction between sociology of and sociology with the body glosses over the complexities of inter-corporeal encounters. We explore these questions through a discussion of our multi-species ethnography of dog training cultures in the UK, looking at the training of companion dogs, guide dogs and police dogs. We pay attention to the different forms of embodied engagement that these training cultures make possible for us as researchers and reflect on the place of embodied communication in both the training and research relationship. We consider the disembodied training necessitated by the transition to online classes during the Covid pandemic and the consequences of this for our ability to create partial affinities with the dogs and their humans. We argue that the methodological challenges of our times require that we develop methods that attend to our multi-species world, rather than focusing exclusively on the human, and that bring into being a social reality which is less anthropocentric.

Presence and Pronouns: An Exploratory Investigation into the Language of Social VR

As social virtual reality (VR) continues to grow as a medium for digital communication, sustaining presence among communicators remains one of the main constructs that researchers and practitioners use to assess the quality of user experience. In the present paper, we explore language patterns as a behavioral link to presence. We accomplished this through an exploratory text analysis of over 4,800 min of conversation in social VR, consisting of over 130,000 spoken words from 126 participants. We observed that the use of self-references and collective references positively correlated to social presence and spatial presence. Furthermore, median interpersonal distance between communicators was positively associated with using impersonal pronouns, suggesting that participants who stood farther apart from their interlocutors tended to speak in more impersonal terms. Our work sheds light on the possible psychological mechanisms behind presence and the potential of using speech data to help build systems that enhance user engagement.