Tattoo Narratives: The intersection of the body,self‐identity and society

Drawing upon Frank's (1995) discussion of the personal and social aspects of embodied storytelling, this paper considers the tattoo as a form of visual communication created within a multiplicity of contexts. Based on in‐depth interviews with eight tattooed men and women, the focus of this article is the stories that these individuals tell about their tattoos. I argue that the tattooed body is a distinctively communicative body. It has a great deal to say, not only about the identity of the wearer, but also about the culture in which she lives. I conclude with some reflections on examining the tattoo as a conceptual latchkey—a tool that may enable researchers to begin to unlock the complicated relationship between the body, self‐identity and society.     

Participation Structures as a Mediational Means: Learning Balinese Gamelan in the United States Through Intent Participation,Mediated Discourse,and Distributed Cognition

Participation has presented a complex unit of analysis for interactional sociolinguistics. In this study I add another dimension to participation by considering recent theories related to sociocultural activity theory—mediated discourse analysis and distributed cognition. Drawing on examples from maguru panggul, the traditional pedagogy of Balinese Gamelan music, I argue that participation structures are a mediational means that enable students to augment their learning. Focusing on two participation structures that involve keen observation and listening-in, I also consider how intent participation is a part of these participation structures and maguru panggul pedagogy. What emerges is an understanding of how participation structures used as mediational means can have an effect on the division of cognitive labor within a classroom.     

In the Eye of the Beholder: The Stratification of Taste in a Cultural Industry

Scholars argue that cultural intermediaries—that is, people that sell popular culture—accomplish their work through an affinity between their personal taste and that of their consumers. Yet, studies have not examined the social origins of such taste. To address this gap, I use qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze data collected from a probability sample of U.S. advertising practitioners. I find that although the tastes of cultural intermediaries are socially stratified, they are not consistently the “middlebrow” taste long associated with such industries. Additionally, by incorporating a two‐dimensional model of class and focusing on how cultural goods are consumed, I extend knowledge on taste more generally.     

All that is solid melts into work: self‐work,the ‘learning ethic’ and the work ethic

In this paper I examine the intersections between a general commitment to education and learning and the moral and ethical dimensions of the work ethic under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on Kathi Weeks' (2011) recent exploration of the work ethic in The Problem with Work, I suggest there is a relationship between the form and function of the work ethic‐ and what I term the ‘learning ethic’. I suggest that commitment to a learning ethic, to the unreserved power of learning and education‐ may reiterate a moral commitment to the personal characteristics that define the work ethic under capitalism. As a consequence, consideration of the form and function of these moral character ideals in the continuation of unequal social relations across educational and workspaces, become obfuscated by a generalized celebration of learning, education and self‐work.     

“It’s a Lifestyle”: Social Class,Flexibility, and Young Adults’ Stories About Defining Adulthood

Abstract

In discussions of how social class matters during the transition to adulthood, the simultaneous importance of both class origins and future class trajectories is underexplored. In this paper, I use interviews with 60 emerging adults in the United States to investigate their stories about progress towards adulthood during the emerging adult years. I find that regardless of class backgrounds and trajectories, participants agree on three subjective criteria—identity exploration, learning responsibility, and gaining control—as most important to the project of becoming an adult. However, personal stories about living up to these subjective criteria diverge by future class plans. While those on class-advantaged (middle- and upper-middle-class) tracks draw heavily from traditional, concrete markers of adulthood to explain the accomplishment of subjective expectations, those on class-disadvantaged (working-class and poor) tracks stress the importance of “flexibility” as important in their stories about becoming an adult. While emerging adults use subjective criteria to explain reaching adulthood, this subjectivity also helps conceal the ongoing importance of access to material resources and opportunities for transitioning to adulthood along a normative path. Subjectivity also allows for individualization in emerging adults’ stories, which helps obscure broader patterns of inequality.     

News and Comment

Using personal narratives and research on teacher “communities of practice,” the authors outline a proactive response to high-stakes testing policies that places teacher learning at its center. Although research on the effects of these policies is mixed, the authors are troubled by the ways in which the policies have been used to strip teachers of their autonomy and the erosion of the value placed on their professional knowledge. The authors—who have both taught in urban schools where students had to pass high-stakes social studies tests to graduate—argue that teachers must work together to reclaim their role as leaders in response to the policies. They provide key questions that social studies teachers can use to guide an inquiry into the tests themselves and suggest ways to use the knowledge gained to better serve their students’ learning and raise test scores.     

Developing understanding of the idea of communities of learners

The idea of a community of learners is based on the premise that learning occurs as people participate in shared endeavors with others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural activity. This contrasts with models of learning that are based on one‐sided notions of learning— either that it occurs through transmission of knowledge from experts or acquisition of knowledge by novices, with the learner or the others (respectively) in a passive role. In this paper, I develop the distinction between the community of learners and one‐sided approaches from the perspective of a theory of learning as participation, and use two lines of research to illustrate the transitions in perspective necessary to understand the idea of communities of learners. One line of research examines differing models of teaching and learning employed by caregivers and toddlers from Guatemalan Mayan and middle‐class European‐American families; the other line of research involves a study of how middle‐class parents make a transition from their own schooling background to participate in instruction in a public US elementary school.     

Career Decisions From the Decider's Perspective

The authors used a phenomenological research method to investigate the career decision‐making experiences of 17 employed adults. Thematic results from interview data analysis were organized within 3 overarching themes: decisions centered on relational life, decisions centered on personal meaning, and decisions centered on economic realities. Study results supported and extended contentions that career decisions are embedded in relational life and have contextual meaning. Belonging and the potential for meaningful engagement were integral to career decisions. Implications for the role of career counselors and career counseling are discussed. Recommendations for counseling that facilitates the consideration of belonging and personal meaning in career decisions are offered.     

Teaching Sociology in Community College: Balancing Ideals with Institutional Constraints

Many professionals experience conflict between personal ideals about the meaning and importance of their work, and the structural limitations of the workplace. This conflict presents professionals with the challenge of how to hold true to their ideals within a non-supportive or even hostile environment. In this paper, I describe my experiences balancing my ideals about teaching, learning, and the purpose of a college education with the institutional constraints of a community college. There are three main sections in this paper. First is a discussion of the reasons I chose a career in community college teaching. The second section focuses on the institutional constraints I have encountered over the first 5 years of my career. In the third section, I explain how I have attempted to balance my ideals with the structural limitations of the college where I teach. Throughout the paper, I blend personal narrative with the relevant literature. In doing so, I intend to use my personal experience as a lens for discussing the challenges and possibilities that characterize community college teaching in general.     

Observing the Rites of Autonomy,Distancing the Prospects for ‘The Spiritual’

We are acculturated to believe each healthy person is a firmly bordered republic, a kind of self‐sufficient island. With its associated values entitlement and self‐determination, this assumption has become an internalised schema within which individuals — and many therapists — evaluate personal competence and adjustment. Whilst acknowledging that an expectation of autonomy might encourage ambition and empowerment, the injunction ‘be autonomous’ may also bring with it a number of unintended consequences. These include the promotion of experiences of isolation and incompleteness, experiences that many find uncomfortable and which may come to be associated with an emerging desire for what might be called ‘the spiritual’. A question then arises: might an expectation of personal autonomy on the one hand prompt a yearning for spiritual experience yet, on the other, diminish the prospects of such an experience by marginalising the possibilities of personal and interpersonal connectedness? After developing this argument, I offer preliminary ideas to assist practitioners to envisage how the ‘secularly spiritual’ might be imagined and invoked within everyday therapeutic practice.     

Intimate circuits: modernity,migration and marriage among post‐Soviet women in Turkey

The study of migration too often ignores the ways that labour migrants' emotional entanglements and complicated personal relationships factor into their experiences of being people on the move. In examining post‐Soviet migrant women's relationships with Turkish men and the ways these are regulated in Turkey, in this article I consider how intimate practices of marriage and performances of ‘love’ have emerged as key aspects of transnational mobility. These intimate practices both enable long‐term transnational circuits between post‐Soviet homelands and Turkey, and attest to the way global capitalism is redefining personal lives.     

Spiralling Up or Spinning Out: A Guide for Reflecting on Action Research Practice

This paper offers a theoretical ‘action research spiral’ model to guide reflection on the dual client focus of action research. While theoretically exploring and highlighting the tensions and dilemmas created by this dual client focus, this paper will argue for a greater degree of reflection on action research practice and utilize vignettes from action research cases to illustrate those reflective processes. It is concluded that further discussion and reflection on the process of action research is an important component of social science’s contribution to phronetic knowledge.

I saw the University as helping us to reflect on what we are doing—they are the expert reflectors. This is particularly what I saw as X’s role. Sometimes his interjections go above their heads and his ‘nine words or less’ statements need to have some explanation, and I should feed this back to him. I also see the University as playing a visionary role, helping to show us new things about what is possible. I don’t see the University as helping to pull the team together—that is when it gets confusing. They are observing us, they are looking at us as the rats, and when they see something that they think needs to be addressed, they can feed this back to us—and this is where teaching and formal learning comes in. This is a difficult role for the University. I can see some of the University people just squirming—you can see it in their face that they want to intervene. They know something about what we are doing but are not imparting the knowledge. This can piss people off. They are withholding what they know and not helping. But it can also piss people off if they come in too early and tell us what is going on and what to do and not let us wallow around for a while, and learn. This is what I see as a major problem for the University. As you observe us, at what point do you reflect the learning and feedback, and yet not prostitute the learning or dirty the data. …We are the rats, the factory is your laboratory. But when we are looking at the role of the University, you are the rats. (Plant Manager and Industry Sponsor of an Action Research Project, 2000)     

THE STUDY OF IDENTITY AS CULTURAL, INSTITUTIONAL, ORGANIZATIONAL, AND PERSONAL NARRATIVES: Theoretical and Empirical Integrations

I argue that the study of narrative identity would benefit from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reflexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients' personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do.     

Cybersex: Outercourse and the Enselfment of the Body

The increased popularity of the Internet invites the possibility of repackaging familiar activities in a new medium. Sex is one such activity—an age‐old topic with a new cybertwist. The new technologies of computer‐mediated communication allow us to examine the nature of human interaction in a uniquely disembodied environment that potentially transforms the nature of self, body, and situation. Sex—fundamentally a bodily activity—provides an ideal situation for examining these kinds of potential transformations. In the disembodied context of on‐line interaction both bodies and selves are fluid symbolic constructs emergent in communication and are defined by sociocultural standards. Situations such as these are suggestive of issues related to contemporary transgressions of the empirical shell of the body, potentially reshaping body‐to‐self‐to‐social‐world relationships.     

The representation of women and girls of color in United States crime news

There is a large body of literature examining the media portrayals of white females as both victims and offenders in crime news, but very little is known about how minority females—including Black, Latina, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Asian women and girls—are portrayed in these roles. In this literature review, I discuss general stereotypes surrounding women of color and their depictions within crime news stories as both victims and offenders. An examination of crime news media portrayals of minority females reveals that outdated and harmful stereotypes provide media personnel frames with which to write their stories. The negative portrayals of minority women and girls—as both victims and offenders—serve to reinforce racist beliefs and affect how consumers view political issues.     

Women's status and global food security: An overview

Scholars are increasingly examining how gender interacts with food security, with specific attention given to women. This is not surprising, given that women make up 43% of the global agricultural labor force and are responsible for producing almost half of the global agricultural food supply. Since women tend to be disproportionately responsible for taking care of household activities, including the production, purchase, preparation, and allocation of food‐based resources—particularly in the developing world—there is a scholarly consensus that an improvement in women's status has a positive impact on nutritional outcomes. Current scholarship on gender and food security is thus broadly divided into relationships between food security and women's economic freedoms, legal opportunities, and both formal and informal education via improved knowledge of agricultural procedures. In this review, I draw attention to the role that sociologists can play in engaging these topics, and I specifically highlight the need to conduct more cross‐national and longitudinal analyses of women's status and food security. Finally, I point towards recent studies that assess the impacts of Information and Communication Technologies on food security, and suggest the need to explicate the role of gender within such processes.