Readings In Sociology Research Articles

Reading culture as shared ethos: A study of Finnish self-identified readers

This article advances understanding about book reading as a sociocultural phenomenon in the 2020s. We make a contribution to the cultural sociology of reading by investigating Finnish self-identified book readers by analysing the significance of sociodemographic variables (gender, education, age, and place of residence) in terms of reading activity and access to books. Our study is placed in the context of Finnish reading culture that is characterised by a particular appreciation of reading and measures promoting equal access to culture. Based on an online survey of 955 respondents conducted in 2021, our statistical analyses show that the social stratification of book reading activity that is prominent in population level does not recur within the specific group of people who identify themselves as readers. Among Finnish self-identified book readers, education, gender, and place of residence do not induce significant differences in reading activity. Our analysis that foregrounds inclination instead of quantity as a criterion for readers sheds light on reader equality from a different direction than previous research into nationwide reading habits or descriptive studies on avid readers.

Soviet Library Policy on the Organization of Interaction between Science and Society in the 1920s–1930s

The purpose of the article is a critical analysis of the historical experience of forming the educational Soviet state library policy in the 1920s and 1930s and determination of the possibilities of its modern use. It is shown that the basis of this policy were the views of the domestic revolutionary democrats on science and its popularization, as well as V. I. Lenin’s ideas about the political education of the working class and the development of its political consciousness. It is noted that the library educational policy began to be formed within the framework of the educational concept of librarianship as a form of extracurricular education and political propaganda in the late XIX – early XX century, however, the political and organizational conditions for its implementation developed only in Soviet times. The main motive for the formation of the Soviet educational policy was the need to prepare workers and peasants for participation in public administration throughout the power vertical, the fight against the church, as well as improving workers and peasants’ technical and agricultural literacy. Propaganda became the main form of interaction as the most concentrated expression of political, scientific and technical education. These political and pedagogical principles are disclosed and conclusions are drawn about the prospects of using the experience of those years when forming modern library policy on the organization of interaction between science and society. The main achievements and shortcomings are analyzed. The experience of the 1920s and 1930s shows that such policy will become successful if keeping to the following conditions: 1) the library policy in this direction being an integral part of the national educational and scientific policy; 2) the organized management of educational and scientific reading; 3) library impact should have an active character; 4) principles of modern educational library policy are modernized taking into account the achievements of pedagogical science in the field of enlightenment, sociology of reading, information culture and popularization of science.

Creating more equitable school-to-work transitions for young people not taking the university route: an ‘equalities-ecologies’ framework

ABSTRACT This article proposes and illustrates a framework for thinking about how the school-to-work transitions of young people not intending to go to university can be made more equitable. This framework seeks to enrich sociological readings of VET by building on the considerable strengths of existing research on ecologies of VET provision and the life-worlds of young people navigating transitions, and bringing them together with concerns about the theoretical and practical complexity of equality that have tended to be relatively neglected in VET research to date. Its organising principle is that, in order to make young people’s transitions more equitable, we need to systematically combine analytic attention to: the multidimensional and intersectional nature of inequality; how local learning ecologies are produced at different system-levels; and how these ecologies interact with young people’s life-worlds, values and agency. We argue that identifying which aspects of local learning ecologies underpin or undermine which kinds of equality for differently resourced young people represents an important first step towards formulating a strategy for how local learning ecologies can be stimulated to become both more opportunity-rich and more equitable, and for understanding the policy and practice challenges and dilemmas that have to be negotiated in the process.

Between Tradition and Modernity: A Sociological Reading of Bimal Mitra’s Saheb Bibi Golam

In his book Modernization of Indian Tradition, Yogendra Singh advanced a ‘paradigm for an integrated approach’ to analysing social change. Drawing insights from this paradigm, this lecture delivered in his memory analyses the dialectics of or the relations between tradition and modernity. It is based on a sociological reading of the historical novel Saheb Bibi Golam by the Bengali litterateur Bimal Mitra. It elucidates fiction as ethnography and provides a corrective to the conventional polarisation between fiction and social research.

Science, Law and the Raj: Cultural Fields of Fish(y) Fact

Nineteenth century fact-making in British India was a cultural endeavour shared among its diverse colonial experts. Through a critical sociological reading of archival documents and official records, this paper contributes to aquatic-marine historiography by unpacking utterances and deeds of irrigation engineers, pisciculture proponents, naturalists and administrators regarding the facts of ‘injury to fish supplies’ and the preservation of these supplies by law. It argues that early scientific fisheries investigation and their culmination in the Indian Fisheries Act, 1897 were not the result of a successful separation of science and politics, or of fact from interest. Rather, colonial cultures of fact-making were forged in the interplay of the imperial utilitarianism and hybridity inherent to rule-making in the colony, which renders early fisheries science in India as a field of postcolonial politics by other means.

Right to health during COVID-19 pandemic: A sociological reading on global risk society and colonial sociability

The COVID-19 pandemic, because of its global impact in terms of social, health and economic consequences, activation of expertise, and production of public policies and rhetoric, constitutes a privileged object of analysis for sociology, with particular reference to the understanding of social transformations related to the modernization process. The debate on second modernity and global risk society undoubtedly offers effective keys for the sociological analysis of the pandemic. The essay, also in the light of some data on the spread of contagion and deaths due to COVID-19, with reference to specific contexts such as Brazil and the United States of America, offers a critical reading of the global risk society thesis starting from the post-colonial and decolonial debate. In particular, within an emancipatory social science perspective, the elements of inequality and exclusion that are operating as decisive factors for the sociological understanding of the pandemic phenomenon are brought into focus. To this end, reflections on the forms of inequality at the level of the modern world-economy, on the permanence of structures of hegemony and subalternity based on the “coloniality of power” and on the action of forms of “colonial sociability” and “territorial stigmatization” offer a fertile ground of debate for the analysis and understanding of the unequal consequences of the pandemic and the struggles for right to health. Este artículo profundiza en el derecho a la salud durante la pandemia de COVID-19, analizando su impacto en términos de desigualdades sociales. La primera sección introduce conceptos extraídos del enfoque de la sociedad de riesgo global, señalando algunas de sus limitaciones para un análisis efectivo de las formas de exclusión social durante la pandemia. La principal afirmación es que la lógica de las desigualdades surgidas en la pandemia de COVID-19 puede ser interpretada más eficazmente a la luz de la sociología poscolonial y decolonial, con referencia a los conceptos de colonialidad del poder (Quijano) y, concretamente, de sociabilidad colonial (Santos). El camino propuesto es poner en diálogo dichos conceptos junto con los de marginalidad avanzada y estigmatización territorial (Wacquant). Dichos enfoques son útiles para comprender algunos datos sobre la propagación de contagios y muertes por COVID-19 en los contextos de Brasil y Estados Unidos de América, contagios y muertes que han afectado de manera especialmente crítica a territorios concretos de marginalidad avanzada y expuestos a procesos de estigmatización. Analizando caminos concretos para la desestigmatización territorial, el artículo también reflexiona sobre la tarea emancipadora de un análisis sociológico de las desigualdades en la era de la pandemia de la COVID-19.

Retour à Oxford avec Annie Ernaux: casting light on class migrant experience

The documents added to the new edition of Ernaux's Retour à Yvetot (2013, 2022), written during her student years, represent the process and affects of class transition, without the benefits of hindsight, experience, and the readings in sociology, particularly of Bourdieu, that inform her literary texts. I analyse them here both in relation to Ernaux's published works, particularly La Honte and Mémoire de fille and to the letters I wrote at a similar period and phase of my life, as a first-generation student at St Hugh's College, Oxford in the early 70s. At the time, like Annie Duchesne, 1 I had no political or sociological understanding of my experience; reading Ernaux 20 years later in the early 90s was a literary epiphany, illuminating my trajectory from a working-class culture of origin to a middle-class life and career. My engagement with Ernaux over 30 years has also involved a continuous correspondence with the writer, which I draw on here, illustrating the blurred boundaries between intimacy and research discussed by Fraser and Puwar (2008) . This mise en scène of my reading self is placed within the context of the wider communities of class migrant readers of Ernaux: the lay readers studied by myself and Isabelle Charpentier, Ernaux specialists in academe, and the younger writers discussed by Aurélie Adler in this special issue.

Understanding a wounded civilisation: a sociological reading of V. S. Naipaul’s Indian trilogy

Understanding a wounded civilisation: a sociological reading of V. S. Naipaul’s Indian trilogy

The theory of the public sphere as a cognitive theory of modern society

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a key contribution to political philosophy, media history, democratic theory and political economy – published almost 60 years ago – that left a deep imprint on the process of democratic consolidation of the Federal Republic of Germany. At the same time, the Habermasian model of the public sphere was used to test out the possibilities of democratisation beyond the nation-state. The theory of the public sphere was, however, mainly discussed as a contribution to normative political theory and, as such, the applicability of its normative standards remained contested. In this article, I focus instead on a second sociological reading of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere as an exploration of the cognitive foundations of modern society. The relevance of this approach can be shown in an exemplary way by discussing the functioning of publicity, which, by creating social visibility and facilitating public opinion formation, on the one hand, provides the knowledge base of a shared social world and, on the other hand, becomes the main driver of social change through critical self-reflection. The article goes on to take a look at recent public sphere transformations in the context of digitalisation and globalisation, and argues that public sphere principles are both undermined and gain new relevance when facing the challenges of new and digital media.

CREATING THE IMAGINATION OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY: GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA

In Turkey, new trends, which are alternatives to traditional art production in terms of method, material and subject, started to become visible as of the end of the 1970s. In the activities carried out under the leadership of the State Academy of Fine Arts and accompanied by the intellectual efforts of the Academy teachers based on philosophical discussions in the West, graduate students they had the opportunity to exhibit new and different productions and to be visible. In this generation, many artists who adopted new and different trends, beyond the classical painting and art education in the Academy curriculum; One of them was Gülsün Karamustafa. In addition to bringing local political and cultural elements to her artworks over the years, the artist has exhibited a diversity of materials and attitudes; It has continued her production process uninterruptedly by carrying it to the international level and has become one of the important names of Turkish Contemporary Art. Karamustafa's studies, which have developed around the issue of migration-based cultural hybridity, which emerged in the socio-political field of Turkey after 1980, have a quality that makes sociological readings possible in the context of the political and cultural structure of the country. Listening to the migration stories of her family since childhood; The political background of her family members and her contact with Istanbul, which had a very active sociological atmosphere during her youth, enables the artist to create the main themes in her artworks. The imagery shaped by the period and environment in which she lived, in the context of a cultural transformation-based objectivity, leads to the emergence of products in Karamustafa's artworks, in which subjects such as migration, cultural hybridity, identity, arabesque and kitsch are mostly discussed. The artist has produced a sincere and original art production by simultaneously transferring social issues that she blended with her personal history in line with multiple materials and artistic expression. This study aims to evaluate Karamustafa's work, her life and the social memory of the period she lived in, that period’s cultural structure, political readings and her testimony in the context of cultural hybridity.

The journey of subalternity in Gayatri Spivak’s work: Its sociological relevance

This article explores Gayatri Spivak’s journey of subalternity, demonstrating the empirical and sociological salience of this category beyond its theoretical and epistemic features, by highlighting its potential for increasing our understanding of society and bringing about social change. This argument contests assumptions in the literature about an epistemic/empirical fracture in Spivak’s work, recasting her theoretical frameworks as sociologically relevant. Moreover, it demonstrates that this sociological reading, although it goes ‘against the grain’ of Spivak’s own reticence about understanding subalternity sociologically, is well-founded: the theoretical-epistemic aspects of Spivak’s subalternity contribute to analyses about the situation of subaltern groups under colonialism and neoliberal globalisation and the means by which that subordination can be challenged. This illustrates that her conceptions of subalternity maintain sociological specificity vis-a-vis vague characterisations of subordination (e.g. oppression). Spivak’s later reflections on subalternity then grapple with the sociological deadlocks of her early approach: the disentanglement between subalternity and class exploitation. Her work thus delineates an explanatory matrix, interweaving sociological, philosophical and literary tools to explore entangled aspects of the subaltern condition. This systematic reading of Spivak’s approach expands and contests current scholarship, highlighting its sociologically compelling aspects and indicating the analytical and transformative potential of her matrix for future sociological debates on subalternity.

New classics for the new science – re-reading the basis of sociology in Ecuador until the 1950s

ABSTRACT Professional sociology in Ecuador started with the first chair in sociology in 1915. This led to a series of foundational texts during the 1920s and 30s that sought to define what sociology is while applying it to core aspects of Ecuadorian society. While this time was – in the Global North- marked by a growing centralization on the theories of Durkheim and Weber, the Ecuadorian sociologists preferred other thinkers in order to understand society. The result was a mixture of different theories that were not always clearly articulated but did sustain the first relatively coherent sociological readings of Ecuadorian society. This text will shed light on how the first professional sociology in Ecuador used the classics of sociology in a particular way to build local sociology. The focus will be on the four most relevant sociological thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, Agustín Cueva Sáenz, Ángel Modesto Paredes, Víctor Gabriel Garcés, and Luis Bossano. They worked with Tarde, Worms, Durkheim, and some German, US-American, and Latin American authors. The creation of the first School for Sociology in the 1960s meant a break from this tradition that has not been reflected adequately until today.

A Sociological Reading of Statutory Social Work and Irish Corporate Governmentality: On the Death of Creativity

Abstract The corporate and neo-liberal governance of Irish social work, and a strangle-hold of legal-rational reasoning on the profession, has led statutory social work to be increasingly alienated from its traditional commitment to radical change in the pursuit of true social justice. Whilst this case has already been made, we set out to extend debates around an ‘epistemic schism’ in social work through a sociological critique of creativity. The demise of creativity arguably lies in the fettering of social work by corporate state entities, increasingly prescriptive governmental law and policy and a degree of deliberate deformation of social work through the health and social care regulator CORU. We argue that as the artistry of creative practice increasingly now comes under assault through proceduralisation, corporate governance and risk aversion, any remaining residuals of creativity also come to be repackaged and misappropriated in the form of ‘professional discretion’. What is at stake in the death of creativity is the death of anything surplus and exceptional to that which social workers are mandated to do. Moreover, we propose that without creativity, social workers can no longer fulfil the profession’s ideological goal of dismantling social injustice at a wider societal level.

The Historical Sociology of Class Formation in the Southern Kurdistan: 1921-1991

This article attempts to investigate the phenomenon of class formation in Southern Kurdistan from 1921 to 1991, during which the class structure of this society changed gradually. On this basis, a historical sociological reading of the political upheaval implications for class formation has been made in Southern Kurdistan. Since the establishment of the Iraqi state in 1921, under the supervision of a British Mandate, in Southern Kurdistan, which was regarded as a part of this country, the feudal system was dominant until the July 1958 revolution in Iraq and the coming to power of Abdulkarim Qasim, which began to reform agricultural lands. On the other hand, the successive uprisings of the Kurdish nation, especially the Eylul uprising in 1961-1975 had a significant influence on the formation and change of the class relations in Southern Kurdistan. As a result, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were significant changes in class relations, which led to the formation of petit-bourgeoisie that played a crucial role in the coming years in Southern Kurdistan.

XXVIII Sociological Readings in RSSU

XXVIII Sociological Readings in RSSU

Field, place or space? A carnal ethnography of a therapeutic space-construct

PurposeIn advancing the academic discourse around the theory of field, place and space in ethnographic research, this paper proposes a carnal sociological reading of the meaning and form of the Lindsay Leg Clubs – third-sector community leg care centres for older adults with leg problems – as a therapeutic space-construct.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on non-formulaic, polymorphic ethnographic research in the UK Lindsay Leg Clubs conducted through multiple on-site and extramural engagements with the Leg Club community between 2019 and 2023 and an interview with the Leg Club founder and president, Professor Ellie Lindsay OBE. Wacquant's (2015) reflexive, enactive ethnographic approach is applied to develop an intellectual and carnal know-how of Leg Clubs as therapeutic space-constructs.FindingsThe researcher's “flesh and blood” experience of the Leg Clubs reveals the importance of cognitive and embodied appreciation of sounds, smells, sights, movements, the structures of wound stigma, centre-stage physical bodies of members and the volunteers, the material arrangement of the place and the researcher's own visceral and intellectual, biographical relation to the fieldwork to understand the therapeutic form and meaning of Leg Club spaces.Originality/valueApplying the carnal sociology approach to reveal the therapeutic form and meaning of the Leg Club spaces makes concrete the abstract distinctions between field, place and space in ethnographic research, hence advancing the discourse around the theory of field in ethnography. A carnal sociological reading of the Leg Club spaces has implications for an embodied understanding of broader community care spaces.

Violence Hidden in the Commercials Discourse on Social Media Sociological Reading

The study aimed to answer the main study question: What are the impacts and forms of hidden violence in commercials discourse? The researchers used the qualitative approach, and a number of in-depth interviews were conducted, distributed into focus groups consisting of 25 individuals, five heads of families, and three specialists in management and marketing in the governorates of Bethlehem. The study reached the following conclusions: Violence hidden in the Commercials discourse appeared when the social media surfers were involved in social media and raising their volume of consumption, reaching waste on one hand and extravagance on the other, which resulted in anxiety as indicated by the interviewees. Moreover, the interviewees exhibited the extent to which they were impacted by violence hidden in commercial discourse when the latter permeated their social status, which is always navigating in search of their absent identity among the attractive commercial. The interviewees could not restrain themselves from moving through the commercial content. Furthermore, violence hidden in commercial discourse manifested itself in arousing the desire hidden inside them. They expressed that they oftentimes find themselves unconsciously involved in search of attractive trademarks and other competing ones. Besides, violence hidden in commercial discourse had an impact on the predominance of foreign products and the melting of domestic ones. It was noticeable that most of the interviewees purchased the foreign product at the expense of the domestic one. This creates a state of a feeling of contradiction between the status of fluid global values and the landmarks of a scattered national identity. Finally, the two researchers noticed that the power of violence hidden in commercial discourse had transcended the roles of many of the classical sociological variables. Therefore, the variable of controlling the electronic virtual context had a powerful impact that contributed to spreading consumption and the exercise of power on social media sites.

Linee di conflitto, economia politica e stratificazione sociale nel Kurdistan iracheno

Abstract The article follows the history of Iraqi Kurdistan from the achievement of regional autonomy in 1991 to the most recent protest movements, tracing the origin of a neo-patrimonial system tied to the dynastic power of the two ruling parties and outlining its current crisis. The authors analyze the popular protests that have inflamed the region since 2015 within the processes of institutional formation, social stratification, and economic transformation of the Iraqi-Kurdish region. By questioning the dominant scholarly approach, which tends to present the Kurds exclusively in ethno-national terms, the authors propose an original sociological reading with the aim of shedding light on the complexity of the social and political conflicts running through Kurdish society.

What Sociologists Talked at the XXIII Ural Sociological Readings

What Sociologists Talked at the XXIII Ural Sociological Readings

A Book on Economics for Sociological Reading Book Review: Banerjee A., Duflo E. (2021) Ekonomicheskaya nauka v tyazhelye vremena. Produmannye resheniya samykh vazhnykh problem sovremennosti [Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems], Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press; St. Petersburg: Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg University, 624 pp. (in Russian)

A Book on Economics for Sociological Reading Book Review: Banerjee A., Duflo E. (2021) Ekonomicheskaya nauka v tyazhelye vremena. Produmannye resheniya samykh vazhnykh problem sovremennosti [Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems], Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press; St. Petersburg: Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg University, 624 pp. (in Russian)