Sociology Lens最新文献

This article engages with the representations and meanings of child figures within US films about environmentally induced displacement. At the intersection between film studies, childhood studies, and the emerging scholarship on climate mobilities (Boas et al., 2022), it explores the ways in which three contemporary apocalyptic films—The Road (2009), Take Shelter (2011), and Greenland (2020)— mediate the relationship between mobility and environmental collapse through child characters. It argues that the functions attached to the child in these films—those of seer, victim, and carrier of hope and futurity—work to depoliticize climate mobilities, obscuring the varied aspirations, sociopolitical factors, and power structures that shape mobility choices in the context of environmental threat. As imaginary projections of an upcoming climate collapse, these films provide fertile ground for an exploration of the cultural ideals underpinning the construction of child characters, and the influence these have in the articulation of climate mobilities.

On February 6, 2023, earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.7 and 7.6 struck southern and central Turkey. The disaster caused severe damage to buildings and resulted in the loss of thousands of lives, leaving many children injured, traumatized, and without basic needs. One of the most sensitive issues was the news stories about children rescued from the rubble. These news stories were highly emotional and sensational, frequently describing the children as miracles. However, they often disregarded the reasons and negligence that caused their victimization. The journalism ethics related to the representation of children, disaster coverage, and interviewing victims are also ignored. This study uses a multimodal critical discourse analysis method to explore the discursive strategies employed in the media coverage of this topic. Three salient common themes were included in the study: “Miracles and hope”, “patriarchal state”, and “sensational/dramatic elements. The analysis shows that media representations of earthquake victim children in Turkey aestheticize their pain and suffering, reducing them to objects of pity or spectacle. By examining these representations critically, the study aims to raise awareness about the importance of ethical and responsible media practices in reporting on natural disasters and other humanitarian crises.

Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of capital, field and habitus were originally used to understand inequalities in education in the 1970's. Today they are readily applied in other disciplines and contexts. This paper firstly explores the author's understanding of the concepts of capital, field and habitus as a depiction as a set of lenses, and suggests the application of this framework to further understand the experiences and trajectories of pre-registration nursing students to contribute to improvements in policy and service provision.

This article provides an examination of the concept of consumption within the fields of sociology and economic historiography. Two theoretical approaches towards this phenomenon exist in the literature: the consumer society as a characteristic element of late capitalism in the 20th century and the society of consumption as a fundamental aspect in the historical origins of modern society between the 17th and 19th centuries. The article challenges one of the central premises of the first approach, which suggests that mass consumption contaminates a previously given society. Instead, I argue that the expansion of a consumer society during the early phase of capitalism created the conditions for the emergence of an emancipatory ideal of dignified life associated with a basic standard of consumption. This concept served as a historical precursor to the contemporary notion of absolute poverty.

Interdisciplinarity continues to be a focus and method for complex social and environmental challenges. This paper explores how the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) which was founded through the idea of scientific interdisciplinarity operated in practice to create new knowledge about a new object of concern, the ‘environment’. Using the ‘trading zone’ concept, the social and epistemic processes behind making scientific interdisciplinarity a material and institutional reality are uncovered, and to what extent interdisciplinary knowledge was actually produced. This paper concludes that interdisciplinary processes can be effective in dealing with complex challenges but often rely on the institutional and social dynamics of the researchers involved. Historicising interdisciplinarity in knowledge-making settings can go some way in supporting new interdisciplinary endeavours associated with environmental and climate research.

Almost every city and every citizen in China had experienced lockdown at least once.

Today, I accidentally killed a mosquito. I don't usually hurt any creature, not even the tiniest. But this mosquito was so persistent that it pushed me to my limits. It kept buzzing around me for two whole hours as I tried to sleep. When it landed on my face, I couldn't hold back any longer.

I slapped it, it died, leaving a tiny mark on my hand.

On another day, I saw a pigeon tied up in front of a convenience store. It couldn't fly away, but it wasn't locked in a cage either. The bird just stood there, not even trying to break free. It made me wonder, has it ever attempted to escape?

I also saw a man, drunk by 9 pm. His head was low, as if weighed down by his problems. I guessed that the lockdowns must have played a part in his situation. He seemed to mirror us all in a way, as we were all grappling with the effects of the pandemic, along with the pressures of life.

Today, I take part in a strange ritual for the hundredth time – a swab test. This alien thing invading my throat has become an ordinary feeling. But living under the constant shadow of the pandemic is still a challenge. Every visit to the test site increases the sense of dread. There's an electric horn constantly reminding us to “line up, show your health and travel codes.” People move forward slowly, like a long line of cattle under the hot sun, waiting their turn to undergo this bleak ritual.

But this is the way to keep some sense of a normal life, to be a responsible citizen. Still, I can't help but ask: should we have to go through this invasive test three times a week, becoming part of a never-ending cycle of pandemic procedure? My roommate jokes that our throats have grown tough from the countless swabs scraping them.

In reality, I feel a new strength in my throat, a change brought on by these repeated invasions.

Now, I open my mouth wide, not to yell, but to stay quiet.

Waiting for my hundredth test, I realize: life in a pandemic is like enduring a swab test – the swab goes in, twists, and turns, making you want to gag, your eyes tear up, you feel sick. But you can't do anything, you can only watch in silence.

Ah, it's my turn now…

Reality has taken a surreal turn. Shanghai, the shining star of China's urban landscape, has been under the grip of an unseen enemy for a month. The city that never sleeps is now unable to provide even basic necessities like food. Many are succumbing to hunger. A rising number of suicides add to the grim reality, victims of desperation, untreated chronic illnesses, or perhaps, acts of defiance against the harsh COVID restrictions. They are casualties of the pandemic, but none officially die due to COVID.

I, too, am caught in another top-tier city, Shenzhen. I can only step outside after another PCR test. The city has been transformed into a fenced maze, cutting us off from one another, restric

Under what conditions is local governance influenced by external interests? I illustrate the capacity of external lobbies' strategic behavior to affect local change on hot button issues by exploiting resource asymmetries between them. Using a case of gun policy in the Chicago suburbs, I analyse how local policymaking on guns changed. While the gun lobby's federal impact has been explored, its local influence is insufficiently considered. I find two main insights. First, the institutional landscape around firearms after 2008 impacted local policymaking that was resilient to challenge in 1981. Second, the gun lobby became more resourceful in its influencing strategies, which activated the latent potential of these institutional changes to exert a local effect. This granular study contributes insights on the gun lobby's local impact and the institutional local consequences federal changes brought. This comparative analysis theorises the NRA's strategic use of ‘precedent as resource’, locales' risk aversion when faced with better-resourced external lobbies, and how resource asymmetries become significant in unfavorable legal environments, with wider implications regarding lobby-locale policy interactions after Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). The social-political uses of law as a strategic resource offers a study of the downstream impacts of the courts' politicization since the 2000s.

The 13-minute video excerpt from an artist talk, “Listen to the Voices in my Head,” delivered on December 2nd, 2022, by Sahar Te at the Alberta University of the Arts. Accompanying the video is a written response by artist and writer Aman Sandhu who was present at the talk.

Applying a queer historical framework, this study examines the legacy of Matthew Shepard while centering the perspectives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two–Spirit, and other people of expansive genders or sexualities (LGBTQ+). In particular, this study highlights the varied responses of LGBTQ+ people during and after his murder, and how queer young adults living and working in Wyoming today have been shaped by Shepard's legacy. Drawing on evidence from archival and interview data (n = 23 interviews), we argue that the social process of collective memory endemic to Matthew Shepard has largely been one of erasure—not erasure of the incident itself, but erasure of historical and contemporary queer activism, community, and resistance in the region. For many young people, Matthew Shepard's legacy is that of a cautionary tale. His name is invoked by allies and anti-LGBTQ+ people alike to deter LGBTQ+ visibility, thereby constructing and reifying a heteronormative imagining of rural America. This study illustrates the value and importance of expanding queer history to represent rural queer voices in diverse, nuanced, and accurate ways. We also make a call for Sociologists to examine how they, too, may be perpetuating rural queer erasure within their scholarship.

This article proposes a theoretical approach to the sociology of moral giving. ‘Moral giving’ is a novel term introduced to cover acts of charity, philanthropy, and suchlike, both individual and as associated with donor institutions, such as family foundations and civil society organisations. A topic in moral philosophy for centuries, it has sociological aspects that have not been well studied. Inevitably, there is a complex range of functions motivating moral-giving actions, including the social ends (benefits, rewards, etc.) that motivate donors. Assuming not to distinguish between motive and function as (potential) drivers, this study presents an analysis of the social motivations of moral giving from an integrative perspective. First, a particularist approach is considered and a novel synthesis of the micro-macro dichotomy is outlined. Then, five major motivations or perspectives on moral giving are identified – those of religion, exchange relations, solidarity, rational choice, and social capital – and their micro/macro orientations and intersecting functions are briefly reviewed. An integrative model is thereby developed that incorporates mutually transitive relations between macro structures and micro agents and between the various social motives of moral giving.