Humanitarian Crisis as Everyday Life

Contemporary scholarship understates the resilience of everyday life in humanitarian crisis. Disaster may seem like a fleeting moment—colloquially, we say “the world stood still” or “everything changed in a blink”—but in the Buduburam Refugee Camp, a predominately Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, people experienced calamitous tragedy accumulated over years of daily activities. Though they remained politically and economically “out of place,” residents constructed buildings and other ordinary material objects to forge a new lived environment. As residents engaged with this new lived environment—from building homes to managing rainwater—they regularly participated in moral boundary work that helped establish how “good” people ought to act in inhumane circumstances. Moral boundary work did not obviate inequality or conflict, but it did help mediate between immediate bodily needs and the wider social order. More broadly, the study documents the crucial role that seemingly mundane material objects play in moral boundary work. Material objects like signs, garbage cans, and homes can operate like sociospatial props in the stories that people tell about their daily lives. These stories reinforce the moral boundaries that divide “good” and “bad” people and ultimately help make a shared moral order possible.     

Comic Relief In Everyday Life: Dramaturgic Observations On A Function Of Humor*

The comic relief of the theater has an everyday analog. It is seen in the momentary humorous respites from the seriousness or lengthy concentration on a collective task commonly found in certain spheres of daily life. These respites facilitate the completion of that task by refreshing the participants. Observations of social comic relief made during a series of rehearsals and performances of an amateur theater company are reported. The nature and function of this sort of humor is considered, first in theater, and then in other similar settings. A comparison of social comic relief as a function of humor with selected philosophical and psychological relief theories of humor follows. A concluding section considers the place of creativity and wit in social comic relief.     

Everyday Life in Stochastic Networks1

Models of Stochastic networks may prove important tools for integrating ideas about structure with ideas about process in social theory.     

A Cartography of Passing in Everyday Life

This analysis of student narratives explores various forms of passing encounters whereby individuals are not who they claim to be. I distinguish between (a) passing along highly stigmatized identities and everyday passing across less threatening ones; and (b) proactive passing, which individuals initiate, and reactive passing, in which individuals embrace an identity others have mistakenly assigned to them. These strategies are complex processes whereby individuals interactively negotiate definitions of the situation and sometimes give idealized performances. They underscore through contrast the sense of an authentic identity that enhances the stability of self. Although theorists claim that passing is inconsequential for the individual, the narratives in this study suggest that masking a central identity can be emotionally costly.     

Inside Out: Postcolonial Subjectivities and Everyday Life Online

What gets overlooked amid the hype surrounding the Internet/world-wide web is that these are a newer communicative means and medium for people to gather from all over the place, not only to meet each other but also to discuss a wide range of issues. Discussion Forums and News Groups are important and long-standing examples of these sorts of non-commercial online interactions. This article argues that this sort of onlineness constitutes emergent (cyber)spatial practices of everyday life. These entail complex gender-power relations that encompass struggles for ownership and control of ICTs, on the one hand, and the intimate, public and political nature of online discussions visà-vis lived lives offline on the other hand. One way of seeing these dynamics at work in everyday life online is when women from non-western diasporas talk about their personal-public lives and changing sociocultural obligations on Internet discussion forums. Such discussions provide newer, electronically mediated (re)articulations of the 'public-private' problematic and a (re)articulation of how the 'personal is political'. In so doing they recall feminist and postcolonial critiques of the androcentric and eurocentric nature of the public-private dichotomy itself. The article explores the intersection between these critiques, the practice of everyday life for postcolonial diasporas and the advent of the Internet/world-wide web. Through the reconstruction of someof these open andintimate online discussions between older andyounger women from the Samoan and Tongan diasporas, the article argues that postcolonial everyday uses of the Internet/www are challenging assumptions about what constitutes access, ownership and control of ICTs. These have implications for equitable research and development of ICTs in terms of the practice of everyday life online and offline and the future of public cyberspace(s) in a neo-liberal world order.     

Displaying Gender: Transgender People's Strategies in Everyday Life

Drawing upon data from in‐depth interviews with transgender people in Portugal and in the United Kingdom, this article critically reflects upon different ways through which transgender people recreate their gender displays, particularly in terms of gender embodiment and aesthetics, in order to navigate their everyday lives. I focus on four strategies of articulating gender displays with one's own gender subjectivities: “blending in,” “masking,” “naturalizing,” and “subverting.” These strategies are not exclusive of one another. They are used differently throughout the participants' own lives in accordance to the social contexts they were in.     

Participation in Everyday Life Before and After a Housing Adaptation

Housing adaptation aims to enable clients to live independently in their own homes. Studies focusing on participation in everyday life following a housing adaptation are lacking and needed. This study aimed to explore housing adaptation clients' experiences of participation in everyday life before and after a housing adaptation, through the lens of a housing adaptation, using a qualitative follow-up design, with 11 participants. It was found that when the housing adaptation met the participants' needs, performance of activities improved and the housing adaptation opened doors to engagement and participation in everyday life. Thus, focus on performance and engagement in everyday life at the onset of the housing adaptation process, combined with regular follow-ups, may enhance participation.     

Enough Already! The Pervasiveness of Warnings in Everyday Life

Qualitative Sociology -     

亚运将实现"体育生活化"

亚运会给广州发展带来机遇,不仅促进了经济的大发展,有助于世界文化名城建设,提高城市形象知名度和国际知名度,加快优美舒适的宜居城乡建设,培养健康阳光的生活方式,形成文明和谐的社会风尚,促进体育事业的全面发展.同时,亚运也给广州带来了市场开发和财政平衡的难度、满足赛时需求和兼顾长远发展矛盾、协调巨大投资和引导消费关系城市管理等挑战.     

Human Inquiry Systems: Understanding Everyday Social Life And Its Stresses

Abstract

Ever since the rise of modern psychology questions arose as to how to scientifically study human behavior, whether from a socio-cultural perspective (geisteswissenschftlich) or by means of a more rigorous (positive) approach. However once psychology was defined as the study of behavior, it included animal behavior, and the positive approach became the dominant orientation in academic psychology, which made little differentiation between the methods employed in studying man or animal in the laboratories. This article examines the underlying proposition of these two paradigms, including their critical shortcomings and offers a complementary, more humanistic alternative to the study of human behavior, namely hermeneutics and discursive psychology. It will be argued that these alternatives offer a deeper understanding of human actions in a situated field because they attempts to take into account the motives and aims of people's conduct. Ultimately this approach attempts to assess a person's sense of social reality (in addition to the reality of a physical word) in the hope that a dialectic synthesis of laboratory research and hermeneutic understanding will lead to the manifestation of a greater emancipatory interests.     

Knowing How To Quit: On the Finitudes of Everyday Life

This paper elaborates upon the emergent social psychology of social endings and explicates how culminating behaviors associated with role conclusions in general and with retirement in particular can contribute to both social and personal order. Now that role careers are typically concluded by design rather than by death, invidious comparisons are being drawn and ending strategies rank-ordered in terms of their desirability. It is hypothesized that some retirements are recognized as being better than others and that our social system is coming to recognize and celebrate those who excel in their role performances until the very end. As illustration, we consider American professional team sports as the cultural totem dramatizing modern work relations and examine how the quality of athlete's career conclusions affect how they are remembered.     

Fantasy and Reality:Conflicts in Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land

赖声川的《暗恋桃花源》以其独特的艺术技巧和发人深省的主题在海内外广受好评。其主要情节是两剧组争夺彩排场地,在相互干扰的过程中形成的独特场景。在吵闹与冲突中折射出不同的爱情观。