Social Reality Research Articles

Harlem, USSR: Black Modernism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1937

Abstract The following essay tracks the translation of African-American poetry in the first two decades of the Soviet Union. Because the concept of race had no direct correlate in the Soviet Union, this essay argues that the translation of African-American poetry allowed Russian translators to publish modernist poetry that challenged the aesthetic imperatives of the Bolshevik party. To that end, the translation of Black modernist poetry—work by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and others—maps on to a canon of “socialist modernism,” an assembly of work that was both aesthetically and politically radical and one that pushed back against the Soviet conceptualizations of “socialist realism” and “bourgeois modernism.”

The Fundamental Types of Social Transformations: Evolution and Revolution

The concept of social transformation is of significant importance, as it forms the basis for theories of social development. To comprehensively understand the nature of this phenomenon, it is essential to define its significance. Social transformation, in its broadest sense, refers to the transformation of society's social reality and its ongoing development. However, similar to any socio-cultural phenomenon, transformation exhibits specific characteristics, internal mechanisms, and features that manifest in the interaction between the subject and all aspects of human activity, ranging from economic to social spheres.

What does it mean to redefine prosperity? A theory of definition for pathways to sustainable futures

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of literature arguing that we need to redefine prosperity – to move away from prosperity as economic wealth, and towards a new definition as quality of life for people and planet. While much work has been done on theories and methods for building sustainable prosperity, the process of redefinition at the level of meaning has received significantly less attention. Current arguments for redefining prosperity do not have a theory of definition despite raising multiple conceptual questions about what exactly is being redefined, what the conditions for redefining it are, and what the relationship is between redefining the word and redefining the thing. The article addresses these questions by developing a much-needed theory of definition for today’s debates on prosperity. It claims that the redefinition of prosperity is not a substitute of one definiens with another but a reconfiguration of elements in what Adorno called “a horizon of associations” at the levels of both language and social reality.

Anúncio de uma Sociedade em Crise sem Filosofia: Repensar a Educação Angolana a partir da “Sagrada Esperança”

The present text sheds light on reflection about a society in crisis "that is announced", being the capture of how we think in relation to Philosophy and the use that is made of reason, a necessary condition for this purpose. This way of thinking is reflected in all dimensions of human life, with particular mention of how education, politics, law, and justice are viewed as conditions for achieving a more dignified humanity. Hence, in this sense of philosophizing about our reality, we have proposed the challenge of (re) thinking our (Angolan) society from the perspective of "Sacred Hope" reflected in education. The reflection starts from the question: how to rethink, philosophically, our Angolan society from the "Sacred Hope," whose content is reflected in education? It is a question that fundamentally raises the discussion about the educational possibilities for realizing the individual in the Angolan context, characterized by levels of illiteracy and widespread poverty. This situation leads us to resort to the "Sacred Hope" which, in the circumstances in which it was born, as a thought-out ideal, represented the dream of achieving a different and dignified condition of life for the Angolan person, to, as a Philosophy, understood as a new perspective of life grounded in the light of reason, and question its reach in the present. Thus, if Philosophy is a questioning of any (social) reality, then it makes sense to admit that, without Philosophy, a society enters into existential crisis and, in this sense, it becomes imperative to rethink it from the perspective of education as sacred hope

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's 7th March Speech: An Analysis Through Performance Study Lens

This paper critically examines Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s 7th March speech from a performance studies perspective. It argues that the speech, delivered at a crucial juncture in the Bangladesh Liberation War, utilized performative language and embodied performance techniques to galvanize the Bengali population. This paper analyzes how Mujib's rhetoric transformed social realities and mobilized a nation towards independence by applying theories from performance studies, including those of J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, and Richard Schechner. The findings suggest that Mujib’s strategic use of pronouns, emotive expressions, rhetorical questions, and repetitive phrases, along with his dynamic body language, created a powerful performative act that effectively united and motivated the audience. Concluding comments emphasize the enduring impact of Mujib's speech on the formation of Bangladeshi national identity. Research implications highlight the importance of viewing political speeches through the lens of performance studies to understand their broader social and cultural impacts. Limitations of the study include the reliance on textual analysis without incorporating audience reception data, which could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the speech's impact.

Media and Natural Disasters: Organising Storytelling in the Age of Climate Change

Starting on 2 November 2023, some territories in the Region of Tuscany in Italy were hit by exceptionally intense meteorological and calamitous events. The Region of Tuscany’s government was immediately at the forefront of relief, assisting the population, and aiding restoration. On 3 November, a national state of emergency was declared due to flooding. Journalistic communication is an essential aspect of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. In terms of protecting people and reducing damage, journalists and the media have an important role to play. This article reports an Italian case study analysing the behaviour of local media in cases of natural disaster. Nine focus groups were conducted with local journalists covering the flood emergency. The results highlight the role of social and institutional mediation, rather than mere dissemination, played by the local press in emergency situations, a central element in the construction of a community bond, precisely in moments of insecurity and disorientation. The narration of a disaster from the inside seems to have allowed the emergence and representation of hitherto unknown social realities in Tuscany. The goal of the news coverage was widened, making it possible to respond better to the diverse interests of the reading public and to satisfy in a short time and exhaustively the information needs of individual communities in difficulty.

Exploring How the Professional Ethics of Engineers Can Be More Effectively and Deeply Integrated with Today's Social Reality

Under the impact of the epidemic in the past two years, the economic situation in various industries has been not optimistic. More and more members of the engineering community have begun to adhere to the principle of economic supremacy and utilitarianism, ignoring the most basic professional ethics. This has led to an increasing number of substandard products on the market, and the quality of some engineering products is worrying. Many large engineering projects have also suffered accidents as a result. Perhaps this is the last resort to "supporting the family" during the epidemic. With the end of the epidemic and the recovery of the economy, how to effectively integrate the professional ethics of engineers with the current social reality has become a problem that needs to be considered. In this situation, it is urgent to cultivate the professional ethics and ethical concepts of engineers guided by the spirit of craftsmanship.

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.

Upacara Tabut : Ritual Keagamaan Pada Masyarakat Bengkulu

The Ark ceremony is carried out by the people in Bengkulu city, which is held annually in every month of Muharram, starting on 1-10 Muharram in commemoration of the Shahid of Husen bin Ali bin Abu Talib (grandson of the prophet Muhammad SAW) who died in Padang Kaarbela for defending Islam, which is marked by a coffin called the Ark as a symbol of Husen's body. This ceremony is a cliché because it involves thousands of personalities from the preparation, implementation and organisation stages. This paper aims to reveal the Ark ceremony in the Bengkulu City community by paying attention to all matters related to the implementation of the ceremony, including the background and purpose of the ceremony (history/origin), technical organisers, participants, time, place, equipment and preparations, and the course of the ceremony. The collection of data and information is based on qualitative methods, which is a commonly used approach in cultural research. This research is in the form of explorative-descriptive which seeks to describe and reveal a social reality in people's lives. From the organisation of the Ark ceremony, it is known that the Ark ceremony is a religious ritual that contains local wisdom and cultural values

“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 New Documents: Creative Shifts in Contemporary Chinese Documentary Photography

Following China’s economic reform and opening-up, contemporary Chinese documentary photography underwent a significant shift. The most notable transformation was the move from Socialist Realism photography to a new form of documentary photography. According to John Szarkowski, former Director of Photography at MoMA, this “new documents” differed from its predecessors by emphasizing “personal purpose” and focusing on “insights into life.” These characteristics became increasingly evident in Chinese contemporary documentary photography starting in the early 1980s. When Chinese photographers began to realize that documentary photography serving political purposes should give way to documentary photography reflecting society, the key Western influences that shaped their work were the new wave of documentary photographers emerging in the 1950s. This paper explores the work of six photographers and argues that understanding the shift to this “new documents” provides a crucial framework for comprehending the evolution of contemporary Chinese documentary photography.

Beyond Discontent: Dialogues on Subjectivity and Belonging

ABSTRACT This document delves into the intricate interplay among cultural, geographical, and sociopolitical contexts in shaping identity and individual perceptions, drawing inspiration from Eyal Rozmarin’s seminal work. It discusses the ongoing exploration of these themes within the framework of the IARPP 2024 conference titled “The Quest for Belonging and the Co-creation of a Therapeutic Home.” Focusing on Mexico’s diverse cultural landscape, it examines how varied regional experiences contribute to a complex sense of belonging within the nation. Through narratives of psychoanalysts representing different Mexican regions, it highlights the nuanced ways cultural and social realities mold personal identity and notions of belonging. The discussion underscores the role of psychoanalysts in understanding and shaping relational dynamics, informed by their introspective journeys and unique perspectives. This exploration fosters deeper reflection on the fluid nature of the self and its implications within the Mexican context, offering valuable insights into identity formation and the quest for belonging amid Mexico’s dynamic cultural tapestry.

Prisms of Possibility: Biographically situated insights on the transformative potential of sustainable affordable housing

AbstractRooted in my upbringing in the South Bronx and informed by my extensive equity‐focused research on housing, energy, and health, alongside practical experience in small‐scale, place‐based real estate, I advocate for a more nuanced and holistic approach to understanding and achieving “sustainable affordable housing.” By challenging the conventional emphasis on environmental and economic sustainability, I argue that social realities must also take precedence in this endeavor. Drawing from my lived experiences and expertise, I propose viewing housing and neighborhoods through a population lens to drive equitable, intergenerational progress. In this commentary, I present three innovative strategies to harness the transformative potential of sustainable affordable housing. Bold Idea #1 emphasizes community‐based, non‐profit‐led retrofits, maintenance, and property management, while Bold Idea #2 champions legacy housing placements. Bold Idea #3 focuses on promoting moderate income housing and homeownership opportunities. These bold propositions aim to propel sustainable affordable housing beyond its current constraints, positioning it as a true catalyst for positive social change.

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.

Co-design in virtual environments with 3D scanned childcare rooms in social virtual reality

AbstractThis research proposes a virtual environment (VE) for co-designing in early childhood education and care settings using a social VR platform with 3D-scanned childcare rooms. Co-design workshops were analyzed focusing on perceived presence and experience and workshop outcomes. The results indicate a high level of presence in the VE, with unique advantages like facilitating 3D prototyping. However, challenges such as unbalanced prototyping tools distribution were also noted. The study highlights the potential of VEs with 3D scanned rooms in co-design.