Ulak (The Messenger): a mystic fable of Islamic messianism

Although modernity considers religion as a fable, religion has always been part of modern politics. The ‘return of religion’ in global politics, which marks the contemporary political and cultural imagination, accentuates this paradox. Religion has now become indispensible for the idea of truth. In this article, I approach this problematique by discussing the relationship between religion and art in terms of their relation to the idea of truth. In this respect, I focus on a Turkish film, Ulak (The Messenger), and analyze the film’s thought about religion and the link it establishes between the artistic/narrative fable and the idea of truth. The film’s choice of Gnosticism as the language of the dispossessed indicates a political position in relation to both the ‘return of religion’ and the popularity of the cultural turn in politics. On this basis, the article examines the film’s take on the concept of the event as a miracle (in religious messianism), contrasting it with the philosophy of revolution. Thus, it navigates the ambivalent border between art and non-art, between the mystic fable and politics. With modernity, it is said that, art has replaced religion and borrowed its sacredness. A reverse process in place today: a resacralization of art and politics. Art and religion share a common element: illusion. However, art profanes illusion, while religion sacralizes it. On this basis, the article concludes that Ulak is a cinematic form of antiphilosophy. It is a spectacular movie as a critique of institutional religion, yet it is captivated by the understanding of truth as a miracle, by the truth of the fable. Following Badiou, who views art as a truth procedure, one could say that Ulak’s potential to clarify the value of the truth event remains questionable.     

Childbearing and Marriage: Investigating the Importance of Context for Meaning-Making of First-Time Marriage

Previous research reveals that the temporal ordering of childbearing and marriage can have an impact on the meaning of first-time marriage. This article aims to obtain a deeper understanding of meaning-making of first-time marriage in relation to childbearing. Narrative interviews with 16 brides and grooms in 8 couples in Sweden were conducted. The material was analyzed in relation to the temporal ordering of childbearing and marriage. The study reveals that the construction of meaning of marriage does not only relate to the temporal context. Social factors such as social class or family formation might also be relevant for how meaning is constructed. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of meaning-making as a relational process constructed within particular contexts.     

The Imaginary Audience and Personal Fable: Factor Analyses and Concurrent Validity of the “New Look” Measures

This study examined key components of the “New Look” at the imaginary audience and personal fable constructs. Toward this end, data from four samples of Belgian high school students (N= 1,458) were analyzed. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses failed to confirm that the measures associated with the New Look theory, the New Imaginary Audience Scale, and the New Personal Fable Scale (NPFS), tapped a common underlying construct. Only the invulnerability and omnipotence subscales of the NPFS proved to be highly related. In line with the New Look theory, boys were found to believe more strongly in their own uniqueness, invulnerability, and omnipotence than were girls. Higher scores on the invulnerability and omnipotence subscales were associated with lower levels of depression and loneliness. Finally, each aspect of the personal fable seemed to have its own specific role in the process of separation – individuation. Implications of these findings for the New Look theory of the imaginary audience and the personal fable are discussed. Suggestions for future research are put forth, with particular emphasis on the role of the invulnerability/omnipotence complex in adolescent development and behavior and on the family resemblances among the various aspects of the personal fable.     

Pleasure,power, and pain: A review of the literature on the experiences of BDSM participants

Since the explosion of social scientific and sociological research on BDSM in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the field has grown exponentially. In this review, I identify three particularly fruitful recent lines of research in sociological and related approaches to BDSM. First, I discuss work that critically analyzes the meaning(s) of BDSM for participants and the role of debates about the sexual and the erotic in relation to BDSM. Second, I discuss work on BDSM identities, including scholarship that examines BDSM identities in relation to other identities. Here, I also discuss emerging lines of scholarship that focus on the ways in which privileges (particularly race/ethnicity and class) shape identification with and access to BDSM communities. Third, I discuss work on BDSM communities, examining the ways that community organization shapes BDSM experiences. I conclude with suggestions for future research in the field including deepening and broadening intersectional analyses of BDSM experiences, exploring specialized roles and identities that exist within the broader BDSM umbrella, and investigating similarities and differences between those who participate in BDSM on a time‐limited basis versus those for whom BDSM is an ongoing, continual core aspect of identity.     

Rethinking gender and development practice for the twenty-first century

This article presents the personal view of the author on raising the profile of gender equality and gender transformation in development agencies. In the first section, the author describes the practical difficulties observed in the context. These include the confusion in the discourse, overemphasis on the economic aspect of women's empowerment, oversimplification of complex issues, exploration of the meaning of gender, the assumption of a distinction between male and female sexes, and the assumption of a distinction between sex and gender. The findings indicate the need to develop a social relation theory which revolves around three elements: 1) conceptualization of social relations as the mainframe of analysis; 2) the understanding of the link between experience and gender differentiation; and 3) the lack of acknowledgement of the relevance of homosexual experience. Lastly, the author emphasizes that gender must not be viewed as a politically correct ideology, but as an integral element in a wider search for a deep understanding of human behavior.     

Class,place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.     

The Unreliable Narrator and the Implied Author in Lolita

Lolita is written by an American of Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, who is one of the most famous writers in the united states .This book is heatedly disputed because of a kind of lopsided love between an middle-aged man and a young girl .At the foundation of reading this novel carefully and analysis some narrative theory, this paper Trieste to analyses the protagonist Humbert Humbert's and Dr.John ray's unreliable narration and the implied author in this novel.     

Worlding Miss World,Bangalore, 1996

This essay revisits the much-discussed swarm of protests surrounding the 1996 Miss World pageant in Bangalore, India. It suggests that behind the clamour of clashing opinions regarding the content of the pageant lay a deeper crisis, uninterrogated yet constantly palpable: the absence of a performative dispensation within which the then-nascent project of liberalisation could, paradoxically, be experienced as self-grounding. By organising its discussion around interviews with some of the people most directly involved in trying to manage the meaning of the event – through sponsorship, public relations, policing, and protest – the essay shows how a reconsideration of the pageant can help us understand the delicate relation between commercial publicity and sovereign authority in a globalising age.     

And … action? Gender,knowledge and inequalities in the UK screen industries

This article explores how a knowledge ecology framework can help us better understand the production of gender knowledge, especially in relation to improving gender equality. Drawing on Law, Ruppert, and Savage, it analyses what knowledge of gender inequality is made visible and actionable in the case of the UK screen sector. We show: (i) that the gender knowledge production for the UK screen sector operated with reductionist understandings of gender and gender inequality, and presented gender inequality as something that needed evidencing rather than changing; and (ii) that gender knowledge was circulated in two relatively distinct circuits, a policy‐ and practice‐facing one focused on workforce statistics and a more heterogeneous and critical academic one. We then discuss which aspects of gender inequality in the UK screen industry remained invisible and thus less actionable. The article concludes with a critical appreciation of how the knowledge ecology framework might help better understand gender knowledge production, in relation to social change in the UK screen sector and beyond.     

Adolescent egocentrism and indoor tanning: is the relationship direct or mediated?

This paper explored how imaginary audience and personal fable ideations contribute to adolescent indoor tanning intentions directly and indirectly through the way they shape pro-tanning attitude and association with peers who use tanning beds. Five hundred and ninety-five male (n = 207) and female (n = 387) adolescents, ranging in age from 11 to 19 (M = 16.87; SD = 1.34) years completed a cross-sectional survey. Measures included imaginary audience, personal fable (three dimensions: invulnerability, uniqueness, and omnipotence), pro-tanning attitude, association with peers who use tanning beds, and tanning bed use intentions. Bootstrapping analyses documented that imaginary audience ideations are indirectly associated with indoor tanning intentions through the mediation of pro-tanning attitude and association with peers who use tanning beds. Of the personal fable ideations, only invulnerability ideation is indirectly associated with indoor tanning intentions through the mediation of association with peers who use tanning beds. Design and evaluation of interventions and campaigns to reduce indoor tanning must be targeted to adolescents varying in imaginary audience ideations differently.     

Uneasy passages between neoliberalism and feminism: Social inclusion and financialization in Israel's empowerment microfinance

This article focuses on feminist non‐governmental organizations advocating for economic empowerment of women (EEW) through microfinance, using Israel as a case study. Through fieldwork, interviews and documents, we investigate the institutional practices, cultural discourses and struggles that EEWs develop in order to expose the particular ways in which feminist organizations interact with the world of finance and state institutions. Our analysis points to the complex power dynamics of mediation, suggesting that there are ‘uneasy passages' between neoliberalism and feminism, ones that help re‐signify the meaning of financial discourses while re‐politicizing women's social and economic exclusions. Simultaneously, however, this relation induces a series of compromises, whereby EEWs adopt neoliberal modes of governance. Rejecting the notion that contemporary feminism has simply been co‐opted by neoliberalism or the perception of EEW microfinance as a mere expansion of neoliberal rationalities, we reveal new sites and ways in which feminism both colludes and collides with neoliberalism.     

Mobility closure in the upper class: assessing time and forms of capital

Most understandings of the ways classes become social groupings centre on processes of mobility closure whereby mutual appreciation and recognition within classes arise from homogenous experiences over time. The mapping of such structured biographies, however, remains understudied. This paper explores intra‐ and intergenerational mobility patterns in the upper strata of the Norwegian class structure and aims to include temporal processes and multiple forms of capital in the quantification of class trajectories. By combining multiple correspondence analysis and social sequence analysis, two important but often neglected aspects of recruitment to the upper class are emphasized: first, by introducing multiple forms of capital, different ways of maintaining mobility closure are demonstrated; second, different pathways to power are highlighted by distinguishing between divergent class careers. A key aim of the analysis is to explore internal divisions within the upper class in forms of parental capital (an ‘origin space’) and link these divisions to a typology of ‘destination careers’ in adulthood. The analysis suggests that individuals from modest origins are more likely to have careers that feature a biographically late arrival and/or short‐term affiliations to upper‐class positions whereas individuals from families rich in capital are more likely to have stable careers in the upper‐class fractions from which they originate. The analysis thus reveals important divisions in the trajectories of Norwegians who reach the upper class; not only are there differences in their upbringing in terms of the availability of different amounts and types of capital but such divisions also seem linked to their own class careers later in adulthood.     

浅谈《名利场》中主人公丽贝卡人物性格的两面性（英文）

This novel is created by the famous novelist in nineteenth century—William M Thackeray,it also becomes his most wonderful work.The author describes the environmental background and kinds of people in upper class;in particular,Thackeray pays much word on an outstanding girl who is clever,pretty,diligent,and ambitious.I divide my thesis into several main parts,including her childhood,school life,marriage and social intercourse to elaborate Rebecca’s dual personality—extremely selfish self-awareness and complete feminist consciousness beyond herself.     

Automatic transmission: ethnicity,racialization and the car

This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Bradford, an ethnically diverse city situated in the north of England. The sample of over 60 participants mostly comprises males of British Pakistani Muslim heritage but varies in terms other markers of identity such as social class, profession and residential/working locale. The article analyses the cultural value and meaning of cars within a multicultural context and how a consumer object can feed into the processes which refine and embed racialized identities. Small case studies reveal the concrete and discursive ways through which ideas around identity and ethnicity are transmitted and how, in particular, racialization continues to feature as a live, active and recognizable process in everyday experience.     

Same Voice,Different Sun

"啊,我的太阳,那就是你,那就是你。"the melody comes from the Italian Folk Song-O Sole Mio. For common people who are familiar with this song, they will have two words in their minds, Luciano Pavarotti and love. According to the relationship between word meaning and culture, it was our aim to analyze the conceptual meaning and associative meaning of the melody between Italy and China to make us understand more about the famous song.     

Elite and upper class in philadelphia, 1975

This study examines the relationship between the Philadelphia elite and upper class in 1975. Much of this study is a historical replication of Baltzell's 1958 analysis of the Philadelphia elite and upper class in 1940. Data on the occupations, educational affiliations, club memberships, and religious affiliations of upper class and nonupper class members of the Philadelphia elite of 1975 generally are comparable to those presented by Baltzell for 1940. Yet the proportion of the elite that is upper class is smaller than in Baltzell's analysis, and holds a smaller proportion of all corporate directorships reported by the elite, including directorships in major Philadelphia banks. These latter data support the assertion that the Philadelphia upper class lost some of its influence in the decades after World War II.     

Think really different: Continuity and specialization in the English dual form adverbs

This paper analyses variation between ‐ly and ‐ø in English dual form adverbs by examining conversational data from York, U.K. Using multivariate analysis and the comparative method we assess the constraint ranking, significance and relative importance of external factors (age, sex, education level) and internal factors (lexical identity, function and meaning). The results show that ‐ly is dominant and has increased dramatically in apparent time. However, cross‐tabulations with individual lexical items reveal that this correlation with speaker age is restricted to a single item–really. In conjunction with evidence from the history of English, we suggest that this does not reflect ongoing developments in English adverb formation, but is the result of continuous renewal in the encoding of ‘intensity’. In contrast, separate analysis of the other adverbs shows that variation between ‐ly and zero is retained in part as a socio‐symbolic resource, in particular for marking less educated male speech. Underlying this social meaning however, is a linguistic constraint which operates across all speakers. The zero adverb encodes concrete, objective meaning–a tendency which can be traced back 650 years or more. This provides yet another example of the interface between social and historical developments in language variation and change.     

On the Meaning of Occupational Status: Implications for Stratification Theory and Research

Abstract

There is a controversy regarding the meaning of occupational status centering around the issue of whether status differences continue to entail deference entitlement. This article suggests that deferential behavior is still linked to occupational status differences but, as a result of the complexity of occupational systems in industrial societies, there have been changes in the settings in which displays of deference occur and in the manner in which deference is expressed A source of confusion in the debate on the meaning of occupational status is the failure to distinguish between differences in status and differences in the occupational characteristics on a basis of which status is accorded This distinction and its implications for class and power hierarchies are discussed The article concludes with an argument for the necessity of situating the process of status differentiation in “status assignment systems”.     

The making of an egalitarian elite: school ethos and the production of privilege

Research on privilege and education often focuses on institutions that are elite in a rather traditional way, for example schools that instruct the children of the upper classes according to a reproductive logic that reinforces existing inequalities. The present article addresses the fostering of advantage from the angle of a more ambiguous case. The Global College, a municipal Swedish upper secondary school specialized in environmental issues and global justice, offers an empirical prism for discussing the cultivation of elite identification through the formative potential of an egalitarian ethos. The relation between ethics and class is examined, not only in terms of how moral stands are classed, but also by investigating into the productive capacities of such orientation. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the study unfolds how a possible tension between egalitarianism and elitism resolves into a productive relation whereby the students’ incarnation of ethico‐political ideals becomes a means for developing agency, confidence, entrepreneurial skills and an overall sense of ease.     

From Artifacts to Infrastructures in Studies of Learning Practices

This article addresses how Leigh Star’s notion of infrastructure as ecological and relational to organized practices can inform studies of learning practices and help understand the role that networked technologies play in such practices. A discussion of the relation between the view of technologies as mediating artifacts and as infrastructures is presented. Star’s work on infrastructure is also discussed in the light of debates in information systems research and computer-supported cooperative work. The article presents an empirical study of workplace learning as an illustrative example of how this notion can be brought to bear upon analyses of learning practices.