Virtual Reality: space of negotiation

This paper explores issues of embodiment and representation in relation to Virtual Reality technologies and focuses in particular on the questions that arise in a technologically enforced negotiation between the virtual and the real. My exploration introduces two of my virtual environments, presenting the experimental, provocative playground spanned by such technologies. The sensory involvement of participants in these dynamic, virtual spaces enables me to produce performative realities, in which the boundaries between the Self and the allegedly Other are of a liquid nature. Virtual Reality technology can thus be considered as a ‘thinking apparatus' that not only allows but also provokes to explore the transformation of the real, the body and the Self through the concept of the virtual.     

STRANGE YET STYLISH HEADGEAR VR consumption and the construction of gender

This article examines how gender is inscribed and reproduced in the consumption of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The focus is on how virtual reality systems become embedded in 'everyday life' through leisure and consumption, and how the spectacles and disciplines associated with consumption sites produce gendered virtual subjects. Studies of new communications technologies have tended to polarize between 'cyberpunk'/'cyberfeminist' visions of bodily transcendence in 'cyberspaces', and the critique of such visions from social theorists who focus on the reproduction of social and cultural inequalities through technical systems. These approaches tend to neglect the specific sites in which the social relations of VR are played out. A 'multi-sited' ethnographic study of immersive virtual reality systems is the basis for discussion of how virtual reality technologies produce gender in specific sites. Virtual systems are positioned and used differently in various locales such as arcades and art galleries, bars and theme parks and cafes. The article discusses the practices of consumption which (re)produce and maintain conventional bodily and subjective boundaries. What relationships are becoming institutionalized? Are new conventions of gender created in these consumption relationships? The construction of spectacle and space, and the specific bodily disciplines required for participation in virtual realities in locations of consumption is particularly important in the formation of gender dynamics. Multiple subject positions are offered through competing technical, economic and cultural practices in diverse sites. These positions can establish new conventions of virtual identities and experiences, but also remain shot through with familiar operational categories of gendered identities and bodily practices. This article argues that immersive virtual reality technologies cannot be understood without some consideration of the locales in which they are embedded, and the social identities they make possible or constrain. A local, reflexive and feminist orientation assists in understanding the gendered dynamics associated with 'becoming virtual'.     

Corporeal Interactions in VRChat: Situational Intensity and Body Synchronization

Erving Goffman's work on interaction in everyday life focuses on joint spatio-temporal and face-to-face situations and denies the constitution of social situations via mediatized interaction. In contrast, we argue that shared immersive media such as Social Virtual Reality enable intense, delocalized forms of co-present interactions that constitute closeness and intimacy. By discussing Goffman in the context of current works that open up his perspective for mediatization, we present an understanding of social situations that focuses on intensity and synchronized embodiment—physical, digital, and corporeal. On the Social VR platform VRChat, synchronized bodies allow for intimate corporeal practices, such as cuddling, dancing, or cybersex. Virtual Reality technology facilitates delocalized forms of affective-bodily interaction, thereby contributing to the social negotiation of mediatized closeness and intimacy—despite physical distance. Our findings are based on a digital ethnographic analysis of lifeworlds and practices of enthusiast VRChat-users, combined with qualitative semi-structured interviews.     

Past,Present, and Future: Editorial on Virtual Reality Applications to Human Services

Abstract

“Virtual Reality” interventions in human services may include 360° video, augmented reality, mixed reality, and fully immersive 3-dimensional virtual reality simulations. A variety of applications have been evaluated in various fields of study, including medicine, social work, psychology, and human performance training. Currently, the state of research of VR interventions in human services has primarily focused on efficacy and effectiveness research, with few studies evaluating “scaling up” or implementation of VR interventions in larger populations. Unfortunately, the state of efficacy and effectiveness studies of VR interventions still remains weak with some applications due to smaller sample sizes, lack of randomized control trials, and a gap in reporting key intervention qualities, dosage, and outcomes. With new developments in combining artificial intelligence with VR, realism and the potential for human interaction with computer generated simulations may boost presence and immersion within these applications. This editorial provides an overview of the state of virtual reality applications in human service provision, potential gaps to be addressed by research in the future, and the development of AI based interactive sequences that may boost use presence.     

Three-dimensional virtual reality: Applications to the 12 grand challenges of social work

Abstract

The American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) identified 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work to unify the profession with focused research, practice and policy applications for the most pressing social issues. Virtual Reality (VR), specifically three-dimensional immersive computer-generated environments, has a history of research and applications to address social and behavioral problems. VR is becoming more readily available, as the technology is becoming more common in mainstream platforms such as mobile technology. While social work interventions are often tailored for vulnerable populations that may not have access to VR computing, it appears that virtual reality is gaining accessibility with these advances. Within the framework of the 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work, researchers from three social work virtual reality laboratories in the United States, Texas State University, the University of Houston, and the University of Alabama, review applications previously tested and currently in development to focus future research and intervention in social work practice.     

Anthropology, class and the 'big heads': an ethnography of distinctions between 'rough' and 'posh' amongst women workers in the UK pottery industry

In the context of the take‐over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family‐owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke‐on‐Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re‐structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives.     

360 Video: A prototyping process for developing virtual reality interventions

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising technological intervention for anxiety disorders. However, there are no existing standards and best practices to evaluate the effectiveness of environments to achieve their intervention goals. The purpose of this study was to develop a VR intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder and test feasibility utilizing a three-stage development model. The development of a therapeutic VR environment may benefit from an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from various fields of study. Utilizing three stages of prototyping with two virtual reality platforms, fully immersive video (n?=?6) and three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual reality (n?=?8), the research team designed an intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder, testing bio-reactivity of participants. Results of prototyping include user feedback validating increased stress levels and increased bio-reactivity specifically in galvanic skin response and heart rate elevation. Implications include the use of 360° video for prototyping 3-D virtual reality interventions.     

The body in sociology: tensions inside and outside sociological thought

The human body has in recent years become a ‘hot’ topic in sociology, not just in empirical research but also in sociological theorizing. In the latter context, the body has been variously a resource for broadening the parameters of traditional sociological thought deriving from the nineteenth century, and for overturning that paradigm and fundamentally reorienting the assumptions and concepts of sociological thinking. Attempts to abandon the old paradigm and foster a new one through the means of thinking about bodies are many and manifold, and in this paper we trace out the intricate history of moves towards a ‘corporeal sociology’. We identify the dilemmas that have attended these developments, especially as concerns the ways in which new modes of thinking sociologically have tended to founder over the classical sociological dichotomy between social structure and social action. Through tracing out the various moves and counter‐moves within this field, we identify a central contradiction that affects all contemporary sociological practice, not just that dealing with the body: an oscillation between judging the utility of conceptual tools in terms of criteria derived from the discipline of Cultural Studies, and evaluating the arguments created by those tools on the basis of the incompatible criteria of classical sociology. The paper challenges sociologists to choose one set of criteria or the other, for sociological practice cannot be based on both such antagonistic paradigms.     

Microstructures of economic action: talk,interaction and the bottom line

This paper contributes to an expanding body of research that has analysed the interactional foundations of economic activity, and price determination, by quantifying the financial implications of different micro‐interactional practices. Drawing on video recordings of naturalistic interaction the paper analyses a simple consumer choice, whether to pay one of two prices, the lower ‘standard’ price (£8.00) or the higher ‘gift aid’ (£8.80) price, to enter an arts institution. Utilizing resources from conversation analysis, the paper analyses different ways of posing this choice. It describes how, as interactional constraints tighten, standard prices become less socially desirable and customers increasingly ‘volunteer’ to pay the higher price. The paper contributes to sociological understandings of economic activity, demonstrating how simple one‐off choices, and prices, are accountably responsive to micro‐interactional structures.     

Comparing two types of navigational interfaces for Virtual Reality

Previous studies suggest significant differences between navigating virtual environments in a life-like walking manner (i.e., using treadmills or walk-in-place techniques) and virtual navigation (i.e., flying while really standing). The latter option, which usually involves hand-centric devices (e.g., joysticks), is the most common in Virtual Reality-based studies, mostly due to low costs, less space and technology demands. However, recently, new interaction devices, originally conceived for videogames have become available offering interesting potentialities for research. This study aimed to explore the potentialities of the Nintendo Wii Balance Board as a navigation interface in a Virtual Environment presented in an immersive Virtual Reality system. Comparing participants' performance while engaged in a simulated emergency egress allows determining the adequacy of such alternative navigation interface on the basis of empirical results. Forty university students participated in this study. Results show that participants were more efficient when performing navigation tasks using the Joystick than with the Balance Board. However there were no significantly differences in the behavioral compliance with exit signs. Therefore, this study suggests that, at least for tasks similar to the studied, the Balance Board have good potentiality to be used as a navigation interface for Virtual Reality systems.     

On male femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing

This preliminary report is a study in grounded theory based on eleven years of qualitative sociological research with male cross-dressers and sex-changers in the United Kingdom. It reviews the cognate literature from the standpoint of grounded theory and re-conceptualises the research area in terms of the basic social process of ‘male femaling’. ‘Male femalers’ are males who wish to ‘female’ in various ways, in various contexts, at various times, with various stagings and with varying consequences. Three major modes of ‘male femaling’ are introduced: ‘body femaling’, ‘erotic femaling’ and ‘gender femaling’, and set within a phased ‘femaling’ career path. Typical features of each phase are detailed, indicating oscillations between the major facets of sex, sexuality and gender frequently confronted in each phase. Particular reference is made to the inter-relations between the three modes of ‘femaling’, to the categorisations ‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’, and to the constitution of ‘femaling’ self and world as being variously sexed, sexualised and gendered.     

Exploring the Concepts of Recognition and Shame for Social Work

Recognition and shame are both concepts that potentially offer social workers a structure to build practice on; two states experienced by both social workers and service users. ‘Recognition’, within social, political and economic thought, has been established as a field in which inequality and exclusion can be analysed. Social work theorists have also made inroads into exploring its reach. ‘Shame’ in twentieth century and contemporary sociological and psychoanalytical accounts, is understood as a force in limiting human agency, well-being and capacity This paper briefly outlines some of the defining ideas in circulation in relation to recognition and shame, and then briefly considers how psychoanalytical and contemporary social structural analysis builds on this, making links to contemporary social work thinking throughout. The paper also specifically considers some of the uses of recognition and shame for thinking about social worker and service user ‘well-being’, and the connections, through both the relational and the socio-political, which inflect social work practice.     

Calling for accounts: numbers, monsters and membership1

This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts ‘pass muster’ and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co‐presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like ‘action at a distance’. Taking numbers to act as ‘bearers of culture’, the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to ‘occasions’ in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets. The article begins by exploring how ‘calls to account’ are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such ‘gaps’ affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of ‘co‐presence’.     

Making space for ‘the social’: connecting sociology and professional practices in urban lighting design

Lighting is increasingly recognized as a significant social intervention by both lighting professionals and academic social scientists. However, what counts as ‘the social’ is diverse and contested, with consequences for what kind of ‘social’ is performed or invented. Based on a long‐term research programme, we argue that collaboration between sociologists and lighting professionals requires negotiating discourses and practices of ‘the social’. This paper explores the quality and kinds of spaces made for ‘the social’ in professional practices and academic collaborations, focusing on two case studies of urban lighting that demonstrate how the space of ‘the social’ is constrained and impoverished by an institutionalized division between technical and aesthetic lighting. We consider the potential role of sociologists in making more productive spaces for ‘the social’ in urban design, as part of the central sociological task of ‘inventing the social’ (Marres, Guggenheim and Wilkie 2018) in the process of studying it.     

Family is NOT an institution: distinguishing institutions from organisations in social science and social theory

This paper addresses the use, and potential misuse, of the ‘institution’ as a key concept in sociology. The concept of the ‘institution’ is interrogated using ‘family’ as an example and new institutional economics (NIE) as a crucible. The sociological understanding of family as an ‘institution’ is challenged by the distinction between ‘institutions’ and ‘organisations’ in NIE. The blurring of generic non-sociological terms with critical sociological concepts causes confusion between institutions and organisations. This is highly problematic for understanding social change in increasingly complex systems. I conclude that the contextual embedding of sociological concepts remains important to the appropriate use of the term ‘institution’ in the social sciences.     

The cultural specificity of sociological practices; the case of max Horkheimer's institut für sozialforschung in Weimar‐Germany and the United States

In this article it is argued that the cultural identity of sociology cannot be fully explained in terms of national identity or of certain characteristics inherent in the nature of social sciences (e.g. its methods or methodology), but in terms of how sociological insights are related to various social practices. To illustrate this point, the case of the ‘classical’ Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno is discussed: in order to understand the contradicting ways in which Horkheimer and Adorno appreciate the role of science and liberal democracy in their philosophical and scientific work of the 1940s, one should take into account that these activities are located in different political and scientific contexts. These contexts are characterized by different ‘linkages’ of social theory with social practice. Exploring these linkages makes it possible to understand the ‘broken’ identity of the Frankfurt School, exemplified in an intellectual double‐life in which professionalism and marginality co‐existed. This identity, it is argued, is more characteristic of classical critical theory than the anti‐positivism and post‐modemism‐avant‐la‐lettre they are usually remembered by.     

Family ties in genes and stories: the importance of value and recognition in the narratives people tell of family

Diagnosis in paediatric genetics involves a combination of technologies able to display variation in DNA and clinical discussions with families that concentrate on retrieving family histories. This paper explores the significance of the family tales that genetics brings to the fore. Through discussion of an ESRC‐funded ethnographic study of families referred to a paediatric genetic service, the paper explores how genetics and family history intersect in ‘relations of exchange’ (Latimer, 2013). It draws from sociological work on family that emphasizes the importance of narrative to the formation and maintenance of family ties and the importance of broader social contexts to the kinds of stories that can be told and recognized by others. The paper emphasizes the significance of claims to respectability and value to the narratives people provide of family ties; particularly in contexts where such ties, in the past or the present, are thought of as ‘troubling’. Making reference to research by Skeggs and Loveday (2012), it is argued that an important narrative that is drawn upon, in order to claim respectability, is that of being a good parent who protects their children from socially ‘risky relations’ so that a positive future as a ‘subject of value’ may be possible.     

The poverty of social control: explaining power in the historical sociology of the welfare state

The concept ‘social control’ has been criticised from a variety of quarters in recent years, particularly by historians and historical sociologists. However, it remains in common usage in sociological studies of welfare, deviance and social control. This paper shows, first, how this reliance on the concept of social control is rooted in a wider-ranging argument in social and political theory concerning the liberal-democratic fusion between the state and civil society, and that the lack of resolution of this argument is the foundation of the persistence of the concept social control in other areas of social inquiry, despite its repeated ‘falsification’. Second, the paper highlights the main arguments against the use of ‘social control’ in explaining social order, in particular the misunderstanding of class, culture and power which its use encourages, and the paper will conclude with a discussion of alternative ways of conceptualising the operation of power in contemporary societies.