Sociological Context Research Articles

Hey Kids, Don't Feed the Wildlife: The Dark Side of Biophilia

Hey Kids, Don't Feed the Wildlife: The Dark Side of Biophilia

Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humor in “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” and “Family Guy.”

Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humor in “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” and “Family Guy.”

Understanding the development of advanced wound care in the UK: Interdisciplinary perspectives on care, cure and innovation

George Winter's 1962 paper in Nature reported his observation that wounds in young pigs healed more quickly if covered rather than being left open to the air. This has been widely regarded as the starting point for ‘advanced wound care’ because it established the idea that a wound dressing could influence outcomes. This paper argues that key to understanding innovation is placing technological advances within their broader historical and sociological context. As in other areas of healthcare, the development of innovation in wound care can be seen as a multifaceted, uneven and contested process, not the simple invention and introduction of ‘advanced’ products and services. Innovation in this field takes place at the intersection of historical changes in industry, scientific medicine, medical technologies, health care service delivery and the demographic and domestic spheres. Stemming from interdisciplinary exploration funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this paper presents a provocative argument that contemporary wound care in the UK has become something of a partnership between elite nurses and industry marketing, with important consequences for science and service users. Current challenges in wound care stem in large part from an emphasis on a biomedical model focused on products (albeit one not led by medics) at the expense of considering service design and a social or public health model of patient care.

O viziune globală asupra situației patrimoniale a soțului supraviețuitor în dreptul roman

We conducted an analysis of the succession rights of surviving spouse the succession rights of surviving spouse in Ancient Roman Law, Pretorian Law and Imperial Roman Law. Thus, we have done research starting from the Law of Twelve Tables, dating from Ancient Roman Law and we have come across the years until Iustinian’s Codification, in the 6th century BC. The focus is mainly on the historical and sociological context in which the surviving spouse had a usufruct over the decedent’s share which was generated by the transmission of the estate of the deceased and the termination of the matrimonial regime. Concerning every relevant historical period, we have studied the mandatory conditions that needed to be fulfilled in order to provide a legal usufruct to the surviving spouse. However, to enhance the fluency of the study, we have made some remarks related to the rights of the surviving spouse and other heirs, in general.

Searching of Key Problems of the Contemporary Upbringing and Education in the Czech Republic

The study tries to analyze briefly the current questions of the contemporary school system in the Czech Republic. The ongoing transformation of our school system implied specification of the basic key problems, in the socio-economical, philosophical, sociological, psychological, and pedagogical context. The respective problems are intentionally presented only with their brief characteristics, without taking a stand to them. Such a stand should be taken only after a qualified expert consideration of individual spheres of the problems mentioned.

Contextualizing and conceptualizing time, space and person in political discourse

Abstract The goal of this paper is to make an attempt at exploring the concepts of time, space and person, focusing on the nexus between them, with a view to revealing their role in shaping our perception and understanding of the sociological, political, cultural and economic contexts. The paper is also dealing with the issue of how subjective individual factors can influence various discursive practices vis-à-vis time and space. In its theoretical framework, the paper outlines key theoretical issues and concepts by focusing on the role of text, context and discourse in understanding time, space and person. The second part of the paper considers the crucial role of linguistic devices in the localization of time, space and person in political discourse. Finally, the third part explains how linguistic devices (both conventional and figurative) function in building the dynamism of time, space and person in political discourse, focusing on proximization and direction.

Translation and interpretation market needs analysis: towards optimizing professional translator and interpreter training in Nigeria

This thesis covers both the sociological context of translation and the training of translators in Nigeria. Since the early 1990s, translator and interpreter (T&I) training as a branch of applied t...

THE ANALYSIS OF UNEMPLOYMENT, HAPPINESS AND DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS USING LOG-LINEAR MODELS

Unemployment is an important economical concept indicating the economic development of countries. In addition, unemployment is studied quite frequently in a sociological context since it also affects the level of welfare, quality of life and psychological tendencies of individuals living in a country. In this study, unemployment was examined not as a macroeconomic variable but with micro data acquired from the household surveys carried out by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK). Based on 2015 data, the demographic factors with impact on the employment status of people in Turkey were studied in addition to examining whether or not they are related with the happiness of individuals. Non-parametric tests were preferred since the analysed variables had a categorical structure. Log-linear models from among the advanced contingency tables analysis methods were used for examining the more than two way relationships of variables. It was determined as a result of the analyses carried out that the employment is related with happiness and gender and that there is a statistically significant difference between happiness and gender.

First Contact and Time Travel: Selected Essays and Short Stories by Zoran Živković

665 BOOKS IN REVIEW letter of 4 December 1898 to Wells from Joseph Conrad: “Impressed is the word, O Realist of the Fantastic” (199). There are further appendices on the biological, technological, and sociological contexts, and a list of 24 key films from 1909 to 2016 that were inspired by The Invisible Man. An up-to-date critical bibliography rounds out the volume. I conclude that, from the striking X-ray “Self Portrait” on the front cover to the eloquent blurbs on the back, the university classroom now has a portable, modestly priced edition of The Invisible Man worthy of Wells’s remarkable “grotesque romance.” And as early Wells is now in the public domain, let us hope that The First Man in the Moon (1901) and a collection of sf short stories will soon be added to the Broadview list of offerings. —Nicholas Ruddick, University of Regina Serbian Fantastika from the Banal to the Profound. Zoran Živkoviæ. First Contact and Time Travel: Selected Essays and Short Stories. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, SCIENCE AND FICTION, 2018. ix+148 pp. $27.99 pbk, $19.99 ebk. The Serbian Zoran Živkoviæ is generally shelved as a writer of sf, but he does not consider himself to be one, preferring to see himself as a writer without any prefixes—or a writer of “fantastika” for which there is not a fully satisfactory English equivalent: “The ‘fantastika’ encompasses all non-mimetic types of narratives, in the sense that worlds imagined in the literary works of this sort don’t fully coincide with what is generally considered to be reality” (148). It should be mentioned that this Slavic term is gaining wider acceptance in English, especially because of John Clute’s adoption of it. An annual “Fantastika conference” was already in its fifth year at Lancaster University in 2018. Živkoviæ started by writing on sf, translating sf, and publishing it. He wrote an MA and a PhD thesis on sf and was a reviewer and commentator on the genre. From 1975 to 1990 he published several books on sf, including a lavishly illustrated two-volume Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1990), translated some 70 books, and published more than 200 books in the publishing house Polaris which he founded. He also wrote and hosted a television series on sf cinema and taught creative writing at Belgrade University. He started to write fiction only in 1993 and has since then authored 22 books. As a writer he has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino; one might also add Dino Buzzati and Julio Cortázar. He was fortunate in finding in Alice Copple-Tošiæ a congenial translator who put many of his books into an impeccably simple and elegant English, and who is responsible for much of his reputation in English-speaking countries. Her name is carefully hidden in the book: it can be found only at the end of the last story, which is somewhat curious in view of the fact that Živkoviæ himself is of the opinion that the names of translators are not given enough prominence by publishers. And unlike for the non-fictional pieces, the book contains no information on the first publication of the stories in English, although they have appeared in many editions. But it is easy to see why Živkoviæ’s stories, despite their seductiveness, do not have wide appeal; they have been printed in tiny editions by small publishers such as Dalkey Archive Press, Aio Press, Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy, and PS Publishing in the UK, and in 666 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) magazines such as Interzone. But “The Library”(2002) won the 2003 World Fantasy Award for best novella. Currently all of his books are available or appearing from Cadmus Press with beautiful covers by Youchan Ito. The sf themes that interested Živkoviæ the most are first contact and time travel or chronomotion. He postulates that the meetings between human and alien reveal anthropomorphic deficiencies, in decreasing order (anthropo-centrism, anthropochauvinism, and simply anthropomorphism) and finds them expressed in three short stories by Arthur C. Clarke. This is the topic of his 1979 MA thesis, “Anthropomorphism and the Motif of First Contact...

Fluid Writing: Identity, Gender and Migration in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Ausser sich (2017)

Abstract This article offers a reading of Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Ausser sich which focuses on the “fluidity” of the novel as thematic and narrative aspect in relation to questions of identity, gender and migration. My reading shows how Salzmann has crafted a narrative that unfolds at the intersections of multiple transitions in the protagonist’s life. In Ausser sich, the reader follows Ali’s family’s migration from the Soviet Union to West Germany; Ali’s own search for their past and twin brother in Istanbul; and the gender transition that the protagonist undergoes. My analysis highlights how these thematic aspects are reflected in the form of the novel, its queer narrative voice, and the use of multiple languages. Guided by ideas taken from queer and feminist narrative theory and informed by the concept of “fluidity” explored within a sociological, postcolonial and postmigrant context, I show how Salzmann’s “fluid writing” resists binary classifications to account for the shifts described.

Audiovisual content: risk issues of impact modern media

The article explores audiovisual content in regulatory and legal framework, communicative, cultural, sociological and psychological contexts. General scientific methods such as analysis, synthesis and generalization have allowed us to distinguish a number of terms and to outline the general definition of audiovisual content. An inductive and systematic method was used to identify the risks of audiovisual content’s impact on information formats of traditional and new media. An interdisciplinary approach was used to investigate the problem of the legal regulation of audiovisual content and the complex mechanism of media impact – on the verge of communication, media culture, media psychology and media law. The modern consumer of information is constantly affected by the media impact of audiovisual content, which is the most powerful because of its specific nature. Dynamic video is the basis of audiovisual content used in audiovisual media, multimedia and social media. The activities of journalists and video producers who violate the standards of information dissemination should be regulated at the legislative level of audiovisual media and services in Ukraine, taking into account world and European experience. Research into the risks of media impact of audiovisual content on the mass consciousness and subconscious of information consumers is relevant because of the risk of manipulation in traditional and social media.

Metaphysics of the Self, the Selfie as a Splinter of Modern Culture

Leszek Kołakowski once wrote such a sentence: “Metaphysics pushed out the door returns through the window”. These words of the Polish philosopher are still valid. Metaphysics did not die, although it went through intricate paths of criticism. It cannot be practised any more as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas or Hegel did. Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduced it to new paths. One thought seems obvious: metaphysics cannot be practised outside cultural, sociological and psychological contexts. In this paper, we seek metaphysical experience in contemporary culture. It is impossible to mention all the paths followed by culture and metaphysics related to it. Obviously, not every cultural phenomenon “generates metaphysics”, but the scale of the changes and redefinitions requires us to seek metaphysics in places where it has not been expected before. One of them is the omnipresent phenomenon of the so-called selfie. A photograph, taken with a smartphone, which documents both the person taking the photo and a trace of the environment they are in, is an attempt to create a new reality. “Creation” and reproduction are complicated cognitive processes. One may ask: is it not an attempt to formulate a “new metaphysics”? Can we provide its definition? Yes, we can. It is the metaphysics of oneself. An important inspiration for the presented reflections is a film by a renowned Polish director, Krzysztof Kieślowski – “Amator”. Descartes and Merleau-Ponty cannot be overlooked either. The conclusion I aim to reach is the following: a selfie is a rendering of a person, who is running away from himself and at the same time wants to find himself; who wants to notice, but does not notice; who wants to see, but does not see. This “pursuit” means both an escape from reason, concealed under a hastily conjured smile or seriousness.

Lica sa mentalnim smetnjama u svetlu odnosa pojedinca i zajednice - psihološko-sociološki i eklisiološki kontekst

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights arises in the context of the need to protect human rights from the tyranny of collectivist ideologies, primarily socialism and nazism. The emphasizing of these rights was necessary. At the present time, a need to defend the subject of human rights such as to be seen from the perspective of theology of the image of God in man. A new challenge is the egoism that a modern man strives for. The theme of duty or responsibility for the community is shown to be very important. That is where the search for answers to the question of the relationship between the individual and the community is open. In this case, the subject of our attention are mentally ill and their interaction with the environment, in the psychological, sociological and ecclesiological context.

From data sharing to data publishing [version 2; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations

Data sharing, i.e. depositing data in research community accessiblerepositories, is not becoming as rapidly widespread across the life scienceresearch community as hoped or expected. I consider the sociological and cultural context of research and lay out why the community should instead move to data publishing with a focus on neuroscience data, and outline practical steps that can be taken to realize this goal.

Impact of Parenting Styles on Physical Activity of Children

The study is based on the broader context of the phenomenon of physical movement and sportive activities in contemporary sedentary society. The issue of parenting styles targeted towards the active lifestyle, with regular physical activity as its integral part, becomes more and more relevant. Different parenting styles are being revised; at the level of authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful style, marking the motivation for physical activity for children and adolescents. This includes the simultaneous process of agents of socialization reviving sociological context of a relationship of young people and sports mainly in the frame of motivation for physical activity even outside the family, in the organized sports environment. Therefore, a newly-formed socially and culturally conditioned relationship sporting child – parents – trainer appears, which, in the climate of consumer society and elite sportsperson adoration, brings possible conflicts of motivations, experiences and direction of the different actors of this triangle. This focuses our attention both on the parents‘ responsibility and the growing educational and socializing role of the trainer. In the synergic process, therefore, questions related to the importance of age and motivation in the targeted direction of a child towards physical activity, when the influence of parents is in this aspect crucial and irreplaceable and becomes even stronger in the situations when the parents appeal at their children by regular sporting together. In the text, this is also supported by empirical knowledge of parenting approach to physical activity of children and adolescents.

Re-examining Adorno on the Regression of Consciousness and Democracy: Towards Social Transformation

Scholars have charged Adorno of hypocritically abandoning efforts to articulate possibilities of social transformation, a propensity he emphasizes is central to social critique and sociocritical sociology. Keeping consistent with his fundamentally negative position, this essay reexamines democracy by scoping his work and reorganizing its philosophical and sociological contexts to open dialogue on the characteristics of democracy that Adorno would not reject. Throughout, I negatively reflect upon the nature of this democracy and criticize it towards the goal of fleshing out the paths of social transformation possible and available for its realization – through the things it could not be. Adopting this coupling as a point of departure, I analyze the regression of consciousness in Adorno’s thought, as the root of ego-weakness – the destroyer of maturity and that which underpins every shackle he sees as subjugating the masses – and bring this into dialogue with the insights informed by Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and action theory. To examine the practical implications of social transformation, this essay will also demonstrate how they play out in contemporary contexts, drawing parallels with evidence from contemporary social movements, on account of their conception as a means of social transformation and of Adorno’s own engagement with this conception.

Leśmian przed Prawem. Wartość życia i wzniosłość prawa

W eseistyce Bolesława Leśmiana, absolwenta studiów prawniczych, zwraca uwagę nie tylko obecność kontekstu filozoficznego czy socjologicznego, ale także prawnego, podczas gdy jego poezja wydaje się całkowicie odległa od zagadnień prawa. W zaproponowanej w artykule interpretacji dwóch niepodobnych utworów poetyckich, ballady Asoka z tomu Łąka i wiersza o incipicie „Przez śnieżycę, co wyjąc powiększa przestworza” z tomu Dziejba leśna, ukazana zostaje kwestia prawnej ochrony wartości, jaką stanowi życie. Władca i prawodawca starożytnych Indii, Aśoka, zagwarantował ją w swoich orędziach. Bohaterowi licznych legend otwiera to drogę do tego, co duchowe. W XX wieku wartości ludzkiego życia strzeże „przedstawiciel prawa”, umundurowany policjant, którego sama obecność na ulicy udaremnia rozbój. W obu przypadkach życie traktowane jest przez Leśmiana jako najwyższa wartość, motywowana metafizycznie, co otwiera drogę do dalszych rozważań dotyczących wzniosłości prawa w rozumieniu poety, a także do pytania, czy zagadnienie związków literatury i prawa, znane z badań nad twórczością Franza Kafki, może pomóc w zrozumieniu światopoglądu Bolesława Leśmiana.

Güney Afrika’da Yaratıcı Endüstrilerin Kalkınmaya Katkıları ve Yeniden Ürettikleri Eşitsizlikler

Guney Afrika ekonomisinde politika duzenlemeleriyle birlikte onemli bir yer edinmis yaratici endustriler meselesi, arastirma raporlarinda ve makalelerde cogunlukla olumlu ciktilari uzerinden ele alinmaktadir. Ancak birtakim arastirma verileri, Guney Afrika’nin kendine has tarihsel ve toplumsal sureclerinin yarattigi esitsizliklerin, yaratici sektorler icinde yeniden uretildigini gostermektedir. Bu verilere referansla bu calisma kapsaminda, literaturde uzun suredir tartisilan yaratici endustriler konusu Guney Afrika baglaminda irdelenmis, yaratici endustrilerin ekonomiye katkisi, kentsel gelisime etkileri ve kendi icinde barindirdigi esitsizlikler tarihsel ve sosyolojik bir baglama oturtulmaya calisilmistir. Bunun sonucunda yaratici endustrilerde ortaya cikan esitsizliklerin, Guney Afrika’da ustesinden gelinmeye calisilan kurumsallasmis esitsizlik oruntulerinin devami niteliginde olduklari ortaya konulmustur.

The IAU, from New Worlds to Exoworlds: recollections of a mandate

AbstractThis paper presents my own recollections of the difficult relations that existed between the IAU and a fraction of the public, especially in the USA, following the IAU decision to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet at the 2006 General Assembly in Prague, and which ultimately led the IAU to organize the NameExoWorlds international contest to give public names to selected exoplanets and their host stars. In spite of the success of the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, the Pluto controversy continued, and its consequences climaxed during my term (2012-2015), as NASA’s New Horizons probe approached Pluto for a flyby just before the 2015 General Assembly in Honolulu. It was during this period that the IAU launched the NameExoWorlds contest, which also came to a conclusion in Honolulu after over half a million votes were cast from all over the world. While the inside story of how the contest was organized has appeared elsewhere, here I focus on the historical and sociological context that made Pluto such a sensitive issue, especially in the USA, explaining why this contest generated another controversy between the IAU and the New Horizons team. However, after the world-wide success of NameExoWorlds, the IAU and the New Horizons team eventually reached an agreement on finalizing the characterization and names of a number of newly discovered Pluto and Charon surface features (an on-going process), while a new edition of NameExoWorlds is in preparation for the IAU centennial in 2019.

Sociological Context of the New Land Acquisition Law in India: A Case Study

Sociological Context of the New Land Acquisition Law in India: A Case Study