Breaking Out of Academic Isolation: The Media Odyssey of a Sociologist

The professional development of sociologists involves specialized training through which we acquire and apply numerous skills. However, it is unlikely that our professional socialization includes training in how to inform the public about sociological knowledge and research through media involvement. As a sociologist who did not receive such training and was not prepared for the enormous unanticipated media and public interest given to my research topic, I provide a personal account of my unexpected metamorphosis into a media self and my experiences working with the media. I describe the nature of my professional and media obscurity, provide an overview of my initiation into media culture, and explore a self-transformation process that became necessary to manage the responsibilities associated with the media-assigned role of expert. I identify and examine the lessons I learned through extensive media involvement and the emergent realities of this involvement. Based on my experiences and resulting awareness of media culture, I offer to the discipline some suggestions and guidelines for media involvement and advocate for media training.     

"Give Me Peace,Give Me Peace,Give Me Peace": Using Film as a Tool for the Study of Comparative Religious Experience

The purpose of this article is to explore the value of film for illustrating two contrasting views of the religious experience. Using two of my favorite films (Pi and The Apostle), I outline the contemplative and the existential visions of the religious experience, and I proceed to show how I have used these films in my courses. Centering predominately on the Jewish and Christian traditions, figures mentioned throughout include Soren Kierkegaard, Meister Eckhart, and Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav.     

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.     

Marginalized to double marginalized: My mutational intersectionality between the East and the West

Intersectionality allows better understanding of the differences between individuals' experiences. In this article, I use intersectionality to explore how my lived experience of marginalization is different from one context to another. I reflect on how the nature of intersectionality and the intensity of oppression are altered by context. Grounded in a brief reflection of my fragmented experience in two different contexts, I explore how my identities and their intersection “mutate” from the Egyptian context to the UK context. Then, I reflect on how the intensity of oppression changed with this alteration in my intersectionality. In contextualizing my intersectional experience, first I problematize viewing intersectionality as a fixed acontextual ontology. Second, as a student immigrant and racialized minority in the United Kingdom, I seek to extend intersectionality and move beyond the traditional categories of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality to include precarity as a pivotal social category that amplifies the intensity of oppression and marginalization, especially when intersected with race and gender. Finally, in sharing my reflection as a Middle Eastern woman, I contribute my unique experiences into the conversation, and a voice that has been muted, invisibled, marginalized, and excluded from the literature.     

‘It's a macho thing,innit?’ Exploring the effects of masculinity on career choice and development

Through the analysis of qualitative data of the life stories of ten male returners to further education this article aims to support and develop some of the ideas presented in Gender, Work & Organization by both Simpson in 2005 and Lupton in 2006 on men in non‐traditional occupations. I employ the notion of multiple masculinities to understand my cohort's careers and demonstrate that over time early socialization can be overcome so that some men can make non‐stereotypical career decisions later in life. In offering an explanation as to why this might be the case, I argue that in late modernity some men can actively choose non‐traditional occupations, albeit within a gendered and classed labour market. I also offer insights into male identity in late modernity.     

Boundary oscillations: Epistemological and genre transformation during the 'method' of thesis writing

In this article I offer an account of some of the 'boundary oscillations' I experienced during the writing of my doctoral thesis, and attempt to illustrate my personal struggle with the presentation of qualitative data. This struggle evolved through my search for an appropriate style to [re]present both voice and experience as a text, resulting in my turning towards genres alternative to those normally adopted in social science research. And it was during that process that I experienced both change and conflict in my epistemological position, as I moved from positivism, through postpositivism and towards postmodernism.     

Gender-as-Knowledge and AIDS in Africa: A Cautionary Tale

This article is based on my experience with translating research about AIDS, masculinity and risk in Malawi into the public sphere. My work was misinterpreted as demonstrating that African men want to get AIDS because they think it reaffirms their masculinity. I use the concept of gender-as-knowledge to organize my analysis of this response. I argue that media representations of AIDS in 21st century Africa are filtered through a centuries-old prism of racialized gender knowledge, in which African men are presumed to be irrational, sexually voracious, and uninhibited. This article concludes with cautions about the complexities of translating social research into the public sphere.     

Thinking of age: Personal reflections on critical gerontology

This essay is a reflection on how personal experience has inspired and shaped my ideas about critical gerontology. It is a writing from the inside about the outside world of intellectual discovery, apart from the typical narratives about career and research. I take this opportunity to explore the life of thought through my own life, and conclude that our ideas about aging are bred in those places where humor, tragedy, conflict, passion and sympathy make it imperative that we ask the questions we do as critical thinkers.     

Zen and the art of aut-ethnography: a tribute to Robert M. Pirsig

With the passing of Robert M. Pirsig, I felt that it was an appropriate time to write a tribute to his work and the influence it has had on my own theorising in regard to autistic ways of being. This reflection utilises the concept of an ‘aut-ethnography’ to examine passages that I had highlighted word by word when I first read Pirsig’s book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These fragments contain links to a number of theoretical ‘lines of flight’ within my own work and that of others, from his concepts of dynamic ‘quality’ to his discussion on the tension between scientific method and lived experience.     

But it’s not all about the sex: mothering,normalisation and young learning disabled people

This paper is about mothering, young learning disabled people, their sexualised and relationship lives and normalisation – not through the lens of the disabled person, but via a mothers perspective and theoretical discussion. As a mother who has a learning disabled daughter, a feminist and an academic my own mothering experience, my Ph.D. research and social theory are woven throughout this paper with the intention of opening up debate about sex, intimacy and normalisation, and how these impact upon young learning disabled people. I suggest that the relationship between sex, reproduction, intimacy and intellectual impairment and a project to decipher what it means to be human in all its dirty glory are also part of the discourse that needs to be discussed experientially and theoretically. So much so that the messy world within which we all live can be variously and differently constructed.     

Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

In this paper, I present an autoethnographic story about my experiences of expressing breast milk at a Dutch university department. My story illustrates how interrelated and conflicting discourses about gender, motherhood, breastfeeding, embodiment and professionalism raised issues about (in)visibility, embodied control, spatiality and discipline of my body and shaped my experience as a newly maternal employee. This paper thus aims to include bodies and embodied experiences in organization studies and highlights the need to consider spatiality as an important topic of research. I address these issues in my writing and use insights from feminist poststructuralism to show how the experiences I describe are part of a larger cultural framework of power structures that produce the ‘leaky’ maternal body as the Other, subject to (self-)discipline and marginalization. I hope my story inspires reflexivity and empathic understanding of the complex reality of experiences related to expressing breast milk in the workplace.     

Studying one's own in the Middle East: Negotiating gender and self-other dynamics in the field

This article uses examples of the experience I had in the field as an indigenous researcher in Turkey in order to problematize claims to knowledge. I contend that for researchers who are positioned as relative “insiders,” whether indigenous or bicultural, such aspects of the researcher identity as gender, class, professional and relationship status are made especially salient, perhaps even more so in Middle Eastern contexts. I also argue that while indigenous status can be both empowering and restricting, the insider/outsider position can be employed as a useful vantage point for “rethinking the familiar.” I discuss with examples how this position informed my researcher role and my perspective on what is traditional.     

Conflict and compliance: Christianity and the occult in horticultural exporting

The introduction of export horticulture in Meru District, Kenya, brought about disadvantageous effects on female farmers. Their workload increased while their earnings did not. Women reacted by turning to Christianity for support, and resorted to traditional witchcraft to regain control. In this article, Christianity and witchcraft are presented as ways of expressing discontent with the prevailing social norms, and as means to reclaim autonomy and security within their households. Since Kenyan women are entailed to meet the standards of being a good Christian wife, in which women are submissive to their husbands, the church became a means of escaping the confinements of their marriage. In Meru, Christian conversion offers a means of coping with life and an opportunity to interact with other women who share the same experience. Another strategy adopted by women is witchcraft, a traditional relic wherein women give "potions" to their husbands to induce psychosis and eventually death, which would then leave control of the household to the woman. In conclusion, the case presented here demonstrates how failure to recognize cultural dynamics leads to gender inequity and worsens women's well being, as well as men's security.     

The (in)security of gender in Afghanistan’s peacebuilding project: hybridity and affect

In this article I draw on a feminist approach to hybridity to explore interview data and observations from my field research in Afghanistan. I argue that there is a logic of masculinist protection influencing the affective environment of the peacebuilding project there. The combination of a perceived patriarchal context in Afghanistan and security routines protecting civilian internationals (and Afghan elites), which rely on hypermasculine signifiers, help to create and perpetuate the conditions in which the female (for both internationals and Afghans) is marked with insecurity. I point to hybridity between the foreign and female experience, as well as resistance and reflexivity within my research. Throughout I explore fragments of power hierarchies that cut through the meaning of gender, rendering the female state a disempowering one, always referenced in some uncertain, hybrid way as protected or in need of protection.     

COMMENTARY (12 YEARS ON) ON ‘THE CONTRIBUTION OF OBSERVATION TRAINING TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN SOCIAL WORK’ BY JUDITH TROWELL AND GILLIAN MILES

This article aims to stimulate discussion about relationships between the lives of professionals and of service users. The idea is that when parallels are explored and developed, power dynamics between professionals and social workers are reduced, the quality of interaction and work with service users can be improved, and professionals can also be helped in overcoming difficulties in their own lives. I start with an outline of my own personal background and highlight my development throughout, including my emerging identity as a Buddhist. I discuss a case study involving ‘Sally’ and her family and our work together while I was a social work assistant in a Children and Family's team. I try to show the interconnections between the different difficulties that we faced and how that informed my work. I look at some of the benefits, pitfalls and boundaries of working from the point of view that service user and professional are both working to overcome their problems. I also interweave interactions I had at the time with Carlos, a drug user friend in a crisis and the impact he had on me. Because I include my own situation I have called this article a ‘case experience’.

Throughout I refer to Buddhist and psychoanalytic thinking and particularly to agreement between the two around ideas that inner‐resistance is the main barrier to personal evolution. I argue that faith is the key to unlocking resistance, and that faith should be understood as the development of a belief within people that they are able to progress rather than be destroyed in the face of inevitable problems.     

‘Lucifer Is Behind Me’: The Diabolisation of Oksapmin Witchcraft as Negative Cosmological Integration

This paper examines the diabolisation of Oksapmin tamam (here glossed as ‘witchcraft’) as an example of negative cosmological integration. The article takes as its point of departure Robbins's model of cultural syncretism developed in a series of recent papers, wherein diabolisation occurs as people insert those aspects of their indigenous religion that do not contravene the Christian God's paramount creative power into the Christian cosmos as representatives of the Devil. Through my own discussion of the diabolisation of Oksapmin witchcraft, I build upon the model in three main ways. First, I draw attention to the role of the mission in providing and enforcing these negative moral terms of reference. Second, the article highlights that in cases of negative cosmological integration, whether within or outside the frame of Pentecostalist Christianity, syncretic melding and mixing may occur, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary. Finally, I point out that the subordination of indigenous religious realities within the Christian cosmos does not necessarily entail their restriction or reduction of expression, as Robbins shows for the Urapmin nature spirits known as motobil. Indeed, in the case of witchcraft, integration into the Christian cosmos and related complexes of deliverance may actually serve to intensify and amplify their expression.     

Growing Up in the Old Left: An Intergenerational Tale of Silence and Terror

This essay explores the intergenerational transmission of trauma that arises from political repression. Using mine and my family’s experiences of the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, I explore the psychic effects of the political terror and silencing that accompanied my growing up as a Red Diaper Baby and the profound internal shifts that occur when the social surround becomes a place of danger. I look at my family’s experience in the left during the 1950s and I consider the fear that couldn’t be registered, our unexpressed grief and loss, and the multiple contradictions against which our silence defended. Viewing my personal history through a psychoanalytic lens (e.g., Freud, Gerson, Butler, Puget), and considering a clinical example, I explore the ways the social surround of state-imposed terror during the 1950s was elaborated internally from my earliest years, shaping and shaped by my interpersonal experience and intrapsychic fantasy. I also consider the pre-McCarthy era family history that gave nuance to our experience in the 1950s and the emergence in my clinical work of my history of having been terrorized and silenced by the state. Finally, I briefly reflect on the interweaving of political repression and gendered silence.     

LGBT Religious Activism: Predicting State Variations in the Number of Metropolitan Community Churches, 1974–2000

Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) critique the emphasis movement scholars place upon activism within the formal political sphere, proposing, instead, a multi‐institutional approach which argues that protest can occur within any social institution and that the desired outcomes of activism can include cultural outcomes. The goal of this article is to expand the range of social movement targets studied through an examination of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activism within the institution of religion. In the United States, religion, particularly Christianity, is used as the primary justification for defining same‐sex sexuality as undesirable and denying LGBT individuals full citizenship. The LGBT community challenges these traditional Christian definitions of same‐sex sexuality in numerous ways, including through the creation of LGBT‐affirming congregations. I examine the development and spread of congregations affiliated with the United Federation of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), an LGBT‐affirmative denomination, across all 50 states from 1974 to 2000. Drawing upon organizational ecology, resource mobilization, political opportunity, and theories of religious switching, I find that the distribution of UFMCC congregations challenges the usefulness of traditional explanations for activism.     

Celiac disease in North America: the disabling experience

Diagnosed as having celiac disease during my final year of undergraduate studies at McGill University, in the spring of 2005, my identity and lifestyle have undergone a transformative process. In this article I examine my experience of having celiac disease post-diagnosis, using the social model of disability framework. I examine the barriers that persons having celiac disease experience, both generally and personally. At the general level I explore the parallels between the experience of having celiac disease and the experience of being disabled: culturally, environmentally and financially. At the personal level I recount the emotional experience of being disabled.