The Interactional Community: Emergent Fields of Collective Agency*

Social interaction is generally regarded as elemental to the notion of community. Within the broader discourse on community, the field‐interactional perspective is distinctive in its explicit focus on emergent social processes and community change dynamics. Wilkinson (1970) extended Kaufman’s (1959) early work on the interactional approach through an application of the social field concept to community action. In doing so, Wilkinson (1991) outlined several key linkages between social–symbolic interaction and community agency. Despite these promising beginnings, only a modicum of research has examined the theoretical or philosophical underpinnings of the interactional conception of community. This article explores the symbolic‐interactionist tenets undergirding the field‐interactional approach, most notably Mead’s (1934, 1938) discussion of generalized social attitudes and Blumer’s (1969a, 1969b) work on joint or collective action.     

Between Philosophy and Art: The Avant-Garde Work of Debora Vogel

ABSTRACT

Debora Vogel (1900–1942) helped develop modernism in Lviv in the interwar period. As a philosopher and writer, she was able to make connections between the dominant Polish school of philosophical logic (the so-called Lviv-Warsaw School) and the artistic circles in Lviv, to which Bruno Schulz, Stanis?aw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Leon Chwistek belonged.

Inspired by Cubism and Surrealism, but also by recent philosophical discussions, Vogel developed a writing technique called montage. In her poems and prose written in Yiddish and Polish, she reflected on the relationship between humans and modern urban architecture, playing with mathematical or geometric words and color predicates. At the same time she abandoned traditional narrative models with her style of writing.

In view of the above, this article presents Vogel's experimental writing practices and aesthetics concepts by locating her work in Lviv's culture of knowledge.     

A Cesspool of Intrigue: Les' Kurbas,Oleksandr Dovzhenko,and the Film Industry in 1920s Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

In the 1920s, theatre innovator Oleksandr “Les'” Kurbas (1887–1937) made three short films for the Vseukrains'ke Foto-Kino Upravlinnia [All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration] or VUFKU. His film career was short-lived, however. Lambasting the VUFKU as a “cesspool of intrigue,” Kurbas left film for good to focus exclusively on theatre. His films never gained wide release, and have since been lost. Kurbas’s brief foray into cinema could therefore be considered a non-moment, yet because Kurbas objected not to the medium itself, but to the institutions creating film, his encounter with the VUFKU illuminates the larger process of the formation of the Soviet film industry. Kurbas’s departure from film occurred simultaneously with the arrival of Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956), and their crossed paths show how the structure of the Soviet film industry shaped artistic possibilities. The institutional transformation of VUFKU into Ukrainfilm, the regional affiliate of the all-Union film monopoly Soiuzkino, signalled a cultural shift: from a film industry in Soviet Ukraine, to a Soviet Ukrainian film industry, one both part of wider Soviet cinema production and slotted specifically into a Ukrainian niche. Ultimately, this article argues that this process of consolidation and centralization in the film industry complicated the development of culture in the Soviet regions.     

‘The Rule of Men Entirely Great’: Republicanism,Ritual, and Richelieu in Melville’s ‘The Two Temples’

Abstract

This article explores the complex and multifarious reasons behind Herman Melville’s decision to refer to the English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 work Richelieu, or The Conspiracy in his 1854 diptych ‘The Two Temples’. It responds to a critical consensus that has seen the reference merely as a sarcastic attack on William Macready (whose rivalry with the American actor Edwin Forrest was the nominal cause of the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York), by contextualizing the play within traditions of antebellum American Anglophilia. By using a combination of new critical work on Anglo-Americanism and anthropological ritual theory, I show how Bulwer-Lytton’s play was significant to Melville’s artistic development. In particular, I demonstrate how the play influenced his increasing engagement with republican and theatrical forms of expression that emphasized the importance of filial relationships between America and Britain in a period of increasing hostility between the two nations.     

The “Aging Males’ Symptoms” (AMS) Scale assesses depression and anxiety

Abstract

Objective: Emotional distress may be associated with severe aging symptoms. This study aimed to investigate aging symptoms in male psychiatric outpatients and their relationship with anxiety and depression.

Method: About 176 male psychiatric outpatients aged 40–80?years were enrolled into this single-center cross-sectional study, and completed self-reported questionnaires including “Aging Males’ Symptoms” (AMS) scale and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS).

Result: Age was correlated with less anxiety (r?=??0.23), less psychological (r?=??0.16) and more sexual symptoms (r?=?0.31). After controlling demographic variables, the partial correlation coefficients of HADS and AMS scores ranged from 0.30 to 0.73. Four groups were defined by HADS: control (C; n?=?103), depression (D; n?=?18), anxiety (A; n?=?26) and mixed anxiety and depression (M; n?=?29). The M group had the most severe aging symptoms, and the C group the least. The A group had more psychological and less sexual symptoms than the D group. “Impaired sexual potency” was the only aging symptom in males not significantly different among the four groups.

Conclusions: Anxiety and depression was associated with more severe aging symptoms in male psychiatric outpatients. Sexual dysfunction could be regarded as the core manifestation to differentiate aging symptoms from syndromal emotional distress.     

The Representation of Arab America in Betty Shamieh’s Roar and The Black Eyed

Abstract

This article gives an analysis of Betty Shamieh’s Roar and The Black Eyed. In these plays, Shamieh presents Arab Americans as victims of Orientalism. She puts Arab Americans within the context of immigrants’ sagas in the United States in an attempt to give their experience validity and identification within larger ethnic experiences. Conversely, Arabs in the two plays are presented as victimizers and politically blamed. This confusion over the representation of the cultural and the political results mainly from Shamieh’s reluctance to offend the wide/white readership market, which is more interested in reading and watching the western stereotype of the Arab. Shamieh’s failure to stage a coherent positive picture of Arab America confirms that Arab Americans are still looking for artistic freedom and that literary censorship is still limiting their productions.     

Pravastatin improves the impaired nitric oxide-mediated neurogenic and endothelium-dependent relaxation of corpus cavernosum in aged rats

Abstract

Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of pravastatin treatment on diminished corpus cavernosum (CC) function associated with aging.

Methods: Male rats were divided into three groups as adult rats (12–14 weeks old), aged rats (72–80 weeks old) and aged rats given 10?mg/kg/d pravastatin in drinking water for six weeks. Blood pressure was measured by tail-cuff method. Total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol, triglycerides and testosterone levels were estimated in blood. Changes in expression levels of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), phosphorylated eNOS (p-eNOS) (Ser-1177), neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS), NADPH oxidase subunit gp91^phox, Rho A and Rho kinase (ROCK2) in CC were assessed by immunohistochemistry. Nitric oxide (NO)-mediated endothelium-dependent and neurogenic CC relaxation were evaluated by acetylcholine (ACh, 0.1?nM–100?µM) and electrical field stimulation (EFS; 30?V, 5?ms, 2–32?Hz), respectively.

Results: In aged rats, NO-mediated, both endothelium-dependent and neurogenic CC relaxation, were significantly impaired as compared to adult rats. Besides, eNOS, p-eNOS and nNOS expressions decreased significantly in CC from aged rats, while gp91^phox, RhoA and ROCK2 expressions increased significantly. The diminished relaxation in response to ACh or EFS as well as the changes in expression of these proteins in aged rats were significantly improved by pravastatin treatment.

Conclusion: Pravastatin improves NO-mediated CC relaxations of aged rats probably by inhibiting NADPH oxidase/Rho kinase pathways, and this effect does not seem to be associated with lipid lowering effect of this drug.     

Subalterns ‘speak’: migrant bodies,and the performativity of the arts

ABSTRACT

The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their precarious lives look from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The following investigation treats the way their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as it is articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembene’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern speak and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyse raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.     

A Dyadic Perspective on Childhood Maltreatment for Women With Provoked Vestibulodynia and Their Partners: Associations With Pain and Sexual and Psychosocial Functioning

Childhood maltreatment is robustly associated with adult-onset vulvodynia, a common form of female genito-pelvic pain/penetration disorder. However, little is known about the impact of childhood maltreatment on current sexual, psychological, and relationship adaptation for couples with provoked vestibulodynia (PVD). This study examined the associations between childhood maltreatment and sexual and psychosocial functioning and pain in women with PVD, the most common subtype of vulvodynia, and their partners. A total of 49 couples (M_age women = 27.80, SD = 6.05; M_age men = 30.04; SD = 6.48) with PVD completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), as well as measures of sexual functioning, couple satisfaction, and anxiety. Women also reported on their pain during intercourse. Analyses were guided by the actor–partner interdependence model. Women’s higher reports of childhood maltreatment were associated with their lower sexual functioning and higher anxiety. Partners’ higher reports of childhood maltreatment were associated with their lower sexual functioning, lower couple satisfaction, and higher anxiety, as well as women’s lower couple satisfaction and higher anxiety. Both women’s and partners’ higher reports of childhood maltreatment were associated with higher affective pain for women. Findings suggest childhood maltreatment experienced by women with PVD and their partners should be considered as part of treatment planning.     

“Our Artistic Home”: Adolescent Girls and Domestic Interiors in the Girl’s Own Paper

Abstract

By zooming in on the Girl’s Own Paper (GOP), this essay demonstrates how the production and dissemination of shared domestic cultures are directed at adolescent girls through esthetic practices of furnishing and decorating the home. The essay aims to contextualize the role of household art in the relationship between female adolescence and bourgeois domestic interiors in fin de siècle Britain. The relationship reveals three important aspects of domestic cultures: household art, do-it-yourself crafts, and material collecting. First, the GOP advises adolescent girls to read and interpret the language of household art through selection and placing, which, in turn, facilitates the construction of the textuality of interior furnishings. The GOP’s esthetic theory, an integral part of educating and improving girls’ taste, functions to enhance their room-layout skills and also construct their architectural identities. Second, adolescent girls are credited with the active role of young home-makers in the GOP. The practice of amateur upholstery shapes female youth’s artistic self-expression and manifests their autonomous control over the making of home-crafted objects. And thirdly, the act of collecting furniture pieces and decorative items functions to address the various components of a room alongside contemporary social concerns about good taste. The accumulation of artifacts allows girls to achieve a sense of materiality and ownership contained within the domestic sphere. Home decoration in general provides a focal point for understanding how the familial space becomes the site of adolescent girls’ artistic labor and household elegancies.     

Love,Will and Becoming in Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Bakhtin

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the ideas of the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov and the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Compared mostly with regard to the Dostoevskian novel, these two authors prove to be connected by a more complex intellectual relationship, as the commentators of Bakhtin’s Collected Works have demonstrated. The present paper continues this broad-context discussion by revealing the principal difference between Ivanov’s and Bakhtin’s worldviews as it stems from the different orders of dependence of love and volition. The framework for comparison is provided by Max Scheler’s essay ‘Love and Cognition’. The primacy of the will causes constant becoming of the human subject in Ivanov’s poetic universe, mostly presented as self-surpassing. The primacy of love in Bakhtin’s philosophy of the deed results in the ‘becoming’ of the other, primarily in the form of the growing value of the beloved, rather than in the form of his or her internal existential transformation.     

The iemoto system and the avant-gardes in the Japanese artistic field: Bourdieu's field theory in comparative perspective

The conceptual framework of ‘field’ proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and his model of the literary and artistic fields in nineteenth‐century France are widely applied to studies of the development of the literary and artistic fields in other regions and the fields of other cultural practices. These researches, while showing similarities to Bourdieu’s model, reveal the distinct forms of nomos which those different fields developed through localised contingencies. In other words, their findings highlight the cultural specificity of the cases on which Bourdieu’s field theory is based. The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the field theory can be beneficially applied to cross‐cultural cases provided that its culturally specific elements are clearly identified. For this purpose, I focus on one particular aspect associated with the nomos of Bourdieu’s model – the orientation toward autonomy – to argue for its cultural specificity, which becomes clearer when it is compared to a distinct case of the artistic field in early‐twentieth‐century Japan. My case study shows that the Japanese artistic field did not develop the same form of autonomy as Bourdieu’s model, but it also discloses the processes in which a certain form of nomos was shaped through the struggles between the artistic field and other fields.     

Sociologist Austin Turk and Policing: Structural Reinforcers and Reversals of the Positional Authority of Police

Austin Turk (1969) offers a distinctly sociological explanation of policing by theorizing that structural reinforcers (e.g., older police officer, younger citizen) and reversals (e.g., younger police officer, older citizen) of the situationally absolute positional authority of police officers affect the relationship between police officers and citizens. To this point, however, there have been only three direct tests of Turk’s theory ( Greenleaf and Lanza‐Kaduce, 1995 ; Lanza‐Kaduce and Greenleaf, 2000 ; Weidner and Terrill, 2005 ). All have examined overt conflict and the results are mixed. The present research therefore adds a fourth test of Turk’s (1969) theory to the sociological literature by examining the effects of structural reinforcers and reversals on citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy and propriety of police actions during routine traffic stop encounters. Net of control measures, including the legal reason for the traffic stop, and extra‐legal measures, such as driver gender, the data provide modest to strong support for parts of Turk’s (1969) theory and absolutely no support for others. The conclusion of the present study is that more research is needed to determine whether Turk (1969) is correct in theorizing that there is a sociology, and not just a social psychology, to police‐citizen encounters.     

Aging male symptomatology and eating behavior

Objective: The literature on eating disorders in older males is still very limited. We assessed the relationship between aging male symptomatology and eating behavior in middle-aged and older men.

Method: We distributed anonymous questionnaires to men aged 40–75?years living in or near Innsbruck, Austria, covering demographic items, current eating disorder symptoms (as defined by DSM-5), and associated measures of eating pathology, body image, and sports activity (including exercise addiction). We also administered the Aging Males’ Symptoms scale (AMS), and classified respondents as “high-AMS” (AMS score ≥37; N?=?82) or “low-AMS” (AMS score <37; N?=?386).

Results: High-AMS men reported a significantly higher mean current BMI, a greater prevalence of eating disorder symptoms, higher scores on the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, greater risk of exercise addiction, and more negative body image than low-AMS men.

Discussion: We found a marked association between aging-male symptomatology and eating-disorder symptomatology in aging men. Our findings suggest that clinicians should carefully inquire about eating disorder symptoms in men aged 40 and above reporting aging-male symptomatology. Importantly, several men in the study reported “purging” via excessive exercise (as opposed to the more common methods of vomiting or use of laxatives or diuretics), and therefore this should be a subject of inquiry in clinical evaluations. To pursue these findings, subsequent studies of eating disorders in older men should consider assessing endocrinological measures, particularly testosterone levels, and should use longitudinal designs.     

Disability citizenship and digital capital: the case of engagement with a social enterprise telco

ABSTRACT

This paper uses as its base a key initiative involving a not-for-profit organisation (NPO), government start-up funding and a social enterprise which evolved through three phases. The purpose of the initiative was the development of a smart phone technology platform for people with disability. The paper’s purpose is to answer questions about the ways in which the mobile technology, seen here as assistive technologies, supported the development of disability citizenship and active citizenship. Data were collected through in-depth interviews conducted at three points in the 13-week programme during which participants with disability received customised support for their phone and training in its use, at no cost. Fifteen participants volunteered to take part in the research project, along with their significant other and service provider. Key themes were identified in the preliminary analysis. Exploring these using Ragnedda’s ([2017]. The third digital divide: A Weberian approach to digital inequalities. Abingdon: Routledge) three levels of digital divide, and Wilson’s ([2006]. The information revolution and developing countries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) categories of access allowed a series of philosophical, ethical and human services management questions to emerge, challenging the optimism with which the digital economy is presented as a solution to issues of inequality. Although the mobile technologies were very successful as assistive technologies for some participants, the findings reinforced the potential for such technologies to further entrench aspects of social exclusion. They also identified ways in which the shift in the role of the NPO to social entrepreneurship, and its relationships with government and private enterprise, had the potential to undermine the exercise of disability citizenship by turning participants into consumers.     

Autonomy,spontaneity and creativity in research with children. A study of experience and participation,in central Italy and North West England

ABSTRACT

Research involving children, deemed to have difficulties with conventional means of communication, can perpetuate reductive forms of representation of children’s knowledges and experiences. This article focuses on the possibilities and opportunities that visual and creative methods can offer to researching with children. Children advance their views in and through spontaneous and concrete forms of participation. Autonomy in aesthetic acts is central to this methodology; to explore practices that produce and reproduce presuppositions deriving from societal attitudes affecting research with children, their agency and self-presentation. This cross-cultural study was conducted in Central Italy and North West England: children contributed their perspectives and experiences through participation in a series of creative encounters resulting in aesthetic and embodied outcomes of sociological and educational significance. The study contributes to the debate on children’s autonomy and the value and quality of participation through artistic practice. Examples from the corpus of data, which includes a series of artefacts and over 900 photographs from each geo-cultural context, are presented. The study shows that it is possible to harmonise power imbalances in spaces of creative freedom, in research and education, where children’s choices and agency are respected.     

Georges Bataille's base materialism

Abstract

The French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897–1962) developed base materialism in his work during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with all existing materialism. This essay is an explication of base materialism and its radical implications for contemporary theory. Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Then he attempts to use this to develop a radical libertarian Marxism, opposed to both Stalinism and fascism. Although it provided a critique of the emphasis in Marxism on production, the active flux of base matter could not be contained in a political discourse. This means that Bataille's thought has an impact beyond the political and into the wider domain of theory. One example of this is the influence of base materialism on Derrida's deconstruction, and both share the attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable ‘third term’. This explains why Bataille's materialism does not appear as conventionally materialist, and why it has had little impact within contemporary materialism. Despite attempts to force base materialism into the mold of a new form of materialism it disrupts conventional materialism and the ‘radical’ politics that often goes with it. Bataille destroys the promise of liberated spaces and offers a more radical and disorienting freedom which inscribes instability into all discourses. It is this that defines the importance and necessity of Bataille's base materialism today.     

Evening and night work schedules and children's social and emotional well-being

ABSTRACT

An emerging body of evidence shows that parents’ non-standard work schedules have a detrimental effect on children's well-being. However, only a limited number of studies have investigated mediating factors that underpin this association. Likewise, only a few studies have examined the impact of fathers’ non-standard work schedules on children's well-being. Based on data from the Families in Germany Study (FiD), this study aimed to address these research gaps. The sample consists of parents and their children at ages 7–8 and 9–10 (n?=?838 child observations in dual-earner families). The data were collected in the years 2010–2013. Non-standard work hours were defined as working in evenings and or at night (every day, several times a week, or changing as shifts). Children's social and emotional well-being was measured with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). The findings show that both mothers’ and fathers’ evening and night work schedules are linked to an increase in children's externalizing and internalizing behavior and that this association is partially mediated by mothers’ and fathers’ harsh and strict parenting, with a stronger mediation effect for fathers parenting.