“Tell Something About the Pictures”: The Content and the Process of Autobiographical Work Among Scrapbookers

Viewing the popular process of making “scrapbooks” as a particular type of autobiographical occasion, I analyze interviews with scrapbookers and others who make up the scrapbooker's community, including industry workers and biographical others (i.e., family and friends). By considering scrapbooks within the autobiographical community in which they are created, I am able to scrutinize the structure of the narratives they contain, the role of the audience in their creation, and the emergence of norms of remembrance among scrapbookers. The narratives recorded in scrapbooks emerge from the bottom up and suggest that scrapbooking is a way to demonstrate the biographical stability necessary to craft an authenticity narrative. Further, I explore how scrapbookers “do autobiography” by uncovering their decision‐making process regarding what is worth memorializing. Scrapbookers work through a mnemonic checklist assessing special events and everyday life for its “scrapworthiness.” This paper's contribution centers on describing the process and the content of these atypical autobiographical occasions.     

Conversion to Islam: Narratives of Awakening,Continuity, and Return

Previous research utilizing conversion narratives to understand how and why people convert has been troubled by the “accuracy” of the accounts. This study of Muslim converts in the United States sidesteps this problem by turning the focus away from the causes, motives, and drivers of conversion and placing it instead on the form or structure of their conversion narratives. More specifically, it foregrounds the subjective process of making sense of one's conversion story through the employment of formulaic narrative structures. Findings suggest that when accounting for their conversion to Islam, these respondents employed three different narrative structures: stories of awakening, continuity, and return. Although these stories vary in meaningful ways, each provides a different perspective on how conversion to Islam can be conceptualized and expressed narratively. The discussion centers on the similarities and differences between these stories in order to more fully articulate and distinguish their underlying premises. I conclude by considering how each of these stories are used by converts to convey the authenticity of their Muslim identities.     

Housing Historic Role Models and the American Dream: Domestic Rhetoric and Institutional Decision-Making at the Tenement Museum

How does a social history museum end up obfuscating issues it intends to highlight? How does the Tenement Museum—an institution committed to “challenging the future” by “revealing the past”—come to obscure structural issues related to housing, immigration, and poverty? Through a comparison of participant observation of tours and analysis of institutional archives at the Tenement Museum, I show how decisions made for pragmatic reasons and materialized into domestic spaces obfuscate structural issues, both in the past and the present. Specifically, I demonstrate how the museum advances historic role models and the American Dream through depictions of tenement apartments, thereby displacing the very issues that tenement housing encapsulates. It is not news to sociologists that museums depict selective narratives that reinforce cultural tropes. Nor is it surprising that museums use domestic space as a mnemonic vehicle through which to portray the narratives they select. What is surprising, however, is that this happens in a museum that is invested in challenging the narratives it ends up depicting. Unpacking how this happens is especially pertinent because of the prevalence of museums that depict domestic spaces of the past, given the increased necessity for museums to educate in order to secure funding, and in light of contemporary political debates over housing and immigration.     

Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self‐narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self‐narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture—especially “bitch” imagery and sometimes racialized discourse—to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre‐making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.     

Placeholders and Changemakers: Women Farmland Owners Navigating Gendered Expectations

Gendered expectations are central to the continuation of agricultural land tenure systems that concentrate land and power in the control of men. These expectations about how land should be used and by whom are communicated through cultural narratives and maintained through social interactions. Through analysis of qualitative data collected through in‐depth interviews with women farmland owners in Iowa, this article identifies a pivotal person without whom the success of these stories is in jeopardy: the “placeholder.” In this article, I identify how cultural narratives place two gendered expectations on women in the placeholder position: (1) that women landowners maintain farmland through the continuance of its use and preexisting land agreements with tenants or co‐owners, and (2) that women landowners defer their authority as landowners to men. Further, I identify the “changemaker” as an emerging character within cultural narratives—one who refuses to fit the expectations of placeholder and whose behavior may or may not be accepted by the community. Finally, I find that alternative social networks provide enabling environments for changemakers as sites of potential narrative revisions or shifts.     

Measuring futures in action: projective grammars in the Rio + 20 debates

While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that has not happened yet? In this article, I argue that future projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives, performance, and material forms. They are particularly evident in what I call “sites of hyperprojectivity,” that is, sites of heightened, future-oriented public debate about possible futures. As a pilot project, I examine contending narratives about possible futures in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. I propose a framework for studying how public interventions into debates about “sustainable futures” and the “green economy” differ on various dimensions of projectivity, including their temporal reach, attention to contingency and causality, and network mapping of future actors. I present a preliminary analysis at the level of narrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative, and subjunctive verb forms in both programmatic and oppositional texts. I close with a discussion of how different genres of future projection might be put to analytical use in studying processes of interest to social scientists, such as coalition formation, institution building, political mobilization, and policy change.     

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME AS VERNACULAR RESOURCE

First coined in 1973 to describe a pathological response on the part of individuals involved in kidnapping or hostage‐taking situations, the label “Stockholm syndrome” has since been used in a much broader range of contexts including reference to wife battering and human trafficking, and in debates about gender and race politics as well as international relations. Tracing the domain expansion of Stockholm syndrome since the 1970s, we examine how the label offers claims‐makers a device for neutralizing the arguments of those with opposing points of view, and, in so doing, reinforces collective narratives and “formula stories” of victimization.     

Fate and Agency in Job Loss Narratives

While sociologists have emphasized the social sources of autobiographical narratives, there has been relatively little sociological reflection on the way that autobiographers themselves make selective use of accounts of social forces and pressures to explain their actions. This paper examines the way individuals' use of social pressures as explanations of their behavior are related to the structure of autobiographical narratives as a whole. The paper draws on empirical examples from interviews with people who are unemployed. Focusing on heroic and tragic narrative structures, I argue that the overall narrative structure is shaped by a number of factors, including the events of historical experience, the rhetorical intention of the autobiographer, and the structuring effects of social location.     

Social media time,identity narratives and the construction of political biographies

ABSTRACT

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.     

Mugabe’s fall from grace: satire and fictional narratives as silent forms of resistance in/on Zimbabwe

Zimbabwean state media has been known to portray the long-serving President as a superhuman who has remained unscathed by the ravages of age. Rumours of his failing health have often been downplayed by narratives of him being as “fit as a fiddle.” This myth of the indefatigable Mugabe was dealt a blow when in February 2015 he fell to the ground in full public view upon his return from an African Union meeting in Ethiopia where he had been named chair of the continental organisation. This paper sets out to analyse the satirical memes that flooded social media after the falling of Mugabe. Bringing into conversation Goffman’s dramaturgical model, Scott’s weapons of the weak thesis as well as Mbembe’s theories of sovereign power, the paper contends that these “memes” led to the emergence of competing narratives that cracked the armour of Mugabe’s invincibility in Zimbabwean political and social discourses. The paper further argues that the memes constitute vital avenues of resisting, contesting, rewriting and availing a different “truth” about Zimbabwe and powerful myths around the fetishisation of Mugabe’s person and power.     

Trust,scepticism, and social order: A contribution from the sociology of scientific knowledge

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which studies the organisation and content of science, has made two original contributions to the understanding of social order at large. First, SSK scholars regard social order as a problem of establishing “cognitive order” and knowledge. A wealth of case studies has demonstrated that interpersonal trust is necessary to achieve agreement and shared perception among particular collectives of specialists. Second, SSK scholars insist that all types of cognitive order and knowledge, whether “scientific” or “lay,” are the result of socially organised scepticism being parasitic upon existing trust and background expectations (an argument that I call “the Parasitic View of Scepticism”). Sociologists with an interest in today's so‐called “knowledge” and “information” societies, and more specifically, in the social distribution and political uses of doubt and unknowns (including “post‐truth”), would benefit from adopting the Parasitic View of Scepticism and investigating the corrosive and generative consequences of scepticism on the trust relations and the cognitive/social order upon which it is based, in line with insights from the emerging fields of agnotology and the sociology of ignorance.     

Struggles of being and becoming: A dialogical narrative analysis of the life stories of Sami elderly

The Sami are an indigenous people living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Historically, national states have made strong efforts to assimilate the Sami people into the majority populations, and the Sami have experienced stigmatization and discrimination. However, after World War II, there has been a revitalization process among the Sami that was pioneered by the Sami Movement and gradually adopted in broader spheres of Norwegian society. The lifespans of the current cohort of elderly Sami unfold throughout a historical period in which contrasting public narratives about the Sami have dominated. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between elderly Sami's individual life stories and contrasting public narratives about the Sami. Nineteen elderly Sami individuals in Norway were interviewed. This article is a dialogical narrative analysis of the life stories of four elderly Sami. The article illuminates how individual life stories are framed and shaped by public narratives and how identifying is an ongoing process also in late life. A dialogical relationship between individual life stories and public narratives implies that individual stories have the capacity to shape and revise dominant public narratives. To do so, the number of stories that are allowed to act must be increased. A commitment in dialogic narrative research on minority elderly is to make available individual stories from the margins of the public narratives to reduce narrative silences and to prevent the reproduction of established “truths”.     

“Who Better to Do It Than Me!:” Race,Gender & the Deciding to Run Accounts of Political Women in Texas

Women remain underrepresented in electoral politics at every level. Much has been written about how dominant gender values shape political women’s decisions to run for office, how the media portrays women on the campaign trail, and how voters respond to women candidates. Yet, research on women in politics has too often assumed a monolithic standard of femininity, overlooking the ways in which gender values are varied and deeply racialized. Drawing from data gathered through 46 interviews I conducted with women leaders and political activists in Texas, I explore the narratives politically active women cultivate to account for their decisions whether or not to run for public office. I illuminate how these “deciding to run” narratives reflect racialized standards of femininity and how these discourses are mediated by the political context and by political and activist organizations.     

‘Freedom Narratives’ of Transatlantic Slavery

It is argued that what have usually been called ‘slave narratives’ sometimes more accurately describe ‘freedom narratives’, especially when individuals who had regained their freedom wrote or dictated such accounts. Most stories that are associated with slavery often focus on the quest for and achievement of freedom through escape, self-purchase or other means. Moreover, it is argued here that there is a distinction between narratives composed by individuals who had once been free in Africa and those who were born into slavery in the Americas. By focusing on the lives of four individuals, Venture Smith, Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano), Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, and Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu, this article assesses the importance of regaining lost freedom as a motive in compiling the narratives and life histories of these individuals. Smith, Vassa and Baquaqua left autobiographical accounts of their lives, while Kaba left a significant paper trail that allows a study of his life, moving from freedom in Africa to slavery and then emancipation in Jamaica. Mediated by the ‘Middle Passage’, these texts demonstrate a consciousness of lost freedom and the importance of re-achieving that status, however contested and understood.     

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.     

Conspiracies beyond Fake News. Produsing Reinformation on Presidential Elections in the Transnational Hybrid Media System

As presidential elections carry the promise of distilling the contested and elusive “will of the people,” the protracted media event intensifies the public demand for exposing the transgressions of the aspiring political elite. This expectation provides fertile ground for investigative journalism, ultrapartisan smear campaigns, fake news, and full-fledged conspiracy theories that are sometimes difficult to differentiate from one another in a hybridized media space. We compare three unique conspiracy stories—Macronleaks, Pizzagate, and Voter fraud—emerging during the previous French and American elections. We assess the divergent strategies of social action that contribute to the stories’ dissimilar patterns for intervening the political news cycle with the “reinformative toolkit” and deconstruct the common conspiratorial “masterplot” for “reinforming” the public. Focusing on online “produsers”—media users functioning as (dis)information producers—we analyze how the grassroots level participated in shaping the conspiracy stories’ synopses and channeling news-framed, conspiratory content between mainstream and “countermedia” outlets.     

Pharmaceutical Intimacy: Sex,Death, and Methamphetamine

ABSTRACT

In this article, I draw from ethnographic work conducted among residents of an “in-house” drug and alcohol treatment center in Baltimore, Maryland, to discuss the relationships born of pharmaceutical (ab)use. By looking in close detail at the autobiographical accounts of one man in treatment for addiction to methamphetamine, I attempt to chart the way life and death are at times brought into close proximity, and at others wedged firmly apart, by such things as love and avoidance. My concern is with the ethics of care that emerge through the so-called “small events” in everyday relations; that so often define a life or a relationship as falling under the category “normal” or “pathological.” I ask how such things as the known demands placed on the body by the need to maintain or avoid relations, whether pharmaceutically mediated or not, come to bear on the decision to “let die” or the resurgence of moral worlds. I end by discussing the different aspects of relatedness revealed by the dependencies and alliances formed by the kinship between pharmaceuticals and humans.

In compliance with current ethical research standards, the names of all informants have been changed to assure their anonymity.     

What's in a Name? Causes and Consequences of Labelling Minorities as “National” or “Migrant”: Roma in Italy and Spain

This article analyses how Roma are represented in official policy narratives in Italy and Spain by comparing the four cycles of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in the two countries. By tracing the representations that the Italian and Spanish governments hold (and make) about the Roma, I sketch out the different categories that EU‐ropean countries recur to as organizing principles to “other” underprivileged minorities. Based on the tailored‐approaches in which both Italy and Spain engage in framing Roma as either a “national” minority or not, I suggest that constructing or “producing” a minority in our imagined communities as characterized by national, cultural, social or migrant characteristics relies more on political expediency than on objective analytical categories.