Towards a ‘virtual’ world: Social isolation and struggles during the COVID‐19 pandemic as single women living alone

This article is a personal reflection of how the current COVID‐19 pandemic affects our working lives and wellbeing, as single female academics who live alone in the UK. We offer a dialogue of our daily lives of being confined at home with lockdown measures extended. In particular, we focus on the experience of, and coping with, isolation and loneliness. Is isolation making us more socially connected? Through ‘virtual’ working and changing learning environments for us as teachers and learners, we explore changes in our working life and subsequent changes in the domestic environment. By capturing our lived experiences, we create an intellectual and safe space to voice our emotional struggles — as ‘invisible’ isolated individuals containing and consuming loneliness on our own. We foster alternative conversations as to how we might engender new perspectives from single female academics to combat social isolation in the workplace.     

Thinking of age: Personal reflections on critical gerontology

This essay is a reflection on how personal experience has inspired and shaped my ideas about critical gerontology. It is a writing from the inside about the outside world of intellectual discovery, apart from the typical narratives about career and research. I take this opportunity to explore the life of thought through my own life, and conclude that our ideas about aging are bred in those places where humor, tragedy, conflict, passion and sympathy make it imperative that we ask the questions we do as critical thinkers.     

Le télétravail des cadres : entre suractivité et apprentissage de nouvelles temporalités

Telework is often considered to be a means for making life at work and at home more compatible. Why do some wage-earners, in particular white-collar employees, choose it? Do they actually make a choice or simply adopt a solution “for want of anything better” in an organizational context with its limitations? In this case, what factors do they weigh against each other? Once they have opted for telework, how do these white collars manage to adjust their occupational and family lives? Is their aspiration to improve the balance between the two satisfied? Or do they run up against unexpected difficulties? Answers to these questions come out of two studies conducted among white-collar employees in different sorts of telework. Given the absence of institutional regulations governing the relation between life at home and at work, telework, far from leading to a more balanced life, jeopardizes the organization’s collective efficiency.     

Aging research grows up

Long viewed as an insoluble enigma, aging is shedding its cloak of mystery as scientists start to understand why and how we age. Many studies support the theoretical argument that aging occurs because natural selection weakens with age, leaving us vulnerable to harmful, late-acting genes. As for what causes aging, scientists have narrowed the pack of candidates to a handful, including free radicals and reactions between glucose and proteins. In recent decades, many mechanisms for lengthening life in animals have come to light. By extending this research, scientists may be closing in on ways to lengthen the human life-span.     

Projects and Possibilities: Researching Futures in Action

How can we understand the social impact of cognitions of a projected future, taking into account both the institutional determinants of hopes and their personal inventiveness? How can we document the repercussions, often contrary to intentions, “back from” such projected futures to the production and transformation of social structures? These are some of the questions to be addressed by a cultural sociology that attempts to look seriously at the effects of a projected future as a dynamic force undergirding social change. In this essay I discuss some of the reasons why the analysis of the future has been so neglected in sociological theory and research, and then sketch a possible framework for reincorporating it that specifies some of the cognitive dimensions of projectivity. In the process, I will show how a focus on future projections can help us make a link between cognition and action in a manner that has so far been neglected in the sociological literature.     

MEDIA LOGIC AND SOCIAL INTERACTION

Media logic and formats associated with television programming are shown to contribute to our understanding of the role of reflexive communication in defining a situation, and suggest the relevance of a theory of mediation for clarifying how an agent's communication products can influence the time, place, and manner of activities for us all. Social rules informed by conventional temporal and spatial considerations can be transformed through electronic content and formats. Viewers obtain information from mass media content that can transcend conventional personal experience (e.g., a 10-year-old child can learn how to be a teenager in 1940 or 1990). Materials illustrate how media logic and formats compatible with popular culture increasingly guide the form, content, and scheduling of social interaction. By the same token, certain kinds of experience are recognized for their mediated characteristics (e.g., rhythm, pacing, syntax, and grammar). As these patterns are incorporated into other realms of social life, temporal and spatial features of organized activities will embody the new formats. Viewing mass mediation from this perspective can illuminate a path for development of a theoretic understanding of mediation throughout social life.     

Aging in Timorese Exile: (Im)mobilities of Care and Intergenerational Relationships

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses transnational care and border regimes in the context of the East Timorese exile in rural Indonesia. Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic research, it explores the ways older people cope with family separation and life in exile, their aspirations, when and how transnational care becomes “on hold”, and how they deal with the impossibility of meeting intergenerational and cultural obligations. Analyzing care using the lens of “circulation”, the paper attends to the asymmetries entailed in intergenerational relationships as well as to how uneven power relations of border regimes shape transnational care exchanges. In the context of “aging in exile”, the paper underlines the importance of understanding older persons’ narratives as they are linked with the ambivalences of other family members across generations. The paper argues that the forms of immobility withholding or limiting caregiving can transcend physical boundaries. They can include the social and emotional borders conflict-divided communities build against one another over time. These “imaginary” borders require us to think about the additional asymmetries entailed in precarious familial relations and how this affects the multiple meanings of care in the context of contemporary border regimes and amid enduring legacies of violence.     

‘Exercise is medicine’: Understanding the exercise beliefs and practices of older Chinese women immigrants in British Columbia, Canada

In this paper we examine how Western biomedical beliefs around exercise and related health practices compare and contrast with traditional Chinese medicine's (TCM) conceptions of health and exercise in a globalizing society, and how these narratives about health and physical activity are understood and taken up by 15 aging Chinese immigrant women (aged 65+) living in the multicultural city of Vancouver. Drawing upon theoretical work around the body and society to guide our analysis (including the ideas of Bourdieu and Foucault), we outline how the participants in our project take a pragmatic approach to their use of medicine, combining TCM with Western biomedicine in creative ways. However, understandings of the body are underpinned, we argue, by Eastern narratives of the ‘oneness’ of mind-body and the need for ‘balance’ in order to achieve health. Towards this end, we found that many of the participants view (and use) traditional Chinese body practices as an extension of TCM, a technique to help them achieve balance. We conclude that the neoliberal narrative of personal responsibility for health does not fuel the exercise practices of many of the participants, but rather that they perceive exercise as a pleasurable activity that improves their levels of happiness (and balance) and enhances their lives.     

"I HATE MY VOICE":

This article presents a narrative, autoethnographic, theoretical account of the public and private negotiation of "minor bodily stigmas," which are mild physical "imperfections" that make us fear we stand out and might be rejected. To examine the situated complexity of stigmatized identity, I tell a story that shows concrete interactional details of an episode in which minor bodily stigmas evolved into a significant topic of conversation between strangers. My personal narrative explores the felt experience of minor bodily stigmas from the perspective of the experiencing and interacting holder. Thus, my work problematizes Erving Goffman's sociological approach to stigmas, which examines inclusively all forms of stigmas from a distanced observational stance of beholder that privileges the outsider perspective of how others see us. Using minor bodily stigmas as a heuristic category, I emphasize how they are experienced as a double bind in interaction (to notice or not to notice) and a double bind in personal feelings (of moral character as well as physical appearance). I seek to connect theoretical and categorical understandings of minor bodily stigmas to their concrete felt experience in day-to-day life in order to examine possibilities for resisting and reframing stigmas in everyday life.     

The effects of religion on subjective aging in Singapore: An interreligious comparison

This interreligious comparison deals with Buddhist and Christian Chinese elderly Singaporeans. Based on the data gathered from in-depth interviews with five Buddhists and five Christians, this article explores how religion plays a role in the adjustment to the physical, social, and existential aging processes. It investigates the similarities and differences between Buddhist and Christian beliefs in terms of their effects on the subjective experience of aging. Findings indicate that religion can play an integrative role that facilitates adjustment to the aging process. Also, they suggest that though there are fundamental, irreducible differences in terms of religious beliefs and practices between Buddhism and Christianity, there are far less differences in the ways they impact on the integrative aging process. Some negative effects of religion on aging and some viewpoints about successful aging are presented in the discussion.     

For better,for worse? Public support for the capitalist model of the economy

A capitalist market economy is based on several institutional elements, such as private ownership and competition. Does public support for this economic model rise if the economy prospers, and fall during a downturn? Or is public support largely independent of the ups and downs of economic cycles? We hypothesize that positive economic performance increases support and that persons profiting personally are more supportive of the economic system's constitutive institutional elements. Using multilevel regression we study the determinants of individual-level support for the economic system. We also test for differences in the perception of economic performance due to political attitudes and personal properties. The findings partly support the hypotheses, indicating that macro-economic factors matter for individual-level attitudes towards the economy. Attitudes towards different institutional elements of the economic system also differ in the degree to which they are political or economic, and influenced by economic performance. Individual features – education and personal economic stakes – affect attitudes towards the economy, but a substantial share of the individual-level variation in economic attitudes remains unexplained.     

Observing the Rites of Autonomy,Distancing the Prospects for ‘The Spiritual’

We are acculturated to believe each healthy person is a firmly bordered republic, a kind of self‐sufficient island. With its associated values entitlement and self‐determination, this assumption has become an internalised schema within which individuals — and many therapists — evaluate personal competence and adjustment. Whilst acknowledging that an expectation of autonomy might encourage ambition and empowerment, the injunction ‘be autonomous’ may also bring with it a number of unintended consequences. These include the promotion of experiences of isolation and incompleteness, experiences that many find uncomfortable and which may come to be associated with an emerging desire for what might be called ‘the spiritual’. A question then arises: might an expectation of personal autonomy on the one hand prompt a yearning for spiritual experience yet, on the other, diminish the prospects of such an experience by marginalising the possibilities of personal and interpersonal connectedness? After developing this argument, I offer preliminary ideas to assist practitioners to envisage how the ‘secularly spiritual’ might be imagined and invoked within everyday therapeutic practice.     

Coming Across: Family Therapy in Australia and New Zealand*

In this Keynote Address I ask where family therapy comes from in Australia and New Zealand, as a way of seeing where it might go. I look at our histories, cultures and traditions and how they are connected. What happened to the old certainties of our field, and where do we take a stand today? How can we come across with courage, imagination and a sense of community? How can we maintain those impulses to justice and to remembering that psychotherapy stands for at its best?     

An ‘unholy alliance’ of existential proportions: Negotiating discourses with men's experiences of cancer and aging

Little is understood about how experiencing cancer and aging together can disrupt people's socio-personal worlds and lead to existential questions about identity, life ambiguity, and death. Toward this end, we interpreted the metaphors that three aging men with cancer used in a focus group to describe their existential concerns. We also considered how two dominant cultural discourses around cancer and aging, generally referred to as discourses of “progress” and “decline”, figured into the participants' meanings. Finally, we compared the men's attitudes toward cancer and aging to dominant ideas about how men respond to these life events. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis, informed by critical phenomenology, we came to three conclusions. First, the men's interpretations of cancer and aging shared similar existential themes of tragedy and transcendence. Second, these existential concerns were informed by dominant discourses of cancer and aging, in that they followed the culturally constructed trajectories of decline and progress, respectively. The men's metaphors point to a negotiation of these two discourses. A third and related point is that the men predominantly contradicted gendered assumptions about dealing with life adversity but in some ways repeated them. This research indicates that people interpret cancer and aging in somewhat shared ways, via dominant cultural discourses, but also in individual ways depending on personal life histories. As discourses and life histories seem to influence how people make sense of aging life with cancer, it may be useful to be aware of these contexts when providing psycho-social care to aging cancer patients.     

Yes, we are prejudiced

Understanding is always translated into language. The dangeris we then take-for-granted a shared common meaning of language.Gadamer reminds us that we each understand according to prejudicesborn of our whole life experience. None of us can escape suchprejudices for they are ‘how’ we understand. A hermeneuticapproach calls us to strive to articulate our prejudices, recognisingthat others may have an understanding that is different.     

Love in Times of Cholera: Systemic Reflections on Supporting Families Through the Journey(s) of Illness

This paper is the result of our increasing interest in the experience of illness in families and the concomitant reflections on how best to therapeutically support these families through this process. This interest led us to reflect on the nuanced way in which language establishes a play with the experience of illness, a play that can amplify or reduce its effects. Such an interplay in turn led us to consider the valuable role that family therapists have in helping families and treating practitioners to create a safe space for conversation about illness. Further questions are also explored in relation to whether there is a role for family therapists in facilitating the interface between our clinical practice with clients and the wider treating medical community. And, if so, what shape would such an interface take? Considerations at this level would include the anticipation of psychological reactions to diagnosis of chronic and life‐threatening illnesses, in particular the importance of ‘normalisation’ of the psychological reactions to such chronic and/or life threatening diagnoses; the complex dynamics emerging from the interface between the effects of illness in the subjectivity of the ill person and the grief experienced by the other family members; different family members’ narratives of the illness; relevant community contexts; and, lastly, ways to help the family members and/or the ill person navigate the medical system including the use of second opinions, cyberspace information, and other systems in their ecology, such as the spiritual dimension. Some aspects of children's narratives of illness are also identified. The paper has been organised around the dialogue that the authors had around one of their clinical cases.     

Where do social relations come from?: A study of personal networks in the Toulouse area of France

One of the fundamental ideas of structural analysis is that in order to understand social structures, one must begin with relations. Yet where do relations come from? A survey of personal networks in the Toulouse area (France) allows us to demonstrate the importance of social circles in the genesis of dyadic relations.     

An “Unthought Known” of Her Own: The Aesthetics of Interruption

Through a personal account, the author reflects on how we are haunted by what we take from our parents or what, unawares, they transmit to us, and how that haunting pulls us forward and back at the same time.     

White Privilege: What's a Family Therapist To Do?

Privilege is the freedom to ignore things that other people are forced to confront; dramatic things like being gunned down by a vigilante on the way home from a convenience store or less urban and visible things like having to live on secluded parcels of land that no one else wants. Most family therapists enjoy the freedom not to experience such events. Many of the people who come to us for help don't have that freedom. My intent here is to increase felt awareness of the injustice of institutional racism and to suggest some actions that White family therapists can take to bring forth a more just society in terms of education, housing, access to wealth, and basic safety.