Letters From Pamela: Reading Howard S. Becker's Writing(s) for Social Scientists

A deconstructive reading of a text is only in part an argument that can be abstracted. More than that, a reading deconstructs a text to make explicit how that text implicates a certain kind of reader. The reading can celebrate, resist, or essentialize the very construction of the reader by that text My reading of Becker's Writing for Social Scientists is a resisting reading which focuses: 1) on the formal aspects of the writing style that Becker endorses for social scientists, and 2) on the figure of the woman which Becker uses as a vehicle of “the structure of feeling” that promotes the message of his text.     

Internet Bibliotherapy

Abstract

Many individuals who use the Internet seek social support for health conditions. Some common “spaces” where asynchronous communication takes place include listservs (Usenet newsgroups or electronic mailing lists). Synchronous social support messages may be conveyed in “spaces” such as Internet Relay Chat or Multi-user domains. This research describes Internet bibliotherapy, a new type of “space” where social support is offered. This investigation reviews the therapeutic benefits of traditional bibliotherapy and the communication of social support. A narrative analysis of messages on a website devoted to helping people with anal fissures describes how social support is communicated using Internet bibliotherapy and the unique interactive and non-interactive properties of this type of reading simulated self help group.     

Reading social work

Abstract

This paper offers a brief preliminary report on our attempts to apply “close reading” a technique drawn from contemporary literary criticism to social work writing. Reading turns out to be very difficult -something we have had to re-learn but reveals ideological formations deeply embedded in social work texts. Hugh England's “Social Work as Art” is taken as a working example and a case is made saying that it is deeply androcentric. However, it is important to distinguish between text and author and to note that the book shares its androcentricism with many other social work texts and arguably with social work culture in general. (England 1986).     

Reading Rites: Teaching Textwork in Graduate Education

The ability to comprehend, discuss, and use disciplinary texts is central to graduate education. Although techniques for teaching writing have been well-discussed, and even incorporated into graduate curricula, the same is not true for techniques of scholarly reading, a crucial skill that is largely untaught and which students must learn independently or through shared culture. We argue that more explicit training in reading has potential benefits for graduate student education. Drawing on thirty-six in-depth interviews with students in the social sciences, we focus on the routines of managing academic reading, necessary for accessing information for research. Graduate students develop techniques and schedules that permit them to read rapidly or carefully, to read for different academic purposes, and to make information retrievable through notating. We suggest how graduate programs might incorporate reading education into the curriculum.     

Censorship in Translation in the Soviet Union: The Manipulative Rewriting of Howard Fast's Novel The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

Abstract

Although translated literature was widely consumed in the Soviet Union, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how translators negotiated the ideological and political forces present in the Soviet literary field. Defining censorship as a manipulative rewriting of discourses, the process under which texts are censored in the process of translation is examined using, as a case study, Howard Fast's novel The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Howard Fast, an American writer, was a committed Communist until 1957, and wrote several left-wing novels. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti recounts the true story of two Italian radicals whose wrongful execution for murder caused protests around the world in the nineteen-twenties. Close comparison of the source and target texts demonstrates a large number of small shifts which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly affect the ideological positioning of the Russian target text. The overall result of these shifts, motivated by the unification of the linguistic field, is to create intertextuality with Soviet Socialist Realist discourse.     

The Ukrainian reading public in the 1920s: real,implied, and ideal

The reading public was discussed in the Soviet Ukrainian press during the 1920s, at a time when the drive to eliminate illiteracy and implement Ukrainization was scoring increasing successes. Sociological studies of the “real” reader indicated strong preferences for pre-revolutionary authors and foreign writers in translation. Under pressure from Moscow, in the late 1920s Mykola Skrypnyk, the Commissar for Education, and the literary theorist Kost' Dovhan' changed the rhetoric advocating Ukrainization, stressing its proletarian content. They supported the concept of an “implied” working-class reader who read Ukrainian and was simultaneously committed to developing socialism and a “proletarian” culture. However, many sophisticated writers pitched their work to an “ideal” reader, whom they imagined as the end-product of Ukrainization – a culturally literate, urban, and critically thinking consumer. The three ways of conceptualizing the consumer clashed, as the Ukrainization policy went through two major shifts during the period of the first five-year plan (1928–33). Ideologists, educators, and writers adapted to these shifts by redefining the way they conceptualized the reader.     

The Meaning of Queer Home

Abstract

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.     

Reflections of an Emerging Male-to-Female Transgendered Consciousness

Abstract

Professionals involved in social work practice with or designing approaches for working with male-to-female (MTF) transgend-ered youth must listen to the individual voices of these youth for the valuable information they can share with us. This paper provides the reader with the gift of a first-person account of one person's experiences as a “plainclothes transgender” person -a term he has coined to define his experiences. The paper concludes with implications for practice with both “plainclothes” and “fixed/prepared” male-to-female trans-gendered youth.     

The Secrets of Scheherazade: Toward a Functional Analysis of Imaginative Literature

A functional analysis of selected aspects of imaginative literature is presented. Reading imaginative literature is described as a process in which the reader makes indirect contact with the contingencies operating on the behavior of story characters. A functional story grammar is proposed in which the reader''s experience with a story is interpreted in terms of escape contingencies in which the author initially introduces an establishing operation consisting of a source of tension, which is resolved in some way by the outcome of the story. Although escape contingencies represent the functional basis for the structure of stories, they are to be understood in a context of many other reinforcers for reading fiction. Other contingencies that maintain reading are discussed. Functional analyses of imaginative literature have much to offer, both in improving literary education and in understanding the behavioral processes that occur on the part of the reader.     

LOST AND FOUND

This article examines Dovid Bergelson’s modernist writing in relationship to the shifting geography of Yiddish culture after World War I. During the 1920s, a series of debates raged in the Yiddish press about the true centre of Yiddish literature. These discussions about Yiddish literary centres, including Bergelson’s own polemic, “Dray tsentern” (Three centres), were also aesthetic debates regarding the future direction of Yiddish literature in the absence of a national home. In “Three centres” Bergelson envisions the new Jewish writer emerging from the agricultural colonies of the Crimean steppes. Though a surprising vision from a Jewish emigrant writer in Berlin, Bergelson turns to the steppes as a way to break free from Yiddish literature’s attachment to the shtetl. However, a close reading of his interwar fiction illuminates how his modernist aesthetic derives from the irresolvable conflict between the old Jewish landscape of the shtetl and the new spaces of Jewish life in the post‐World War I period.     

“Friendly” Initiatives: An Emerging Approach to Improve Communities for Vulnerable Populations

A growing number of cities and towns are implementing “friendly” initiatives to change the community’s social and physical infrastructure to address the needs of a particular vulnerable segment of their population. Three prominent examples are aging-friendly, child-friendly, and immigrant-friendly initiatives. Although the limited but growing literature describes these initiatives as promising strategies to improve the quality of life of the targeted population, to date there has been little written about the underlying goals, values, and assumptions of these efforts. Using the value-critical approach, this article aims to better understand these aspects of population-friendly initiatives by examining the scholarly and grey literature. Social workers engaged in community and policy practice can play a key role in these efforts and call attention to the ways they may alleviate or exacerbate inequities. Future research is needed to assess the effects of these initiatives on their targeted population as well as other community residents.     

Studies of Scholarly Productivity in Social Work Using Citation Analysis

Ideally, an educator’s reputation should be based primarily on that person’s scholarly publications. However, reputation is more than the sum of one’s scholarly efforts. In this article, the authors seek to add objective information to the subjective decision-making process involved in hiring, promoting, or providing tenure to educators. The authors present norms of citations—objective indicators of reputation—for professors, associate professors, and assistant professors. These norms were derived from the Citation Index of the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Four studies were undertaken to examine scholarly productivity using the same basic methodology: citation analysis. In Study 1, the authors examined a sample of educators listed in the Encyclopedia of Social Work. These experts were used as a national norm against which other educators could compare themselves. Study 2 was based on a citation analysis of deans of all graduate schools of social work. In Study 3, the authors examined “local norms” of four particular schools of social work and discussed the differences between national and local norms. In Study 4, the authors examined “personal norms” through a detailed study of the careers of three individual professors, and compared their entirely scholarly productions against the SSCI record.     

Exegetical explorations: Parsons’ problematic aim

The aim of this article is to encourage ongoing and close exegetical study of sociology’s theoretical texts. Attention is drawn to two instances where Talcott Parsons’ theory project seems to be at odds with itself. Both are related to his “first major synthesis” The Structure of Social Action (1937). The first concerns Parsons’ opening discussion of Crane Brinton’s question “Who now reads Spencer?” Parsons’ discussion of Spencer is examined and then compared and contrasted with what he later wrote in the “Introduction” to the 1961 reprint of Spencer’s The Study of Sociology. The second concerns Parsons’ problematic view of his contribution to social theory’s “secondary literature” and how this relates to his claims about “convergence.” The article notes that Parsons was trying to identify what he believed to be a new norm for social theory. Sociological theory, he believed, would from henceforth have to be formulated in terms of this newly emerging normative frame of reference.     

Feeling the Hands of Time: Intersections of Time and Emotion

While the fields of the sociology of time and the sociology of emotion have grown exponentially, missing from the literature is explicit theorizing on the intersections of emotion and time. In this review article, we begin by examining literature that explores both how time (e.g. temporal control, perceived amount) influences emotional responses and how emotions (e.g. emotional intensity, valence) impact perceptions of time. Although such research occurs in a variety of disciplines, much of it fails to look at individuals' active manipulation of time and emotion to produce desired experiences. After discussing the established concepts of emotion work (Hochschild 1979) and time work (Flaherty 2003), we illustrate how two newer concepts – “temporal emotion work” (Lois 2010, 2012) and “emoting time” (Mullaney and Shope 2012) – serve as starting points for thinking about how individuals actively use time in emotion work and emotions in time work. Although much of the thinking to date occurs within the scholarly literature on work and family, we call for more intentional and systematic theorizing about the relationship between time and emotion.     

自反性青年亚文化——青年文化的空间属性与情感转向

“青年文化”具有“亚文化”属性,不仅仅指“青春叛逆”这一特质,在新媒体时代更涉及到“网络媒介”对“青年文化”的形塑。通过当代大学生阅读调查、网络使用习惯调查以及实际社交状况的深描,探讨青年群体在虚拟空间与现实空间中不同的身份表达,可以发现当下“赛博空间”中的青年自我表征与现实身份认同的关系具有“自反性”,一方面“次元壁”的区隔显示出青年身份认同的焦虑,另一方面从“网络—现实”空间的二元对立中又生产出身份认同的路径,即通过“自我对抗”最终生产出青年的主体性。     

How to Do Things With Texts: A Functional Account of Reading Comprehension

We offer an account of reading comprehension that we believe will help clarify some common conceptual confusions in the relevant literature, as well as contribute to existing functional accounts. We argue that defining texts qua texts as stimulus classes, on the one hand, and equating “comprehension” with behavior (covert or otherwise), on the other, are not useful conceptual moves, especially when behavioral settings go beyond basic literacy skills acquisition. We then analyze the structure of the contingencies that usually evoke talk of “comprehension” using techniques from analytic philosophy. We show how keeping the results of this analysis in mind can help avoid the conceptual bafflement that often arises, even among behavior analysts, when defining or assessing behavioral phenomena related to reading comprehension. Using two contrasting cases (legal texts and stories), we argue that what counts as comprehension depends, not peripherally but crucially, on the shared social practices of which texts are a part. Finally, we propose a new framework for classifying reader–text contingencies by combining two dimensions: openness of setting and embeddedness of reinforcement.     

Irregular Workers or Ethnic Kin? Post‐1990s Labour Migration from Bulgaria to Turkey

This paper addresses the invisibility of the post‐1990s irregular migration flows from Bulgaria to Turkey in the literature despite the increasingly significant number of such migrants. I suggest that this invisibility stems partially from a problem of classification that has to do with implicit suppositions about ethnicity and migration. The post‐1990s Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria are not specified in accounts of irregular migrant flows directed towards Turkey since they are assumed to belong to the category of ethnic “return” migrants: Because of their ethnic identity as Turkish, all Turkish migrants from Bulgaria tend to get considered as part of the intermittent “return” migration waves from Bulgaria, the most notable and well‐known of these being the fight of more than 300,000 Turks in 1989. However, while the ethnic affiliation of the post‐1990s migrants from Bulgaria renders them invisible as irregular migrants within scholarly migrant typologies, the same ethnic affiliation does not necessarily work to their advantage when it comes to their legal and social reception in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that prioritizes micro‐level analysis from below, the paper demonstrates that the self designated ethnic affiliation of these migrants, counterpoised against their social marginalization as “the Bulgarian” domestics, heightens the paradoxes of belonging and affects migration strategies. The paper thus underscores the significance of ethnic affiliation as a factor that needs to be adequately taken into account in describing the present and in assessing the future of this particular migratory pattern.     

Shifting Worlds of Strangers: Medium Theory and Changes in “Them” Versus “Us”*

Macrolevel analyses of the influence of different communication technologies are more difficult to test and apply than the results of focused studies of particular media messages. Nevertheless, “medium theory” is of potentially great significance because it outlines how media, rather than functioning simply as channels for conveying information between two or more social environments, are themselves social contexts that foster certain forms of interaction and social identities. This article uses a medium-theory perspective to address one variable related to “technological communities”—the changing boundaries between “them” and “us.” The ways in which oral, print, and electronic modes of communication each foster a different balance between strangers and “familiars” are outlined.