The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics

The objective of this paper is to explore the dynamics of citizen science (CS) in sociolinguistics or citizen sociolinguistics, i.e. the engagement of non‐professionals in doing sociolinguistic research. Based on a CS‐study undertaken in Norway where we engaged young people as citizen scientists to explore linguistic diversity, this paper aims to clarify the definition of citizen sociolinguistics; it seeks to advance the discussion of the advantages of CS and of how CS can contribute to sociolinguistics; it also addresses the opposite: how sociolinguistics can contribute to the general field of citizen science; and it discusses the challenges of a CS‐methodology for sociolinguistic research, epistemologically and ethically, as well as in terms of recruitment, quality control and possible types of sociolinguistic tasks and topics. To meet the needs of society and societal challenges of today there is a need to develop methods and establish scientific acceptance for the relevance of public engagement in research. This paper argues that citizen sociolinguistics has the potential to advance the societal impact of sociolinguistics by constructing a dialogue between ‘the academy’ and ‘the citizens’; citizen sociolinguistics relies on and encourages participatory citizen agency, provides research experience, stimulates curiosity, further research, public understanding of science and (socio)linguistic awareness, and encourages linguistic stewardship.     

Postmodernism and Popularisation: The Cultural Life of Chaos Theory

Popular accounts of science have helped to stimulate greater public interest in the role of science in contemporary society. For example, chaos theory and complexity theory have proven to be highly marketable science "products". These concepts have increasingly travelled into wider culture and, notably, the study of organization. Through an interpretation that promotes a leaning towards uncertainty, unpredictability and ambiguity, these accounts of science have been seen to provoke a (postmodern) re-conceptualisation of our view of the world. Indeed the overtly philosophical style of many of these stories has provided a rich source of material for social scientists seeking to explain and legitimise developments in organization and cultural studies. Concentrating upon the treatment of chaos theory as a "postmodern science", this paper examines and questions the historical and cultural influences that have encouraged the appropriation of theories from the natural science.     

(Im)mobilizing Technology: Slow Science,Food Safety,and Borders

Immobilization is generally thought to result from power and poverty acting against the acceleration produced by science and technology. In this article we explore neglected countervailing trends, such as quarantines, health inspections, and import bans, where science has the effect of restricting mobility, which we refer to as “slow science.” As well as increasing mobility, science can be mobilized for political projects of restricting movement, but this possibility is neglected because of cultural assumptions fundamental to modernity. Both science and technology can be enrolled for projects of slowing mobility as well as increasing mobility. Drawing on actor-network theory, we examine the enrolment of science and technology into restricting movement in various ways. These issues are explored first through an overview of the neglected genealogy of the ways in which science and technology have slowed movement, particularly across national borders, and second through a short case study of how food safety concerns affect the movement of beef across borders. The case study discusses how “slow science” diagnoses threats posed by mobility and develops technologies to immobilize certain entities. These entities have almost always been biological organisms (including humans) or their products due to the self-reproducing qualities of invasive species, bacteria, or viruses. Uniquely, WTO rules about food require that restrictions be based on sound science, resulting in trade disputes focused on scientific interpretations.     

The Presentation of Occupational Self in Science

I examine the ways in which scientists create and present self-identities. Previous work, in particular research on social stratification in science, has underplayed identity and its contextual variations. I draw upon interviews with scientists who work in two distinct types of American universities, which provides a comparative basis on which to study identities in different contexts of scientific practice. I focus on three aspects of careers, which ground my comparative analysis: commitment, mobility concerns, and the uses of work history.     

Linking Citizen Participation to Empowerment Practice

Abstract

The author examines the social work literature on citizen participation and empowerment in order to identify key concepts that can be used to define empowerment-oriented community practice. A historical overview of the emergence of citizen participation and empowerment in the practice literature is presented, along with an overview of similar innovations and concepts related to social service delivery: the use of informal help and the Independent Living Movement. This literature is used to develop a model of empowerment practice that focuses on the importance of participatory decision-making structures in community-based organizations.     

Black Immigrants in the United States and the "Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity

This article argues that social science representations of post-1965 Black immigrants in the United States employ the concept of "ethnicity" in ways that reinforce the racialist myth of Black (American) cultural inferiority. Specifically, the discursive use of Black immigrant "ethnic" and "cultural distinctiveness," while admittedly reflecting an important recognition of the heterogeneity of the United States Black populations, is in fact predicated upon a repackaged "culture of poverty" discourse that serves to reaffirm the overarching racial order. In a discussion of the theoretical and historical development of the concept, I show how the current discourse of "ethnic distinctiveness" perpetuates a form of racism under a theory that denies the relevance of race while it continuously recodes the biological notions of race as "culture." Thus, Black immigrant distinctiveness, when presented through the prism of the cultural narratives of ethnicity, allows for the perpetuation of a "cultural racism" that adversely affects all Blacks in this country. I therefore call for a rejection of ethnicity theory as it is currently conceptualized and suggest the need to ground theories of Black distinctiveness within analyses of power relations and ongoing practices of racial subjugation.     

Creating Cultural Safety as an Aboriginal Teacher in a Class of Non-Aboriginal University Students

ABSTRACT

Creating a culturally safe learning environment is critical for Aboriginal teachers in universities. This paper explores my experience as a new lecturer convening an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social work course at an Australian university. As an Aboriginal woman teaching to a large class of non-Aboriginal students, establishing cultural safety became a priority early on. Through reflecting on my journey from feeling vulnerable at the beginning of the course, to developing a safe and collaborative learning and teaching experience, this paper presents the rare perspective of an Aboriginal academic in the teaching space, and offers practical ways to develop cultural safety in university classrooms.

IMPLICATIONS

• Aboriginal social work teaching academics need to feel culturally safe in the classroom setting to sustain them in their role.

• Engaging non-Aboriginal students to feel safe through collaborative learning enhances the learning and teaching experience for everyone and contributes to cultural safety for Aboriginal academics.

• Aboriginal academics teaching Aboriginal-specific content risk being traumatised through intensive and consistent exposure to traumatic content that may be personal to them.

• Universities need to provide practical support to new teaching academics to best equip and prepare them for the role.

     

Networks,communication and productivity in a natural science research facility

There is a need in the sociology of science to study relationships among sets of scientists, where each set consists of an entire organization of scientists, or an institute or department of scientists within such an organization. In this paper, colleague choices are aggregated between the institutes (departments) of a single large natural science facility and a multidimensional scaling technique is employed to produce a social map of the facility. Next, hypotheses about the positions of the department in that map are tested. Disciplinary similarity; scale of phenomena investigated (cellular, molecular, or atomic); availability of appropriate apparatus at the facility; and, for the applied and service institutes, the type of assistance they provide (general or more specific) all help explain the social locations of the institutes within the facility. Then, productivity scores for the institutes of the facility are determined and related to the social map and to likely patterns of communication employed by the institutes. The institutes vary in productivity, measured both with objective indicators and with more qualitative assessments. Centrally located     

Identity,Campus Climate,and Burnout Among Undergraduate Women in STEM Fields

Women remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and these male‐dominated fields are often described as “chilly” and unwelcoming to women. This study examined the potential moderating effect of chilly climate on woman–scientist identity interference and academic burnout among 363 female undergraduate STEM students. Results indicated that identity interference related to greater emotional exhaustion, greater cynicism, and lower academic efficacy. A chillier climate related to more emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Furthermore, a positive relation was found between woman–scientist interference and cynicism when chilly climate was low or moderate. When interference was high, chilly climate did not have a relation with cynicism. When women experienced many threats (i.e., high chilly climate, high interference), they reached a threshold where additional emotional cost did not matter. Results highlight the importance of improving the campus climate for female scientists, as well as the need to assist female scientists in identity development.     

“I’ve changed my mind; I don’t want to go home”

Abstract

This article considers the motif of porosity and its opposite, impenetrability, in relation to the home or places where we feel at home. It discusses ambiguities in how the physical boundaries of the home—but also of the perceived human subject—are portrayed in the technology-pervaded world of the dystopian science fiction narrative Total Recall. Tracing the story from the 1966 novel by Philip K. Dick, through the 1990 film to the recent remake (2012), allows for a consideration of the changes in our understanding of how the boundaries between the home and its other are culturally conceived and what happens when the integrity of these boundaries are put into question. Despite their differences, we argue that all three narratives use the built structures of walls and the imagery of the container as a way of portraying the basic conflict of an outer world that tries to take possession of the protagonist’s inner life. Tracing narrative shifts, we suggest, can become a vehicle for understanding the ongoing negotiation of boundaries of the “self,” the human body, the home and even the city, and the implications these cultural negotiations have across the period from 1966 to 2012.     

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.     

The future of the social sciences and humanities in the science of complex systems

The modern world is characterized by problems that involve systems with social and physical subsystems. They are entangled systems of system of systems with multilevel dynamics. There is no methodology able to combine the partial micro-, meso- and macrotheories that focus on subsystems into a coherent representation of the dynamics of the whole. Policy requires prediction, but the traditional definitions of prediction are not appropriate for multilevel socio-complex systems. Heterogeneous multilevel systems have subsystems that may behave with great regularity over long periods of time, and then suddenly change their behavior due to weak coupling with other subsystems. Thus systems that are usually highly predictable may be subject to rare but extreme events, and this is highly relevant to policy-makers. New ways of thinking are needed that transcend the confines of the traditional humanities, social and physical sciences. Of necessity, this science will be embedded in the design, implementation and management of systems, and therefore the new science will be entwined with policy. Much policy is interventionist experiment. By themselves scientists cannot conduct experiments on socio-complex systems because they have neither the mandate nor the money to design and instrument experiments on the large scale. Policy-makers – elected politicians and their officers – design the future, making it as they believe it ought to be. New kinds of scientific predictions can inform policy but can only be instrumented and tested if there is goodwill between policy-makers and scientists, where scientists are junior partners. Scientists offer policy-makers theories and predictions of social systems based on logical-deductive methods. Policy is generally made on the basis of rhetoric, with the best possible arguments being deployed to support favored conclusions. To convince policy-makers that a particular scientific theory should be used, scientists move from the logical-deductive to the rhetorical. Thus the full theory of a science of complex systems has to provide a logical-deductive metatheory of the rhetorical and logical-deductive systems that make decisions and implement them. Traditional natural and physical science has avoided rhetoric, which is much better understood in the humanities and social sciences. Thus it is concluded that the science of complex systems must embrace the humanities and social sciences not just because their domains of study are relevant but also because their methods are necessary to understand how science and policy work together in complex social systems.     

What’s Wrong with Us? Sexual Misconduct and the Discipline of Political Science

ABSTRACT

Sexual misconduct matters not only when it is perpetuated by political actors in political institutions. It matters wherever it happens and whomever it happens to, because it is, at its base, political. Politics is fundamentally about power: who gets what, when, and how. As political scientists it should be at the heart of what we study, but it isn’t. Our discipline creates artificial (and somewhat arbitrary) boundaries about which studies of politics count as meaningful research and which do not. We discourage research that explores more expansive notions of how politics is practiced in broader society. As academics we have the luxury of speaking out. I argue here that political scientists ought to embrace an expansive definition of politics to address the real questions of power, its abuse in our society and in our profession.     

Pierre Bourdieu: theorizing the digital

ABSTRACT

Pierre Bourdieu is known for his research in the areas of education and cultural stratification that led to a number of theoretical contributions informing the social sciences. Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of field, capital, and habitus have become central in many approaches to inequality and stratification across the social sciences. In addition, we argue that Bourdieu’s ideas also feature in what is increasingly known as ‘digital sociology.’ To underscore this claim, we explore the ways in which Bourdieu’s ideas continue to have a major impact on social science research both on and with digital and Internet-based technologies. To do so, we offer a review of both Bourdieusian theorizing of the digital vis-à-vis both research on the social impacts of digital communication technologies and the application of digital technologies to social science research methods. We contend that three interconnected features of Bourdieu’s sociology have allowed his approach to flourish in the digital age: (1) his theories’ inseparability from the practice of empirical research; (2) his ontological stance combining realism and social constructionism; and (3) his familiarity with concepts developed in other disciplines and participation in interdisciplinary collaborative projects. We not only reason that these three factors go some way in accounting for Bourdieu’s influence in many sociological subfields, but we also suggest that they have been especially successful in positioning Bourdieusian sociology to take advantage of opportunities associated with digital communication technologies.     

Governing the liberal self in a ‘post-truth’ era: science,class and the debate over GMOs

ABSTRACT

This essay examines four case studies in which prominent commentators in media sites that target the liberal-leaning, educated class – The Daily Show, Slate magazine, the New York Times, and Real Time with Bill Maher – announced that they had changed their minds on the issue of genetically modified foods (GMOs). Though each had previously been sceptical of the technology, they now embraced it in the name of science and humanitarianism, and urged audiences to do the same. These cases were flashpoints in a broader shift in which the liberal, educated middle class – a formation historically critical of GMOs–has increasingly denounced scepticism about biotechnology as a pernicious ‘anti-science’ conservatism. This liberal pro-GMO discourse posits itself as a matter of truth versus lies. We argue, however, that the manner in which it framed GMO opposition as irrational and immoral threatened attachments that have long been central to liberal, educated middle class selfhood and capital – attachments to being a caring and rational self. Moreover, this discourse intensified as this class was experiencing heightened cultural and economic instability under neoliberalism, the post-industrial labour economy, and the aftermath of the Great Recession. Through their narratives of coming to believe in GMOs, our case studies provide their audiences with technologies, in the Foucauldian sense, for making classed selves and shoring up this class’ claims to authority under these conditions. We suggest that this swell of cultural technologies aiming to cultivate liberal support for GMOs has a great deal to teach us about the class dynamics of the so-called ‘post-truth’ era.     

Polarized Scientists? Exploring Political Differences about Religion and Science among U.S. Biologists and Physicists1

From the Texas textbook debate to the March for Science, visible displays of activism illuminate how deeply politicized the science‐religion interface has become. However, little is known about the extent to which scientists’ attitudes about science and religion are politicized. Using original survey data from 1,989 U.S. academic biologists and physicists, we examine the degree to which political views shape how scientists perceive the relationship between religion and science, religious authority, their personal religious identity, and views on dominant scientific theories. Findings suggest that, indeed, the science‐religion interface holds political meaning for scientists, but in different ways across the political spectrum. Specifically, for politically liberal scientists, atheism and the conflict narrative are particularly politicized belief structures, while politically conservative scientists emphasize religious identity to distinguish themselves from political liberals. Findings point to the critical role of politics in shaping scientists’ attitudes and identities, which may have implications for the scientific enterprise, both at the lab bench and in the political sphere.     

Mentoring,Sexual Harassment,and Black Women Academics

ABSTRACT

The #MeToo Movement both within academia and popular culture has largely been seen as an issue for white women (and men). While the phrase Me Too was originally coined by Tarana Burke in 2006 to raise public awareness of sexual harassment, violence and assault experienced by women of color, the Movement has largely been whitewashed by primarily depicting victims and survivors as white women. Black women academics, like myself, also experience sexual harassment. By highlighting the ways that race-based sexual harassment further marginalizes already underrepresented groups in political science, I use my personal story to elucidate how a gender-only lens misses the complexities of Black women’s experiences with power inequities in academia. Throughout this narrative I underscore the importance of mentorship, professional networks, and the ability to harness scholarship as a vehicle to combat the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, violence, and assault for Black women in political science.     

Campus politics,student societies and social media

The university campus has often been seen as an important site for the politicization of young people. Recent explanations for this have focused attention upon the role of the student union as a means to enable a ‘critical mass’ of previously isolated individuals to produce social networks of common interest. What is missing from these accounts, however, and what this article seeks to address, is how these factors actually facilitate the development of political norms and the active engagement of many students. Drawing upon qualitative data from three countries we argue that it is the milieu of the smaller student societies that are crucial for facilitating the habitus of the student citizen. They provide the space for creative development and performance of the political self, affiliations to particular fields and access to cultural and social capital. Moreover, we contend that these processes of politicization are increasingly enacted through social media networks that foreground their importance for developing political habitus in the future.     

Before and after science: Admissions process to Australian university social work courses

Abstract

Application processes to Australian university social work courses provide an explicit example through which to explore the influence of two schools of thought — social work as an art and as a science — on social work processes. Using admissions literature and questionnaire data provided by Australian schools of social work, this qualitative study explored the extent to which these perspectives are reflected in admissions processes. It was found that in terms of both qualities sought and techniques utilised, schools are operating essentially from a social work as science perspective, although there exists a desire to access qualities from an art perspective. This is perceived as being the result of institutional requirements, resource constraints, academic conventions and lack of knowledge about how to effectively assess the latter qualities. It is argued that social work needs to assert its unique perspectives in claiming a right to determine application processes for social work courses.