“Having a family is the new normal”: Parenting in neoliberal academia during the COVID-19 pandemic

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has made explicit the burden of care shouldered by academic mothers, in addition to juggling their scholarly commitments. Although discussions are abundant on the impact of caring responsibilities on the careers of women academics, neoliberal academia continues to minimize such struggles. Despite the disruptions to family routines caused by the health crisis, academic institutions have expected academic mothers and fathers to continue undertaking their professional responsibilities at the same level as before, disregarding their parenting demands. This paper contributes to the research on parenthood in academia by looking at how, throughout the pandemic, academic parents have negotiated the tensions between parenthood and academic demands, and by investigating the strategies they use to confront neoliberal culture of academic performativity, even amid the health crisis. The paper engages with the “space invaders” concept used by Puwar (2004) to analyze the “hypervisibility” of academic mothers' and fathers' “bodies out of place” during the pandemic, and to investigate their “renegade acts” against the uncaring attitudes of their institutions. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study conducted during December 2020 and January 2021 among scholars affiliated to Portuguese academic institutions: 17 in-depth interviews conducted with women, and two mixed-gender focus groups. Our results research reveal how the experiences of academic mothers and fathers were not uniform during the pandemic. In addition, it shows how, despite their commitment to their academic responsibilities, these parents have crafted various resistance strategies to confront the institutional pressure to continue maintain their working routines, and instead positioning themselves as “more than just academics.”     

Adolescent Electronic Media Use: Instead of Doing What?

Adolescents like to watch TV and listen to the radio, even on school days, but their day contains, like for all other people, only 24 hours. What do those who use electronic media frequently neglect? Data from 14- and 16-year-old adolescents from 12 European countries and from the USA (EURONET sample) were analyzed (N = 3,250). The correlations between time spent using electronic media (EM) and 15 other daily activities were all negative, which is not surprising given the fact that the sum of all activities is bound to be 24 hours. We, therefore, calculated correlations between electronic media use and the proportions of each other activity within the remaining time. A clear pattern emerged. The method allowed us to identify “mandatory” activities that always have high priority, such as sleeping and attending school, and “optional” activities that enter into competition with electronic media use, including engaging in sports, playing music, leisure reading, and being with friends without media use. As to the mandatory activities, the correlations between media-using time and the proportions of remaining time were positive; relative to the optional activities, the correlations between media-using time and the proportions of remaining time were negative. While one might expect school homework to be regarded as mandatory, the correlation patterns identified it as optional. As to the average electronic media-using times, there were marked differences not only between the individual participants, but also between the countries. While Bulgarian adolescents spent an average of 2.37 hours of a regular school day using electronic media, French adolescents averaged only 1.72 hours.     

Behavioral evidence for framing effects in the resolution of the doctrinal paradox

The aggregation of individual sets of judgments over interconnected propositions can yield inconsistent collective sets of judgments, even when the individual sets of judgments are themselves consistent. A doctrinal paradox occurs when majority voting on a compound proposition (such as a conjunction or disjunction) yields a different result than majority voting on each of the elements of the proposition. For example, when most individuals accept proposition X; most individuals accept proposition Y ; but only a minority of individuals accept the compound proposition ‘X and Y’. Conducting two elemental votes would lead to accept X and Y , but conducting one compound vote would lead to reject X and Y . In such a situation, do people manifest a stable preference as to which voting procedure should be applied? This research reports the results of two behavioral experiments using a within-participant design, which show that procedural preferences can be upturned by framing either positively or negatively the set of judgments to be aggregated. This shift in procedural preference leads to large swings in the final collective judgment endorsed by participants.     

Relational sociology,pragmatism, transactions and social fields

Starting from the idea that relational sociology has been founded on various and incompatible social ontologies, I argue that it is at risk of losing its raison d'être if we do not answer two fundamental practical and ontological questions: (1) Why do we need relational sociology? and (2) What do we study in relational sociology? In this respect, I propose a deep, transactional sociology partly and freely inspired by the work of J. Dewey which clearly detaches relational sociology from social determinism and co-determinism.     

Australia and the Global South: Knowledge and the Ambiguities of Place and Identity

Australia was settled as a colony of Britain from the 17th century, and its early history of violent occupation has gradually given way to a relatively peaceful, wealthy, multicultural society. As a post-colonial country, its people share characteristics with those of Britain, but, as a multicultural society, national identity is increasingly influenced by the cultures of many countries, from both the global North and South. In this paper, the question of Australia's placement as a country of the global North or South is explored. Considerations of geography, the economy, political regimes and national identity are the backdrop to an investigation of Australian scholarship and the attitudes of scholars to the inclusion of Australia as a country of the global South.     

Two Case Studies on Family Work with Eating Disorders and Body Image Issues

This article highlights the need for clinicians who work with eating disorders and body image problems to address the deeper family issues underlying these symptoms. The authors propose an eclectic approach including family systems, structural and experiential family therapy theory as a guide. The paper begins with an overview of family therapy theories currently used in the treatment of eating disorders, and goes into greater detail about the three theories highlighted in the eclectic model proposed. The authors present two cases with actual case dialogue, demonstrating how they used this composite model. This article has both theoretical and practical implications for clinicians working in the field.     

Securing Aquaculture‐Related Resources through Social Interaction in the Pampanga River Delta,Philippines: An Ethnogeographic Perspective on the Strengths and Pitfalls of Social Capital

Social relationships play a pivotal role in agricultural systems because they influence the economic behavior of stakeholders, but sociological studies aimed at understanding these links have until now not focused much on aquaculture. Here we examine how social capital among communities of the Pampanga River delta in the Philippines plays out in the conduct of aquatic livestock breeding, harvesting, and trading, and how it either facilitates or restrains the transformation of individual livelihoods. Relying on a mixed method of field surveys, participant observation, and questionnaires, we construct an ethnographic portrayal of how the main categories of stakeholder involved in aquaculture (from livestock producers to traders via landless gleaners) elaborate strategies to access or control aquaculture‐related resources. We show that the bonding and bridging efforts to construct social capital are strongly embedded in the cultural matrix, and that they are limited by environmental constraints (ecosystem carrying capacity, exposure to natural hazards) and shaped by historical legacies. The resulting pattern of social interactions is overall successful at buffering the negative impact of external forcing factors such as environmental hazards and global market crashes, but we also show how the different outcomes of social exchange are nonetheless unevenly distributed across the spectrum of stakeholders.     

Asymptotic behaviour of binned kernel density estimators for locally non-stationary random fields

We investigate the asymptotic behaviour of binned kernel density estimators for dependent and locally non-stationary random fields converging to stationary random fields. We focus on the study of the bias and the asymptotic normality of the estimators. A simulation experiment conducted shows that both the kernel density estimator and the binned kernel density estimator have the same behavior and both estimate accurately the true density when the number of fields increases. We apply our results to the 2002 incidence rates of tuberculosis in the departments of France.