Sociology Lens最新文献

This paper approaches globalization through the lens of folk lore, myth, and John Law's hopeful monsters, focusing on Hannah Twynnoy, a woman allegedly killed by a tiger in Malmesbury (England) in 1703. Hannah's death was taken up three hundred years later as a metaphor for globalization when local factory jobs were relocated to a ‘tiger economy’ (Malaysia). Taken to manifest Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury's ‘state of nature’, Hannah's story also illustrates the reverse. Globalization can fragment and deregulate, but globalization assembles and regulates to. Hannah's gravestone and burial records blend real and virtual, local, and global; the genealogy of ‘tigers’ challenges Michel Foucault; and questions regarding blame echo across centuries, in ongoing conflict over agency and causation (as per Edmund Evans). Is globalisation a ‘jungle out there’? No. Local factory jobs did go. Nevertheless, sustaining global intellectual property regulation means the company employs more people in Malmesbury today than before manufacturing relocated. After it was announced that local jobs would be ‘eaten up’ by a ‘tiger economy’, a spate of alien big cat (ABC) sightings near Malmesbury did express what Susan Lepselter calls the inchoate injuries of class and power. Indeed, experiencing such fabulous things did resonate with something real.

Community agriculture describes the practice of land commoning for food production. Communitarian food systems are explained as determined by neoliberalisation for being either prompted by global processes of environmental degradation or dissolved in submerged networks of everyday politics. While consistent with neoliberal critiques, the article advocates for their historicization through a processual approach to community agriculture. The analysis builds on the historical-comparative scrutiny of land commoning in the Italian peninsula through the selection of secondary sources and draws a longue durée periodization from late antiquity to the present. Analytical results highlight three temporal macro-sequences of food transformations that contextualise structural and agential influences on communitarian food systems: delegation, privatisation, and commodification of food production. The historical trajectories of community agriculture in the Italian peninsula offer valuable insights into three key areas of debate and potential avenues for future research. The first concerns the divides between structure and agency, contentious and everyday politics; the article also contributes to classical analyses that emphasize the crucial role of food in capitalist development and finally, it advances the processual framework as an adaptable analytical tool.

This paper is a debate on why Bourdieusian scholars have never fully embraced the “Introduction/Literature review/Data & methods/Results/Discussion” (ILDRD) article format which is mainstream in North American Sociological publications. This paper attempts to argue that Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron developed a different writing format – inspired by Gaston Bachelard's “applied rationalism” -- and which became more influential among French scholars. The Bourdieu inspired different writing patterns and reasoning, I argue, can be traced in the flagship journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. This paper invites further debate on the differences in approaching article formats in the social sciences.

This paper analyzes how a structure of Weberian rational domination has been built and consolidated in Spain since 1959, the year when the so-called Economic Stabilization Plan was approved. This sort of economic constitution represents one of the most important foundations of a technocratic regime that survived the death of a dictator (General Francisco Franco), not only transcending the traditional differentiations between autocratic and democratic regimes but also offering a different perspective to the debate about the degree of continuity and rupture attained by the Spanish political transition in the 1970s. We analyze the institutions, leadership, most influential networks, political discourse, and historical myths through a theory of power and elites to examine the Spanish case. With this remarkable example of structural transformation and institutional resilience over decades, we also propose a more complex and multidimensional approach that could be fruitful to understanding some of the problems of political representation that current democracies are undergoing.

Alfred the Great, the ninth-century King of Wessex, has been a popular subject of media representations, including scenes focused on his childhood. These representations, from paintings to contemporary Netflix series and fanfiction, have created an imagined past for Alfred that has contributed to his legendary status. This article seeks to explore the media representations of Alfred as a child, and the stories, themes, and messages conveyed in different mediums, with a special focus on 21st century online fan cultures.

Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, born on May 4, 1984, in Llodio, Álava, is a film director, screenwriter, and producer from the Basque Country, Spain. Her works include the documentary “Voces de papel” (2016) and the short film “Cuerdas” (2022). However, it is her first feature film, “20,000 species of bees” (2023), that earned widespread acclaim and won awards at various film festivals. This film delves into the challenges faced by a family with a transgender girl, drawing inspiration from the tragic story of Ekai Lersundi. Urresola's aspiration was to evoke empathy for the struggles of transgender individuals, fueled by the hope for societal change. The film's compelling narrative revolves around 8-year-old Cocó's journey of self-discovery, challenging societal expectations and prompting his mother, Ane, to confront her own doubts and fears during a transformative summer spent with family.

This paper describes the making of a documentary film about children's learning cultures in West Africa to show that it is possible to escape the melodramatic gaze through deploying specific shooting, editorial and screening choices that represent children as active, knowledgeable subjects situated in a specific cultural milieu. It also discusses the legacy of ethnographic film, especially in relation to Africa, which in its aim at cultural translation presumes a non-local spectator and deploys what has been called an entomological gaze; glossed here as ‘national geographic’ and proposes that key to disavowing that legacy is making film for African audiences.

This paper analyzes why child film star series produced by major French production companies (Pathé, Gaumont, Eclectic, and Éclair) in the early 1900s (Bébé, Bout-de-Zan, Willy, and the Maria Fromet series) were received with such interest by global audiences. This period, prior to World War I, was a brief era when French cinema held significant hegemony worldwide, before Hollywood's dominance began. There are ideas suggesting that child film stars emerged with American cinema. Contrary to this, however, French producers competed fiercely in the 10 years following 1906, producing series featuring child film stars. Substantial budgets were allocated for the marketing of these series, ultimately gaining a considerable fan base not only in Europe but also in America. When examining these film stars from the early 20th century within their historical context, they emerge as the first international child stars with international fame and financial success, unlike child musicians, vaudeville artists, and theater actors from the 18th and 19th centuries. Inspired by the field analysis of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this article aims to establish a connection between the struggles within the field and the symbolic needs of the audience as reflected in the content of child star films. The films were viewed at the Eye Film Museum archive.