On Past and Future of Community: A Pragmatic Analysis

Charles Sanders Peirce proposed a semiotic that directed attention to the person or people who are providing interpretation, making place for the social and cultural. Following Peirce, we consider the meanings and consequences the term “community” has in an international context. We argue that English affords a richer set of meanings to community, which was not paralleled in the languages of Southeast Asia. The encounter between English and Southeast Asian languages has lexical consequences, but more momentous are the cultural changes they index. In Southeast Asian cultures, there is less need for “community” to take on broader meanings, since those cultures assume social relationality. Thus, the spread of English “community” could be associated with a rise of individualism in these other cultures, but it could also impoverish the Anglophone West, which would be denied alternative frameworks in which associational and affective meanings of community are unnecessary.     

Environment,Development, and Water in Academia: A Critical Network Perspective

The world is currently confronting two water crises, a developmental crisis concerning populations who lack access to water and an environmental crisis regarding water scarcity and freshwater resource depletion. Are we as academics addressing the complexity of these issues? Using network analysis of over 5,000 articles that address water development and water scarcity, I generate a co-citation network to identify the overlap between development and environmental water literatures in academic journals. The results suggest that the development literature only has a 6.28 percent overlap with the environmental literature and the environmental literature has a mere 1.92 percent overlap. Overall, this research suggests that there is an extreme lack of academic articles that address water scarcity and water development concurrently. Until we as an academic community become more nuanced in our studies of water, we will lack a full understanding of how to solve these seemingly contradictory problems. I conclude by drawing on critical Marxist and “Frankfurt School” perspectives to explain this apparent disconnect.     

On Digital Media As a Potential Alternative Cinema Apparatus: A Marketplace Analysis

The infrastructure of American film has made it difficult for the talented outsider to compete in the feature film marketplace. It has been expensive to work in the medium and often not possible to appropriately disseminate anything that might be created. However, digital media now offers the tantalizing possibility of a legitimate alternative feature cinema. Digital video is a high-quality and low-cost means of production, and digital marketing resources offer cost-effective and powerful distribution channels. This study analyzes the marketplace to determine whether a grass-roots opportunity exists for the underrepresented and the underserved to create their own aesthetically and financially viable cinema culture, and to suggest some methods of how this might be accomplished.     

As Good as it Gets? A Life Course Perspective on Marital Quality

Marital relationships, like individuals, follow a developmental trajectory over time with ups and downs and gains and losses. We work from a life course perspective and use growth curve analysis to look at trajectories of change in marital quality over time. Although the tendency is for marital quality to decline over time, some groups begin with much higher levels of marital quality than others. Moreover, a number of life course and contextual factors can accelerate or slow this path of change. Our findings point to the importance of considering the multi-dimensionality of time (e.g., age, marital duration, the passage of years) as well as family transitions (e.g., having children, emptying or refilling the nest) in creating the meanings and experiences of marriage over time.     

Pragmatic Thinking about Self,Society, and Natural Environment: Mead,Carson, and Beyond

An interactionist approach provides a relevant point of view on human—natural environment relations. This essay draws on an interactionist approach from a Meadian, pragmatic, social constructionist perspective. In the context of grounded distinctions for interpreting “natural environment,” this discussion considers instances of human intervention and levels of responses, for example, individual, social, cultural, historical, and utopian, as variant, even conflicting, reconstructions of the foundational relationship of human—natural environment interaction. Incorporating a pragmatic model derived from Rachel Carson, the work at hand focuses on knowledge and ethical claims, as discourse and action shift from preventing to mitigating and adjusting environmental outcomes.     

Enacting Blind Spaces and Spatialities: A Sociological Study of Blindness Related to Space,Environment and Interaction

Lack of eyesight generates blind spaces. Blind spaces often enacted together with sighted are different from visual spaces in important ways. Sharing physical and social space with sighted may imply special challenges for blind persons with regard to interaction order and social identities. The article is based on ethnographic data with the purpose to describe enactment and management of physical and social spaces for blind born persons in different settings. It focuses on the physical and social plasticity of blind spaces and the mediated, practiced and often toolic relationship between body, self and physical and social environments.     

The Developmental Life Course Perspective: A Conceptual and Organizing Framework for Human Behavior and the Social Environment

The developmental life course perspective (DLC) focuses attention on the socio-historical context in which we live our lives as it influences opportunities and life events that produce cumulative advantage or disadvantage. These large contextual forces shape preference and behavior, and it is within this context that the individual exerts personal agency. This perspective has particular utility as a conceptual framework for human behavior and the social environment courses as it integrates individual-level behavior within a social forces context. This article describes the DLC and its application as both a conceptual and an organizing framework for human behavior and the social environment courses at the masters level. It is illustrated with a case example.     

Family Therapy: A Client-Centered Perspective

>This article first critiques therapist-directed approaches to family therapy in the light of research findings on therapist variables (empathy, warmth, genuineness) associated with positive outcomes in psychotherapy. Second, two polar opposite positions in family therapy — psychodynamic and family systems — are examined and found to have much in common. The two approaches are based on a pessimistic view of the family, which is seen as an intractable unit, resistant to its own growth. Third, an alternative, phenomenological view of the family is developed, which more optimistically assumes the family to be motivated for enhancement and growth. Finally, a client-centered approach to family therapy is described.     

Raising Girlyboys: A Parent's Perspective

An increasing number of children are expressing themselves in gender-expansive or gender-variant ways. A subgroup of those children are girlyboys: boys who accept themselves as boys but cross culturally defined gender lines in their attitudes, behaviors, and desires. Using clinical material, written accounts, and personal observations, this paper investigates the experience of parents raising these boys. Facilitative parenting is differentiated from obstructive parenting within the rubric that gender-fluid outcome is healthy and parents can have influence in this arena. The experience of parents with their girlyboys is also offered as a window through which to view a young boy's protogay development. Analysis is made of the ways in which the psychoanalytic lens has traditionally blurred or distorted our thinking about parents' roles in gender-variant children's development. An alternative view of parenting, informed by the work of post-modern psychoanalytic gender theorists, is proffered, with an end to reinforcing healthy gender-fluid development.     

On Becoming a Pragmatic Researcher: The Importance of Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methodologies

The last 100 years have witnessed a fervent debate in the USA about quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. Unfortunately, this has led to a great divide between quantitative and qualitative researchers, who often view themselves as in competition with each other. Clearly, this polarization has promoted purists, namely, researchers who restrict themselves exclusively either to quantitative or to qualitative research methods. Mono‐method research is the biggest threat to the advancement of the social sciences. Indeed, as long as we stay polarized in research, how can we expect stakeholders who rely on our research findings to take our work seriously? Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the debate between quantitative and qualitative is divisive and, hence, counterproductive for advancing the social and behavioural science field. This paper advocates that all graduate students learn to utilize and to appreciate both quantitative and qualitative research. In so doing, students will develop into what we term as pragmatic researchers.     

Developing Virtuous Children: A Theological Perspective

This paper examines various predominant moral theories and their impact on moral education. It makes a case that of these theories, virtue ethics can best handle not only the large, contemporary moral issues but also the mundane moral choices that we make day to day. It also stresses that because virtue ethics includes in its purview not only actions but also intentions, dispositions, attitudes, etc., it offers many insights into how to help children develop the capacity to make moral decisions.     

Social Interaction in a Heterogeneous Apartment: An Investigation of the Effects of Environment upon Behavior

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship of propinquity (spatial proximity) to social interaction in a heterogeneous apartment, specifically, whether spatial propinquity or social homogeneity is the better explanation for resident interaction. We also examine the effects of other characteristics of the apartment design upon interaction patterns among apartment residents. Data are derived from in-depth structured personal interviews with residents of the apartment complex and are analyzed with standard sociometric techniques. Findings indicate that while propinquity and other design features may precipitate initial contact and interaction, this contact will remain superficial unless it is reinforced by shared social and demographic characteristics. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the literature about the effects of the man-made environment upon behavior.     

Lifelong Learning: A Dyadic Ecological Perspective

This paper examines lifelong learning in differentiating it from formal education, and emphasizes multiple theoretical perspectives in doing so. The theoretically based approaches emphasized here include contextualism and the multi-layered nature of the environment, the dialectics of interactions among students and instructors, the zone of proximal development, and person-environment fit. Examining lifelong learning from these perspectives deepens our understanding of such learners and has implications for future research examining lifelong learning, as well as for the design and implementation of interventions designed to foster positive intergenerational relationships.     

Global Cultural Fragmentation: A Bourdieuan Perspective

We examine the contention that global cultural fragmentation persists because it is anchored in increasingly autonomous cultural fields, which produces both challenges to the state and maintains parallel global cultural zones. Instead of a diverse world slowly culturally homogenizing under the onslaught of economic globalization, the emerging autonomous cultural fields creates both intense nationalist struggles over alternative modes of cultural authority, and sustains distinctive worldviews, which are shaped by the cultural heritages of past practices. Economic development appears to push these global zones in a common modernity direction, but rather than converging, they move on parallel path dependent trajectories. This parallelism is maintained by the differing structures of capital, which are embedded in each zone.

Analizamos la controversia de que existe la fragmentación cultural porque se aferra en campos culturales autónomos que van en aumento, lo cual produce desafíos al estado y mantiene zonas culturales globales paralelas. En vez de un mundo diverso lentamente homogenizado en el aspecto cultural bajo el asalto de la globalización económica, tanto los campos culturales emergentes autónomos crean luchas nacionalistas intensas sobre métodos alternativos de autoridad cultural como mantienen panoramas mundiales distintos que se forjan mediante los patrimonios culturales de costumbres anteriores. El desarrollo económico parece que impulsa a estas zonas globales en una dirección de modernidad común, pero en vez de converger, se mueven sobre trayectorias paralelas dependientes. Este paralelismo se mantiene mediante las diferentes estructuras de capital que están reintegradas en cada zona.     

Developing Virtuous Children: A Theological Perspective

This paper examines various predominant moral theories and their impact on moral education. It makes a case that of these theories, virtue ethics can best handle not only the large, contemporary moral issues but also the mundane moral choices that we make day to day. It also stresses that because virtue ethics includes in its purview not only actions but also intentions, dispositions, attitudes, etc., it offers many insights into how to help children develop the capacity to make moral decisions.     

Media Hegemony: A Failure of Perspective

Numerous studies of TV news have been published since Gans's(1972) call for more research on the mass media. A central issueunderlying much of this research is control and dominance ofthe news process. This essay analyzes the logical and empiricaladequacy of media hegemony as an explanation of ideologicaldominance. Analysis of recent research shows that some researchershave uncritically adapted the "dominant ideology thesis" ofmedia hegemony to studies of TV news and have overlooked findingswhich challenge their claims about (1) the socialization andideology of journalists, (2) whether news reports perpetuatethe status quo, and (3) the nature and extent of internationalnews coverage. Despite the shortcomings of the concept of mediahegemony, efforts should continue to develop an empiricallysound theoretical perspective for locating the news processin a broader societal context.