Readings In Sociology Research Articles

Mapping the History of Sociology: Places, Positioning, Dominance and Marginality in an Emerging Discipline

The paper is a contribution to a sociological reading of a decisive moment in the history of Austrian and Viennese sociology: the early 20th century. In this early period of its establishment, the Austrian (and especially Viennese) sociology is known for its intellectual vitality, the diversity of its competing circles, its methodological innovations. At the same time, sociology appeared as a highly fragmented scientific field with dominant strands, today on the fringes of the discipline, and with peripheral and marginalized trends and positions, appreciated today as pioneers of modern sociology. By applying a topographic approach, the paper elaborates specific characteristics of this field, including the different degree of institutionalization in and outside the Universities, in connection with political and ideological struggles for discursive hegemony, or the deep gap between theoretical and empirical approaches, related to the effects of multidimensional and intersectional marginalization on protagonists of the sociological field who are today recognized as important innovators. With its focus on the material dimension of knowledge production and its particular attention to places and the localization of actors, methods, and thoughts, and the related (unequal) positions in the social field of science, the paper aims to contribute to a critical understanding of processes of marginalization as a constitutive, and driving, element in science history.

Minimal gestures: Displacement, affect and urban experience in A hora da estrela/The Hour of the Star (Amaral, 1985)

Regarded as a landmark in Brazilian film history, Susana Amaral’s A hora da estrela/The Hour of the Star (1985) received critical acclaim when it was released in the 1980s, and continues to receive scholarly attention, especially from feminist, ideological and sociological perspectives. This article examines the film’s use of aesthetic strategies that produce affective and sensorial experiences from a phenomenological position, rather than providing a sociological reading of the protagonist’s condition as a migrant. I argue that Amaral’s focus on the film frame and duration, which favours the close-up, mirror images and still-life images, reveals the protagonist’s minimal gestures, which give rise to affects. From a discussion of the concepts of the time-image, haptic visuality, mimesis, I contend that these embodied and affective spatial experiences construct the protagonist’s sense of self and subjectivity instead of a psychologizing portrayal of her condition as a migrant.

Reading John Grisham’s Bleachers with Foucault: lessons for sports retirement

ABSTRACT This paper has explored how a sociological reading of John Grisham’s short work of fiction Bleachers can shed light on the complexities of the coaching and sports retirement processes. The aim of this paper was to consider the “sociological insights” that Bleachers has to offer by reading the novel in companionship with the thoughts of French post-structuralist thinker Michel Foucault , specifically his disciplinary analysis from Discipline and Punish. This paper has also observed how the figure of Coach Eddie Rake in Bleachers can be considered as trope for retired athletes’ unresolved feelings towards their former sport. In achieving these aims, this paper has considered how Bleachers, when read through a sociological lens, can act as a meaningful data source for those invested in learning more about the poorly understood phenomena of sports retirement, as well as the dangers of coaching practices that are overly reliant upon the disciplinary logic of sport.

From Politics to Pope: An Account of the Group Aesthetic

This paper discusses the study of Chartist and working-class literatures, noting that the pronounced development of aesthetic criticism in these areas uncomfortably corresponds with the rejection of “aesthetics” in other fields. Chartist, working-class, and laboring-class scholars have broken free from monolithically sociological or political readings that only a generation ago too often dismissed artistic endeavors as, at best, merely a re-accenting of the mainstream. Current studies focus on the aesthetic innovations that emerged out of working-class entanglements with mainstream counterparts. The paper argues that the rejection of “aesthetics” generally fails to recognize marginalized and group aesthetics (including the critical work done on marginalized and group aesthetics) and specifically what it meant for a political cohort—the Chartists are my example—to think aesthetically.

Narrativas da Nova Gaia – 4400. Prospetos de hip hop na Comunidade jovem

Within a sociological reading, hip hop has a growing importance in the study of contemporary cultural dynamics in the last three decades, since it is understood as a vector of communication, identification and claim of young people around the world. This time, we want to understand the role that hip hop plays in the identity construction of young people inserted in the movement, specifically in the rap aspect, in the parishes of Vila Nova de Gaia. How did the interest for integration in the movement arise? What are the main reasons and influences for the continued presence? How important is rap in each young person's life? What are the main changes between the Old and the New School? And what future do young people want? These are some of the questions we propose to answer based on the interviews - in life story form - that we conducted to young rappers from Vila Nova de Gaia.

O Estado à beira-mar. Estratégias burocráticas na formação do mercado imobiliário em Matosinhos Sul - o exemplo da Comissão de 1 de março de 1996

The genesis of Matosinhos Sul , as a territorial, social and symbolic 'reality', is largely associated with the formation of a real estate market at its geographical scale. This article presents a sociological reading of what is argued to be the central actor in the organization of that space for real estate exchange: the State, in particular at the level of local government. In this context, this analysis will focus on a political-bureaucratic strategy put in place by the municipal executive, which allowed the start of the Matosinhos Sul transformation, by adjusting the regulations of the urbanization plans to the dispositions of real estate developers, but also of architects: a (proto) commission that took place on March 1, 1996. The purpose of this text is to show that the ‘flexibilization 'of building regulations was not a conquest of the private universe over the State, but a possibility granted by the State to the private universe.

Autotraduction. Une perspective darwinienne

Temporarily evacuating the human factor, a Darwinian approach to cultural facts could prove an important source of additional explanation to textual, historical, biographical and sociological readings of self-translation. In this contribution, we quickly introduce some aspects of cultural evolution and their relevance for translation and Translation Studies; we then present the characteristics which (all else being equal) could enhance the success of a cultural object in relation to its competitors; finally, we try to understand, in light of these characteristics, some reasons for the practice of self-translation. These reasons should not be seen as the only valid ones, but as other reasons, valid for other entities (not human beings, but the cultural products themselves).

The Arabic Alphabetical Letter A Psychological and Sociological Reading

The Arabic Alphabetical Letter A Psychological and Sociological Reading

Mourning a Late King through Portraiture: Articulations of the Sacred and Profane in the Primate City of Bangkok

This article employs an urban sociological reading to examine mourning portraiture in the primate city of Bangkok, Thailand, following the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX). The article argues that Bangkok’s mourning portraiture constructs a reified notion of the Thai nation acceptable to Bangkok’s elites. Through a narrative that sacralizes the late king’s historical exploits for the Thai people, Bangkok’s elites have harnessed the affluent shopping district of Pathum Wan as an aesthetic and political canvas for showcasing the transcendent and virtuous nature of their late monarch. With mourning portraiture as figure and Bangkok’s Pathum Wan as background, the nationalist implications of the imagery as they render sacred the late monarch are considered. The article concludes that the capital city’s sacralization of a deceased king is but an attempt by pro-royalist banking families to reinforce their class linkages to the Thai aristocracy by ‘working towards the monarchy,’ a trajectory illuminated by Serhat Ünaldi, one which I hope to make visible in the post-death context of mourning Rama IX.

Unfitting, uncomfortable, unacademic: a sociological reading of an interactive mobile phone app in university lectures

Scholarly literature on education technology uptake has been dominated by technological determinist readings of students’ technology use. However, in recent years there has been a move by sociologists of education to highlight how the contexts in which educational technologies are introduced are not tabula rasa but socially and culturally complex. This study approaches technology as a social construct, arguing that students construct discursive meaning of, rather than simply respond to, technologies for learning. The study explores students’ constructions of a mobile learning app that was introduced into lectures during a year-long university course. Students largely rejected the app, constructing it as unfitting for the context, a socially uncomfortable experience and an unacademic way of learning. The paper highlights the limitations of technological determinism and closes by arguing for readings of educational technologies that pay close attention to students’ voices.

Digital Literary Reading Experiences by Young Readers

In this article, we present an overview of the results of a survey conducted with Brazilian youngsters aged 15 to 18 years old, belonging to diverse socioeconomic strata. We have identified their means of search and access to the works and the experience of digital literary reading, considering that it includes the reading of works of both digital and digitized literature. We have based our research on studies about the history of books and reading, youth literature, sociology of reading, multimodality and digital literary genres. We applied a questionnaire to 342 youngsters, a semi-open questionnaire to 68 youngsters, and followed the practices of digital literary reading of 6 young readers through semi-structured interviews. Digital search environments are diverse, but not always easily understood by young readers. For each type of digital literary reading there are specific ways of accessing the digital environments that make them available.

Voices in the revolution: Resisting territorial stigma and social relegation in Porto’s historic centre (1974–1976)

This article tries to broaden the research agenda on territorial stigmatisation. It reviews some theoretical arguments on the relevance of a relational sociological reading of the processes of territorial stigmatisation, and proposes a study of these processes during a period of political revolution and social instability, through discussion of the case presented by the city of Porto, Portugal, in the mid-1970s. Based on the study of institutional archives, ethnographic work in several neighbourhoods, and semi-structured interviews with social actors involved in these processes, the article describes the urban and housing conditions of inner city Porto’s working-class boroughs in the first three quarters of the 20th century and discusses the forms of political and social resistance taken up by residents from the most dilapidated neighbourhoods following the revolution of April 1974. The sociological analysis of the actions that gave origin to the voice of the residents in the historic centre of the city in this period reveals significant interaction with the processes of territorial stigmatisation, via organised collective resistance.

Staging An Elite Reading Community: Jin Shengtan’s Commentary on The Western Wing

<p>本文擬將金聖歎評《第六才子書西廂記》放置於閱讀史脈絡中，考察金批《西廂》中有關「錦繡才子」之戲劇性展演。金批《西廂》一反傳統的「發憤著書論」以及作者寄身翰墨以期不朽的文化心理，強調古人／作者之不可知，將文本生產與天才作者的英雄人格相剝離，轉而將創作、閱讀主體共同放置於茫茫天地間洶湧萬世的時間潮流中。妙文成為「普天下萬世錦繡才子」構成的菁英讀者群體與聖歎間通過儀式性的情感交流以及「平心斂氣」的身體體驗得以從天下萬世人人心中「偷取」出的公共之寶。如此立論，看似與二十世紀後結構主義的「作者已死」觀念相貫通，實際卻植根於聖歎作為十七世紀江南才子，藉木刻本為公共平臺，對社會性閱讀理想化的構想。本文通過情感紐帶、身體體驗、洞察力培養三方面考察聖歎展演的社會性閱讀之內涵──其中折射的明清之際文人審美趣味既承接儒者身體力行的閱讀功夫，又展現出晚明醫藥話語和禪、儒合一的專業性知識體系。有趣的是，金聖歎對「錦繡才子」的訴求在清代的接受史中不敵刻書家、戲曲家對「才子」概念的慣性理解。然而聖歎的「才子觀」因其突破時空限制，且以共同的倫理、文化、文本記憶為界定，具有超越地域、政治實體、身分的開放性。由此可見金聖歎對預期讀者理想化建構之影響值得放置於東亞語境內進一步考察。</p> <p> </p><p>This paper situates Jin Shengtan’s The Sixth Genius Book: The Western Wing in the context of the history of reading. In his tremendously popular commentary on the romantic play, The Story of the Western Wing, Jin defines the text as an artifact that captures the aesthetics of a single moment that is utterly unique and incapable of reproduction. Any writer does not possess his text once it materializes into marvelous writings between Heaven and earth (tiandi miaowen), as these are treasures of talented men whose brilliance of learning renders the patterns of nature as the text’s simulacrum. I will examine how Jin uses this definition of the literary text to promote his understanding of reading as a social activity that entails emotional, embodied, and cognitive experiences that fuse subjective identities of the author, the reader, and the commentator in a virtual community of reader-writers sharing brocade-like minds (jinxiu caizi). Jin’s theory of reading may resonate with the Poststructuralist perspective on the death of the author—a text is always already embedded in a tissue of signs; to impose an author is to impose a limit on that text. Yet Jin’s anticipation of the reader’s community is premised on a pursuit of those with equal intellectual capacities. There is therefore no “reading public” within Jin’s purview. Ironically, the publishers and editors who produced no fewer than ninety editions based on Jin’s commentary did not respond well with Jin’s call for a reading community. To fully appreciate the significance of the sociology of reading staged in Jin’s commentary, we need to look beyond commercial printing in Qing China and at Chosŏn Korea, where men of letters were inspired by Jin’s commentary to re-evaluate the acts of reading and writing.</p> <p> </p>

Live music network in Larnaca, Cyprus: from musicians to audience and back (to the venue) again

AbstractThis article discusses the development of a live music network in Larnaca, Cyprus. It is the result of a 9 month field research project centred on a specific music venue and it is based on interviews with members of four local prominent rock bands and the venue manager. These interviews were further informed by several discussions with numerous audience members, the result of the author's participatory involvement in this network. The emphasis of the discussion lies in the experiences of the performers and their views concerning the growth of this live music network, which in itself is an indicator of the dynamic relationship between underground musical tastes and the presence of mainstream currents in the city. The purpose of this research is to highlight that the development and preservation of such live music networks depend on various factors and to argue that the study of transformations of a locality's musical life can lead to sociological readings regarding its music-related past and present.

복합장으로서의 공감장을 위한 제언 - 『공감장이란 무엇인가-감성인문학 서론』에 대한 사회학적 독해

복합장으로서의 공감장을 위한 제언 - 『공감장이란 무엇인가-감성인문학 서론』에 대한 사회학적 독해

A new image for a new profession: Self-image and representation in the professionalization of design in Britain, 1945–1960

This article explores the relationship between self-image, representation and professionalization in the formative years of the design profession in Britain between 1945 and 1960 through a focused empirical study of two independent but interrelated design organizations, the Society of Industrial Artists and the Council of Industrial Design. The article examines publications, correspondence and internal memoranda to identify attempts by both institutions to manage, steer and govern the professional image of the designer. As this material reveals, both organizations held the image of the gentleman professional as an aspirational figure for emerging designers. Attending to a gap in historical and sociological readings of the professions, the article establishes the discursive function of self-image in relation to the particular value of professionalism in design, suggesting that dress, behaviour and physical appearance can be read as sources through which to historicize and theorize the shifting status of the designer in the cultural economy.

Reading matters: Towards a cultural sociology of reading

Sociologists have studied reading mostly as a product of or an input to the social structure. In so doing, they have failed to capture why reading matters to people. On the basis of the intensive practices of reading fiction among women in the UK, this article begins to develop a cultural sociology of reading by showing how the pleasures of reading fiction support processes of self-understanding, self-care, and ethical reflection. A cultural sociology of reading is necessary because these readers’ experiences of meaning-making disappear when reading is explained within the binaries escapism/confrontation, indoctrination/resistance, which frame much of the current research on reading. The discussion is based on the interpretive analysis of three bodies of data: 60 written responses by women to the UK’s “popular anthropology” project, the Mass Observation Project (M–O), participation in two women’s groups, and in-depth interviews with 13 women readers in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Terrorism as Ritual Process and Cultural Trauma: A Performative Analysis of ISIS’s Attacks in Europe

Social sciences studied terrorism focussing mainly on causes, processes of recruitment, relationships with media and new media, propaganda. At the same time, Italian and European public opinion gave voice almost exclusively to military, political and economic analysis. Sociological reflection on Islamist terrorism focussed itself almost exclusively on the religious aspect of radicalisation of Islam, spending little efforts to widen the analytic perspective to the effects of ISIS actions on the (re)definition of the identity and the collective memory of the targeted nation. This article will offer a different point of view, providing a cultural sociological reading of Paris Attacks, aimed at understanding its performative aspects. We will approach Paris Attacks as an example of social drama (Turner, 1982) and will focus on the ritual efforts spent by France to manage, repair and define the cultural trauma (Alexander et al., 2004) deriving from the attacks. Data will consist of a performative analysis of ISIS’s strategy in Europe and of the counter-terrorist demonstration held in Paris on the 9 th of January 2015; and of a frame analysis of the speech pronounced by Francois Hollande on November 16 th 2015, after the Paris attacks, and of all the articles published on the main French newspapers during the first week after the events. In the conclusions, we will discuss how those events help to conceive a new kind of cultural trauma that is typical of the age of weak events and of distrust in public institutions.

Taking (My) Time: Temporality in Transition, Queer Delays and Being (in the) Present

Trans temporalities are usually embedded within a linear progressive force that is directed from the past to the future. Whether embracing a narrative of an ‘extreme’ transformation from one gender to another, or by reimagining the past and claiming that the aspired gender was ‘always there,’ these temporalities ‘jump’ over the present without addressing it. This article aims to illustrate alternative trans temporalities through the notion of ‘taking time.’ Starting with my own autobiographical narrative as a trans woman taking her time with her transition, the article discusses the affective, social, and political meanings of doing a ‘delayed’ transition. Following that, the perspective is broadened to more generalized meanings of ‘taking time,’ analyzed through sociological readings of several trans cultural pieces: Imogen Binnie's novel Nevada, John Greyson's web-series Murder in Passing, and the films Jupiter Ascending (Lana and Lily Wachowski) and Tangerine (Sean S. Baker). These analyses will demonstrate the ways in which ‘taking time’ is embedded within the present, a process that incorporates both dangers and hopes for trans lives.

Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’: 2. Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy ed. by Sarah Barboar, Thomas Lacroix, and Judith Misrahi-Barak

Barboar, Sarah, Thomas Lacroix, and Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds. Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, 'Race: 2. Memory and Intimacy. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Mediterranee, 2015. Pp 258. 21.00 [euro] In this second collection of essays under the topic of Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy, Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, 'Race': 2 addresses transnational migration in a global context. In examining the intersections of race, class, gender, and geography, the essays in this collection explore the issue of who migrates where, how they make these journeys, and what is at stake in these migrations. The editors, Sarah Barboar, Thomas Lacroix, and Judith Misrahi-Barak, observe that the essays collected here will unravel the subjective perceptions of the self through its interplay with the Other once it is affected by the experience of de-territorialization (10). They divide interdisciplinary collection into three segments: Questions of Theory, History and Memory, Intersecting Identities, and Bodies in Motion. An interdisciplinary framework is apt for exploring the various conversations pertinent to migration and diaspora. In the first chapter, Diaspora Theory: Here, There and Everywhere, Maggi Morehouse uses both a literary and a sociological framework to conceptualize African diaspora. Using Henry Louis Gates' seminal book Classic Slave Narratives as a starting point, Morehouse expands on the layered intricacies of the African diaspora creole identity forged under slavery. Analyzing the autobiographies of Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince and novels such as Bruce Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah, the chapter allows us to understand what these African diasporic subjects were narrating about their place in the global world order (22). Morehouse contends that while Equiano and Price reflect on the multiple disruptions caused by the institution of slavery in understanding own displaced and diasporic subjectivity, Chatwin's novel pushes the limits of national identity and citizenship for subjects who occupy a liminal space. Morehouse ends the chapter with an interrogation of hybrid positionalities (AfroGermans, Black Russians, AfroBrazilians, and Black Irish) to further the process of de-territorialization. After a strong chapter on Vietnamese-American literary works about Vietnamese subjects fight[ing] status as subalterns in an American neo-colonized Vietnam by Deborah Stefani (51), the collection shifts to a sociological reading of memory construction. In this section, simple mechanisms of remembering are both layered and superimposed for Vietnamese subjects as a result of multiple border crossings, ruptures in social ties, adaptations to languages, and attempts to integrate into new migrated societies. In Between Silences and Rewritings: Two Approaches to Memory Construction by Spanish Refugees and Economic Immigrants in France, Evelyne Ribert compares two Spanish migrant populations: the Spanish refugees in France after the Spanish Civil War (1936--39) and the Spanish immigrants who arrived in France in the 1950s and 60s. Her interviews reveal important variations in the knowledge and memory of family migration and exile (65) and hence a wide variety of transmitted memories. Her essay highlights people's inability to access memory as a result of war and trauma. Ripert shows that memory's discontinuity, marked by gaps of forgetting and remembering, is essential to explore. The text's second segment, Intersecting Identities, explores the vexed question of intersectionalities in the construction of diasporic identities. Adriana Capuano De Oliveira's chapter A Question of Identity: Being Japanese in Brazil and Brazillian in Japan brings the politics of national belonging and exclusion to the forefront. …