Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/11615
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
This article describes the temporal and spatial configurations and limitations of the rupture phase of historical events. It does so through a consideration of the intertwined forms and flows of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the social uprising against police violence targeting African-Americans in the United States. The article argues that these ruptures open up a "double exposure", one that makes problematic conventional categories associated with events, like those of past and future and inside and outside, thus challenging our ability to situate ourselves in relation to such events.
{"title":"What is an Event and Are We in One","authors":"Robin Wagner-Pacifici","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/11615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/11615","url":null,"abstract":"This article describes the temporal and spatial configurations and limitations of the rupture phase of historical events. It does so through a consideration of the intertwined forms and flows of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the social uprising against police violence targeting African-Americans in the United States. The article argues that these ruptures open up a \"double exposure\", one that makes problematic conventional categories associated with events, like those of past and future and inside and outside, thus challenging our ability to situate ourselves in relation to such events.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"11-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44293013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12777
J. Berthaut, J. Bidet, Mathias Thura
As members of the scientific committee of a collection of sociological comic strips, we offer feedback here on our experience of translating qualitative sociological research into graphic fictions. Through the presentation of main editorial choices and the organization of the adaptation work, we explain and discuss the effects produced by this type of adaptation on sociological discourse. We present a “lesson learned” from this adaptation process that disrupted and challenged the inherent assumptions of academic sociological writing. This review of Sociorama albums highlights some advantages and successes, as well as some limitations and obstacles introduced by this comic-ization.
{"title":"Making Sociologically-Grounded Fictions. A Review of the Sociorama Collection Experience","authors":"J. Berthaut, J. Bidet, Mathias Thura","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12777","url":null,"abstract":"As members of the scientific committee of a collection of sociological comic strips, we offer feedback here on our experience of translating qualitative sociological research into graphic fictions. Through the presentation of main editorial choices and the organization of the adaptation work, we explain and discuss the effects produced by this type of adaptation on sociological discourse. We present a “lesson learned” from this adaptation process that disrupted and challenged the inherent assumptions of academic sociological writing. This review of Sociorama albums highlights some advantages and successes, as well as some limitations and obstacles introduced by this comic-ization.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"265-290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44346845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12774
G. Kuipers, F. Ghedini
The standard academic publication is often not an effective way to trigger the sociological imagination. This essay discusses an alternative means to invite people to think sociologically: a webcomic. In a collaboration between a sociologist and a team of comic artists, we created a webcomic (www.erccomics.com) to highlight insights from a research project on the social shaping of beauty standards in the transnational modelling industry. In the making of this Beauty comic, three "translations" had to be done: from analytical to narrative, from verbal to visual and from conceptual to concrete. We discuss how these translations were done and what we learned from this, including broader implications of these translations for (social) science communication, the public relevance of sociological research, the usefulness of thinking in different modalities and the fraught relationship between standard academic modes of communication and the sociological imagination.
{"title":"Beauty: Triggering the Sociological Imagination with a Webcomic","authors":"G. Kuipers, F. Ghedini","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12774","url":null,"abstract":"The standard academic publication is often not an effective way to trigger the sociological imagination. This essay discusses an alternative means to invite people to think sociologically: a webcomic. In a collaboration between a sociologist and a team of comic artists, we created a webcomic (www.erccomics.com) to highlight insights from a research project on the social shaping of beauty standards in the transnational modelling industry. In the making of this Beauty comic, three \"translations\" had to be done: from analytical to narrative, from verbal to visual and from conceptual to concrete. We discuss how these translations were done and what we learned from this, including broader implications of these translations for (social) science communication, the public relevance of sociological research, the usefulness of thinking in different modalities and the fraught relationship between standard academic modes of communication and the sociological imagination.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"143-162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44419898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12776
Adriano Cancellieri, Giada Peterle
This paper reflects on the limits and potentialities of “comics-based research” (Kuttner et al., 2020) in marginalised urban contexts, through the interdisciplinary and collaborative perspective of an urban sociologist and a cultural geographer-cartoonist. The analysis starts from the empirical example of the comic book anthology Quartieri. Viaggio al Centro delle Periferie Italiane, which is devoted to five “peripheral” neighbourhoods in Italy and was realised through collaboration between researchers and cartoonists. The paper focuses on the way in which research activities and spatial analyses were influenced by the narrative and stylistic choices dictated by the “spatial grammar” of comics. Through reading the short comics story about the Arcella neighbourhood in Padua, we reflect on how comics allowed us to explore the role of everyday life spaces and of different spatial agencies and spatial structures in the area. Focusing on the role of maps in the narration, the paper further aims to make some relations between graphic and narrative choices in the story and spatial analysis visible. Quartieri is an empirical example that helps us to move beyond the idea of using comics to merely disseminate academic knowledge differently. Despite their prolific accessibility, indeed, comics seem to help us engaging differently with the contemporary debates around the spatial, material and affective turn.
本文通过一位城市社会学家和一位文化地理学家漫画家的跨学科和合作视角,反思了“基于漫画的研究”(Kuttner et al.,2020)在边缘化城市背景下的局限性和潜力。本文从漫画选集《夸蒂耶里》的实证分析入手。Viaggio al-Centro delle Periferie Italiane致力于意大利的五个“外围”社区,是通过研究人员和漫画家之间的合作实现的。本文着重探讨漫画“空间语法”所规定的叙事和文体选择对研究活动和空间分析的影响。通过阅读关于帕多瓦Arcella社区的短篇漫画故事,我们反思漫画是如何让我们探索日常生活空间以及该地区不同空间机构和空间结构的作用的。围绕地图在叙事中的作用,本文进一步旨在使故事中的图形和叙事选择以及空间分析之间的一些关系变得可见。Quartieri是一个经验例子,它帮助我们超越了使用漫画仅仅以不同的方式传播学术知识的想法。尽管漫画的可访问性很高,但事实上,漫画似乎有助于我们以不同的方式参与当代围绕空间、物质和情感转向的辩论。
{"title":"Urban Research in Comics Form: Exploring Spaces, Agency and Narrative Maps in Italian Marginalized Neighbourhoods","authors":"Adriano Cancellieri, Giada Peterle","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12776","url":null,"abstract":"This paper reflects on the limits and potentialities of “comics-based research” (Kuttner et al., 2020) in marginalised urban contexts, through the interdisciplinary and collaborative perspective of an urban sociologist and a cultural geographer-cartoonist. The analysis starts from the empirical example of the comic book anthology Quartieri. Viaggio al Centro delle Periferie Italiane, which is devoted to five “peripheral” neighbourhoods in Italy and was realised through collaboration between researchers and cartoonists. The paper focuses on the way in which research activities and spatial analyses were influenced by the narrative and stylistic choices dictated by the “spatial grammar” of comics. Through reading the short comics story about the Arcella neighbourhood in Padua, we reflect on how comics allowed us to explore the role of everyday life spaces and of different spatial agencies and spatial structures in the area. Focusing on the role of maps in the narration, the paper further aims to make some relations between graphic and narrative choices in the story and spatial analysis visible. Quartieri is an empirical example that helps us to move beyond the idea of using comics to merely disseminate academic knowledge differently. Despite their prolific accessibility, indeed, comics seem to help us engaging differently with the contemporary debates around the spatial, material and affective turn.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"211-239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42052366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12779
B. Beaty
This article points to the origins of the comics format in nineteenth-century Geneva as a way to think through some of the fundamental questions posed by the use of comics production to report social scientific findings. Surveying the articles in this special issue, a case is built for the importance of transdisciplinary approaches in the field of sociology and elsewhere.
{"title":"The Sociological Image Nation","authors":"B. Beaty","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12779","url":null,"abstract":"This article points to the origins of the comics format in nineteenth-century Geneva as a way to think through some of the fundamental questions posed by the use of comics production to report social scientific findings. Surveying the articles in this special issue, a case is built for the importance of transdisciplinary approaches in the field of sociology and elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"299-304"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48573139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12405
David J. Madden
This paper asks what critical urban theory can add to the sociology of disasters. If the fundamental insight of disaster studies is that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster, the starting point for critical urban studies is that capitalist urbanization is a disaster waiting to happen. Disasters are promoted and inflected by the specific forms of crisis and vulnerability created by neoliberal urbanization. Disasters are also ways in which urban space is produced and remade, in a process that can be called disaster urbanization. A critical account of the relationship between contemporary urbanization and disaster can help us better understand the disaster-prone, unevenly urbanizing future.
{"title":"Disaster Urbanization: The City Between Crisis and Calamity","authors":"David J. Madden","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12405","url":null,"abstract":"This paper asks what critical urban theory can add to the sociology of disasters. If the fundamental insight of disaster studies is that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster, the starting point for critical urban studies is that capitalist urbanization is a disaster waiting to happen. Disasters are promoted and inflected by the specific forms of crisis and vulnerability created by neoliberal urbanization. Disasters are also ways in which urban space is produced and remade, in a process that can be called disaster urbanization. A critical account of the relationship between contemporary urbanization and disaster can help us better understand the disaster-prone, unevenly urbanizing future.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"91-108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49229492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12778
Eduardo Barberis, B. Grüning, S. Hamdy, Coleman Nye, Francesco Dragone
The interview focuses on the book series EthnoGRAPHIC (University of Toronto Press) and the graphic novel Lissa. A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship and Revolution, the first book of the series. Four points arise from the interview with authors Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye, and with the filmmaker Francesco Dragone, who documented their research process. First, the problem of funding multimedia and innovative research projects, aimed to find new ways of communicating social research. Second, the question to what extent such projects are recognized and legitimated within the Academia. Third, the audience potentially interested in reading (ethno)graphic novels and, relatedly, their usability in teaching social sciences. Finally, the concerns and practicalities in putting together different narrative forms. This effort of combining several ways of representing social reality, also concerns the organization of the research itself as well as conducting fieldwork and the capability of thinking “graphically” from scratch instead of adapting textual data collected during the research.
{"title":"EthnoGRAPHIC: An Interview","authors":"Eduardo Barberis, B. Grüning, S. Hamdy, Coleman Nye, Francesco Dragone","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12778","url":null,"abstract":"The interview focuses on the book series EthnoGRAPHIC (University of Toronto Press) and the graphic novel Lissa. A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship and Revolution, the first book of the series. Four points arise from the interview with authors Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye, and with the filmmaker Francesco Dragone, who documented their research process.\u0000First, the problem of funding multimedia and innovative research projects, aimed to find new ways of communicating social research. Second, the question to what extent such projects are recognized and legitimated within the Academia. Third, the audience potentially interested in reading (ethno)graphic novels and, relatedly, their usability in teaching social sciences.\u0000Finally, the concerns and practicalities in putting together different narrative forms. This effort of combining several ways of representing social reality, also concerns the organization of the research itself as well as conducting fieldwork and the capability of thinking “graphically” from scratch instead of adapting textual data collected during the research.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"291-298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47271448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12824
Ryan Hagen, Rebecca Elliott
In this introductory essay to our symposium we argue that “Sociology After COVID-19” needs to center “disaster” itself as an object of study and theory, and that doing so can productively reframe sociology’s fundamental concerns. Building off nascent interdisciplinary work in critical disaster studies, as well as on the insights of our own contributors, we advance and elaborate two theses. First, while disasters are disruptive, they are not purely so; as they unfold, they enfold continuities such that they are best understood as a part of social reality rather than apart from it. Second, disasters are not pathological deviations from “normal” so much as they are the most salient manifestations of the ways that the normal is in fact pathological. A more critical approach to disaster can lead sociologists to examine more closely the interrelationship between the production of continuities and ruptures in social and economic life, enriching our understanding of core disciplinary concerns about social change, stratification, and inequality.
{"title":"Disasters, Continuity, and the Pathological Normal","authors":"Ryan Hagen, Rebecca Elliott","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12824","url":null,"abstract":"In this introductory essay to our symposium we argue that “Sociology After COVID-19” needs to center “disaster” itself as an object of study and theory, and that doing so can productively reframe sociology’s fundamental concerns. Building off nascent interdisciplinary work in critical disaster studies, as well as on the insights of our own contributors, we advance and elaborate two theses. First, while disasters are disruptive, they are not purely so; as they unfold, they enfold continuities such that they are best understood as a part of social reality rather than apart from it. Second, disasters are not pathological deviations from “normal” so much as they are the most salient manifestations of the ways that the normal is in fact pathological. A more critical approach to disaster can lead sociologists to examine more closely the interrelationship between the production of continuities and ruptures in social and economic life, enriching our understanding of core disciplinary concerns about social change, stratification, and inequality.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42722498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12775
Benjamin Schiemer, R. Duffner, S. R. Ayers
This graphic novel offers an insight into various theoretical approaches in creativity theory. In their search for approaches that provide the best possible explanation for how ideas come about, the main actors (scientists) of our story encounter a wide variety of allegories (in the form of superheroes) representing creativity theories on a fictitious distant planet. They end up in remote areas and finally encounter theories that, at first glance, cannot make a significant contribution to creativity. These theories are our contributions to the topics of incompleteness, temporal structuring, and trivial objects that we have developed in recent years as part of ethnographic research on creativity in music. The initial assumption that these theories have less explanatory value for the emergence of ideas turns out to be a fallacy in our story.
{"title":"Theories of Creativity: The Significance of the Insignificant. A Graphic Novel","authors":"Benjamin Schiemer, R. Duffner, S. R. Ayers","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12775","url":null,"abstract":"This graphic novel offers an insight into various theoretical approaches in creativity theory. In their search for approaches that provide the best possible explanation for how ideas come about, the main actors (scientists) of our story encounter a wide variety of allegories (in the form of superheroes) representing creativity theories on a fictitious distant planet. They end up in remote areas and finally encounter theories that, at first glance, cannot make a significant contribution to creativity. These theories are our contributions to the topics of incompleteness, temporal structuring, and trivial objects that we have developed in recent years as part of ethnographic research on creativity in music. The initial assumption that these theories have less explanatory value for the emergence of ideas turns out to be a fallacy in our story.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"163-191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42174634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12781
M. Sassatelli
This short piece is a commentary on the collection of experimental interventions at the crossroads of sociology and comics, or comics-based research, published in the current issue of Sociologica. Starting from some of the most relevant aspects that both unite and distinguish the different approaches, it proposes a reflection on how comics, and more broadly drawings, can help expand the sociological imagination. It does so --- through text, drawings and captions --- focusing on the transition between concepts and images, or verbal and visual icons. The comments draw particular attention to these interventions’ diverse but converging plea for visual literacy --- tentatively renamed here imaginacy.
{"title":"Show and Tell","authors":"M. Sassatelli","doi":"10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/12781","url":null,"abstract":"This short piece is a commentary on the collection of experimental interventions at the crossroads of sociology and comics, or comics-based research, published in the current issue of Sociologica. Starting from some of the most relevant aspects that both unite and distinguish the different approaches, it proposes a reflection on how comics, and more broadly drawings, can help expand the sociological imagination. It does so --- through text, drawings and captions --- focusing on the transition between concepts and images, or verbal and visual icons. The comments draw particular attention to these interventions’ diverse but converging plea for visual literacy --- tentatively renamed here imaginacy.","PeriodicalId":35251,"journal":{"name":"Sociologia, Problemas e Praticas","volume":"15 1","pages":"311-319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43631356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}