Wider Social Field Research Articles

Italian version of the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS)-Total Care (TC): development and psychometric validation in patients undergoing cancer treatment or follow-up.

The routine use of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in clinical practice improves quality of care, it helps in reducing the access to emergency services and unscheduled visits, and it can improve cancer patients' time survival. The Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS) is a PRO largely used in different care settings to monitor physical and psychological symptoms. Nonetheless, along with these symptoms, literature also highlighted the presence and effect of spiritual pain, financial distress, and social isolation on quality of care, treatment effectiveness, and survival. The aims of the current study were (a) to complete the Italian version of the ESAS validation process by adding the missing symptom "insomnia" and (b) to develop and validate the ESAS-Total Care (ESAS-TC) that is intended to evaluate and screen not only physical and psychological symptoms but also spiritual pain, discomfort deriving from financial problems associated with illness, and suffering related to social isolation. A sample of Italian native outpatients, who referred to the dedicated Supportive Care Unit of the Fondazione IRCCS, Istituto Nazionale deiTumori (INT), Milano, were asked to fill the ESAS-TC to assess item properties, factorial structure, internal consistency, test-retest reliability (patients were asked to retake the scale after 2-6weeks), and external validity. Concerning the latter, other self-administered scales were employed to assess perceived stress (Perceived Stress Scale), unmet needs (using theNeed Evaluation Questionnaire that describes informative, assistance/care, relational, needs for psycho-emotional support, material needs), and perceived social support (administering the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support that evaluates perceived support of family, friends, and significant others in the wider social field). The scales were administered to 243 patients with solid (90%) and hematologic (10%) cancers, mean age 62.6, female 76.5%. Analysis suggested that a single factor better represents the structure of the ESAS scales, their internal consistency and test-retest reliability were good, and evidence of construct and criterion validity were provided. Additionally, incremental validity of the ESAS-TC was proved showing that the added items offer a unique contribution in predicting the patient's stress. Finally, known groups validity was confirmed testing the differences in the ESAS scores due to the Karnofsky Performance Status. The current study allowed to complete the validation of the Italian version of the ESAS and to develop a psychometrically sound scale, the ESAS-Total Care, that potentially helps in moving cancer research toward personalized total cancer care.

Damaged Attachments & Family Dislocations: The Operations of Class in Adoptive Family Life

This paper is an initial exploration of an under researched area in the field of contemporary adoption—the impact of class on adoptive family life. The first part of the paper argues that whilst class is structurally present in adoption work, the effects of class difference have been a neglected dimension of practice. This neglect of class in adoption reflects its elision in the wider social field. It isn’t that class stratification has materially or economically disappeared but that the inequalities it installs are concealed through a new privileging of individualism. This individualizing of social problems places new regimes of responsibility upon both individuals and parents. This section concludes with an exploration of the intensive field of contemporary parenting, where social background is considered unimportant. It is argued that attachment theory has become a dominant paradigm for parenting in both adoption and the wider social field because its classed notions of parenting are concealed. The second part of the paper draws upon a small scale qualitative study with one local authority adoption team where adoptive parents and birth parents were interviewed about class and parenting. Working classness assumed a structuring importance in terms of the interview material, as most participants were from this class background. Two areas are particularly foregrounded: the degree to which adopted children’s class differences are interpreted as attachment difficulties and the degree to which middle-classness operates as a silent measure for successful parenting in substitute care.

“Nothing but Sounds, Ink-Marks”—Is Nothing Hidden? Must Everything Be Transparent?

Is there something that lies beneath the surface of our ordinary ways of speaking? Philosophy sometimes encourages the all-too-human thought that reality lies just outside our ordinary grasp, hidden beneath the surface of our experience and language. The present discussion concentrates initially on a few connected paragraphs of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (particularly ##431–435). Wittgenstein leads the reader to the view that meaning is there in the surface of the expression. Yet how adequate is Wittgenstein’s treatment of the sounds and ink-marks, the materiality of the sign? With some reference to Emerson, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida, my discussion explores how far a more adequate account of the sign can coincide with the claim that nothing is hidden. It exposes phony obsessions with transparency, which in a culture of accountability have had a distorting effect on education and the wider social field. It endorses confidence in the reality of ordinary words.

Bad Reading

This essay argues that queer experimental literature provides a hermeneutic mode to resist the gentrification of LGBTQ literature in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis. Queer experimental literature elicits “bad reading,” affective relations of reading that disrupt the corporeal norms that fuse readers into the heteronormative public sphere. Bad reading conjures new economies of social and erotic relation in historical moments when queer belonging is foreclosed, stigmatized, or forgotten. Locating bad reading beside paranoid, reparative, and postcritical reading, the essay situates queer reading within the wider social field from which it emerges. To do so, I turn to Samuel Delany’s experimental AIDS writing. Delany rewrites academic discourses of deconstruction, forcing critics to confront their affective and historical implication in the AIDS crisis. He uses queer experimental literature to recuperate the radicalism of queer eroticism disavowed by mainstream gay literature and safe-sex discourses alike. The Mad Man (1994) contests the conceit that experimental literature is politically solipsistic and affectively unpleasant by inviting readers into the incipiently social relations of queer eroticism. The novel’s provocations of bad reading condense an affective archive of unsanctioned queer hermeneutics, which have been elided in disciplinary debates over critical reading.

Desarrollo sustentable y turismo de naturaleza: reevaluación y acción colectiva en torno a recursos comunes en Holbox, México

The commodification of Holbox Island as a tourism destination has been based on the reassessment of available resources particularly common pool resources. By taking the economic broadly, its necessary to objectify the process of production and reproduction jointly. The creation of value is not only the production of the commodity to be put into circulation, this means to take social reproduction to explain the reconfiguration of economic, social and cultural values. In this regard, production and reproduction leads us to the understanding of the ideological processes that frame the material practices in a particular society. Here, I analyse this articulations to reflect upon the ideological streams that frame local livelihoods and social action under the pressure of wider social fields. In Holbox, the novel values that have been circulating under the frame of ecotourism production are land property and wildlife in the sea; both are generated under the rhythms of the two main markets in the region, viz. nature tourism and real estate. But the creation of tourism commodities led to the dispossession of communal property and the dislocation of the possibilities of exploiting marine wildlife under a common pool resources orientation, due to the messy design and implementation of biodiversity protection policies. Through the empirical traces of this case, I explore how rural societies and their definitions of valuable resources are reconfigured under the pressure and struggles of wider fields of hegemonic domination that use development discourses as an end. This dynamics has important contradictions that make this ideological construct a value to be achieved by rural populations, meanwhile inequalities are reproduced endlessly with the circulation of the idea of “improvement” as a common goal. Keywords: tourism, development, collective action, uneven development.

Transformatio Per Complexitatem: The 20th Century Transformation of Latin Teaching in the UK

A second-order change took place in Latin Teaching in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, with effects reaching into the present day. This Change was a shift in attitude, values and methods which Forrest describes as, ‘curriculum change on an unprecedented scale’ (Forrest, 1996, p. 42) and the ‘transformation of Latin teaching’ (ibid, p. 146). This article explores the nature of this change and justifies categorising it as second-order. Secondly, it considers the process of how the change took place, looking also at changes within the wider social field and resistance to change within Latin teaching. Both a Bourdieusian theoretical framework and a metaphorical application of chaos and complexity theory are used to analyse this change and explain some of the conflicts and crises within and around the change period. The final section of the analysis considers issues affecting the communication of ideas and the effect of social capital within the system.

Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin (review)

Reviewed by: Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin Shira Wolosky (bio) Gilpin, W. Clark. Religion Around Emily Dickinson. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014. $34. Through the various waves of twentieth-century criticism of Dickinson, religion has been mainly lacking. New Critical explication studied her work in its formal iconicity, independent of social history. The assumption was that Dickinson’s poems, like other literary works, were about the powers and forms of the imagination as they illuminated themselves: artifacts about art, language constructing language. Gender criticism opened the door to social history, but only as wide as women’s literary performances. In an odd way this increased Dickinson’s isolation, together with women contemporary to her. As madwomen in the attic — with Dickinson an exemplar in her reclusion – women writers continued to be seen as cut off from public events. Their restricted, constrained domesticity became the very subject of their work, expressed as an anxious tension between their double roles of women and poet. Cultural Studies linked this gendered positioning to other cultural subjections, making a trinity of race, class, and gender. On one level this broadened discussion into wider social fields. On another, it narrowed analysis to questions of power, of domination and oppression as the ultimate measure or mode of analysis. The literary text became a record of oppression and resistance, which it is the critic’s role to track. [End Page 103] Religion was a cultural arena that these approaches generally ignored. Most critics displayed a kind of metalepsis: the secularism they assumed for themselves, they extended backwards into the nineteenth century. But religion has erupted in the twenty-first century, a return of the repressed with a vengeance, horrifyingly destructive but also as an insistent aspect of human experience and efforts to make sense of it. To omit attention to religion in a century like the nineteenth is to occlude fundamental aspects of the formation of self, the constitution of society, and many aesthetic practices of literature derived from, reflecting, or transforming religious practices. Emily Dickinson’s world was religious. Amherst, and the entire Connecticut River valley, was Jonathan Edwards’s country. The Second Great Awakening stretched from the start of the nineteenth century to the Civil War, and it was experienced by Dickinson directly through conversion waves, including those that swept up her father and the missionary-inclined Mount Holyoke Seminary Dickinson attended. The period leading up to the Civil War and the War itself, the historical maelstrom during which Dickinson composed half her poems, was represented in theological terms that profoundly shaped the conflict. That Dickinson herself resisted formal religion, while also composing poems almost ecstatic in ways structured according to religious modes, only ties her work more firmly to the religious contexts in which she lived and wrote. This religious world of Dickinson’s engagement (and disengagement) is the subject of Religion Around Emily Dickinson. To some extent the material Gilpin assembles is familiar. The basic touchstones of American literary history and Dickinson studies, such as Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, are duly treated. Gilpin extends beyond these to topics of recent interest, as well as contemporary methods: domesticity and the market, sentimentality, and the profession of authorship. He addresses a broad range of social practices through a variety of fields, for example examining domestic architecture and its representations as newly spatialized genderings of middle-class life. William Ellery Channing’s call to “self-culture,” reading practices and dissemination, bereavement practices, landscaped cemeteries, keepsakes and public memorials, spiritualism, letter-writing, consolation literature, and gendered boundaries as they were elaborated and enforced in the nineteenth century weave a cultural-social fabric in which Gilpin frames Dickinson’s own texts. Religion is the thread basting together the varieties of social topics the book reviews. Nineteenth-century domesticity, as a religious site, takes on new and specific forms, such as the “parlor piety” of Phoebe Palmer. Examined as a domestic space gendered female and crossing private with public activity, the [End Page 104] parlor offered a social locus where religious attitudes conjoined with emergent American ideologies such as “self-improvement.” The outpouring of religious publications points inward to religious experience while also penetrating public...

On the Relation between ‘Visual Research Methods’ and Contemporary Visual Culture

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.

Emotion and relatedness as aspects of the identities of adolescents with severe learning disabilities: contributions from ‘practice‐near’ social work research

ABSTRACTThis paper considers social and personal/individual approaches to researching identities of adolescents with severe learning disabilities; suggesting that vital components of emotionality and relatedness are largely missing from research and consequently from literature informing social care professionals. This leaves untapped, rich information and communication resources for research which may improve understandings of the experiences of a socially excluded group of young people. A psychosocial view of adolescent identity development, ‘subjectivation’, offers a way forward and a case study on ‘Billy’, drawn from a ‘practice‐near’ observational study, helps to illustrate this. Observation allows the researcher to be sensitive to the subtle ways in which identities of young people with severe learning disabilities are constructed, often with a sense of fragility and uncertainty. Continuities of experience between the young people and the rest of the adolescent community may be seen, but also the impact of living with impairment can be thought about in relation to the particular psychosocial circumstances of each young person. Knowledge of these processes enhances social work practice by encouraging workers to be sensitive to, and healthily curious about, the multiple ways in which identities of young people with severe learning disabilities are shaped in relationship with those around them and the wider social field.

Ergebnisse der Resilienzforschung und Transfermöglichkeiten für die Selbstentwicklung als Erziehungspersonen

Summary Results of the research on resilience and their relevance for the personal development of parents, teachers and carers Starting with Adler’s recognition of the need to educate teachers, parents and carers, this paper proceeds to present the most important results of the research on resilience. Every person has psychic resilience factors at his or her disposal, which can be identified and strengthened. Resilience is made up of a number of different factors, which make up a dynamic or compensatory process of positive adaptation when faced with stressful circumstances. These factors are to be found within the individual (personal protective factors), in the individual’s close circle of social contacts (family and community protective factors) and/or in the wider social field (protective factors of the society). All these make up a complex system of factors, which mutually influence or reinforce each other. Among the most important factors are stable, secure attachments as well as social and cognitive competence. This paper will focus particularly on the factors within and close to the individual. Based on the research findings, the author then tentatively formulates some concrete suggestions for the personal development of parents, teachers and carers. It is helpful, for example, to place importance on the value of lasting social relationships, to have an available network of support, to have realistic personal aims and goals, to be able to reflect on one’s own patterns of thought, to indulge in positive inner dialogues, to have experiences of positive control and empowerment as well as active and effective coping strategies and beliefs. The goal is to become more secure, relaxed, realistic, satisfied, happier and stronger with those in one’s care as well as with oneself.

Harry Potter and the Commodity Fetish: Activating Corporate Readings in the Journey from Text to Commercial Intertext

Recent years have seen a productive dialogue develop between political-economic and cultural approaches to media studies. In this spirit, this article draws on the analytic tools of political economy to produce a textual analysis of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. In particular, we argue that Rowling has woven throughout the Potter series a set of contradictory discourses related to class and consumerism. Yet out of this heteroglossia, AOL Time Warner—the holder of the series’ film and merchandising rights—has activated a narrow reading of Harry Potter that subordinates Rowling's critique of social inequality and materialism while amplifying those moments in the texts that celebrate the “magic” of commodity consumption. Our conclusion discusses the role such corporate activations might play in the struggle over how commodity production and consumption will be understood in the wider social field.

Rumour, migrants, and the informal economies of Naples, Italy

PurposeThis paper aims to consider the use of rumour by Bangladeshi migrant entrepreneurs in Naples, Italy to comment on informal economic practices and migrant moral hierarchies present in that city.Design/methodology/approachIt is based on ethnographic fieldwork among migrants conducted by the author in the Naples region in 2004 and 2005. Rumour has been interpreted by some scholars as a way to promote community cohesion and by others to promote the self‐interest of those circulating it.FindingsIn this paper, rumour is seen as a communicative device that offers information or news for evaluation and is a central means of distributing information in all economies. Here, migrants use the information circulating in rumours to interpret their migratory chances in Italy in general and, more specifically, entrepreneurial conditions available to those engaged in informal economic activities in the Neapolitan economy. These rumours travel beyond a circumscribed racialised group to have purchase in wider social fields. In this case, as subjective representations of economic behaviour, these rumours offer models for entrepreneurial activities to be admired, mimicked, condemned, or avoided.Originality/valueThis ethnographic material suggests that greater attention should be paid to how subjective understandings spur social action as reflected here through the use of rumours as a kind of knowledge to be assessed and interpreted to form the basis of decisions about economic behaviour among Bangladeshi migrants in Naples.