Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist Understanding of Political Engagement

Drawing data from works of political non-fiction that help to reveal the moral and sensual underpinnings of political practice, this paper seeks to adumbrate a sensualist understanding of political engagement. After beginning with a brief discussion of Weber’s seminal essay “Politics as a Vocation,” I then construct an ideal type of political passion with which to highlight the inherent shortcomings that plague traditional explanations of political action. My argument is that these approaches are all vitiated by their reliance on Chinese-box epistemology. I go on to suggest that in order to obtain a genuinely sociological account of political engagement, one must develop methods that are true to the experiential specifics of politics while recognizing the conditions that shape the possibility of those very experiences.

Ethics and social media: Implications for sociolinguistics in the networked public1

As a popular agora for writing identity into being, the networked public of social media sites presents exciting and unprecedented possibilities for sociolinguistic research. At the same time, these sites raise a wealth of unfamiliar methodological and ethical issues, and debate concerning appropriate ethical measures for research targeting online discourse communities is emergent. One of the most pressing debates concerns the visibility of online interaction (i.e. its locus between the public and private ends of the continuum). Although they exist freely online, networked publics are not public forums. They are governed by both personal and communal norms, and they are networked. This combination of factors gives rise to unique ethical challenges, particularly in the case of Facebook, an accessible and data‐rich, yet problematic, research site. This paper reviews the ethical difficulties presented by Facebook, and presents a framework for ethnographic sociolinguistic research that uses this site as a source of data. En tant qu’espace public privilégié pour la création de l’identitéà travers l’écriture, le public ?réseauté? (interconnecté) des sites des médias sociaux présente des possibilités prometteuses et sans précédent pour la recherché en sociolinguistique. Cependant, ces sites soulèvent de nombreuses questions méthodologiques et éthiques qui sont nouvelles, d’où l’émergence de discussions portant sur les mesures éthiques appropriées pour la recherche qui vise les communautés discursives en ligne. Un des débats concerne la visibilité de l’interaction en ligne (c.‐à‐d. sa place entre les extrémités privée et publique du continuum). Bien qu’ils existent de façon libre en ligne, les réseaux publics ne sont pas des forums publics. Ils sont gouvernés à la fois par des normes personnelles et communautaires, et ils sont interconnectés. Cette combinaison de facteurs donne naissance à des défis éthiques uniques, en particulier dans le cas de Facebook, un site de recherche accessible et riche en données, mais problématique. Cet article passe en revue les difficultés éthiques que Facebook présente, et offre un cadre de travail pour la recherche sociolinguistique ethnographique utilisant ce site comme source de données. [French]     

Downloading culture: community building in a decentralized file-sharing collective

File-sharing collectives have significantly disrupted models of digital media distribution since their emergence and widespread popularization in the late 1990s. This study investigates how semi-anonymous and decentralized collectives construct their communities of practice. Conducting a case study of a private torrenting community, data were gathered via participant observation, interviews, and online postings (i.e., blogs and forums). Findings challenged dominant notions of opportunism, selfishness and task-oriented individualism advanced by Human–Computer Interaction scholars. Three key constructs were identified in private torrent community building: boundary construction, membership maintenance, and a sense of belonging and solidarity. Findings illustrate how a file-sharing community cultivates the formation of prosocial digital peers, fosters an affective approach to peer-to-peer collectives, and ultimately forges a downloading virtuoso community. This sisyphean, goal-oriented community seeks to create a comprehensive archive of media artifacts independent of and in opposition to dominant corporate platforms. The community demonstrates a downloading culture inspired by technological design, yet driven by trust and solidarity.     

“Parent Advocacy” as an Ideological Code: LGBTQ Parents Engage with Disability Services

What does the work that LGBTQ parents do to find resources for their disabled children reveal about the social organization of services? This article presents findings from an institutional ethnography study based on interviews with 15 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) parents and six key community informants in Toronto, Canada. The analysis focused on the work parents did to engage with disability service systems on behalf of their children, and the ways in which families’ social privilege and/or marginalization affected their experiences. Particular attention was paid to the ways in which “parent advocacy” was taken up, responded to, and critiqued in these interviews. “Parent advocacy” was found to operate as what Dorothy Smith has called an “ideological code” (Smith 1999), offloading systemic responsibilities onto parents, shielding inequities, and promoting individualized competition between service users. This study suggests that the systemic organization that makes “parent advocacy” necessary also renders parents’ relative privilege or marginality central to what their children receive.     

Exactness and precision

Policy Delphi methods have not received the level of methodological scrutiny evidenced by more established techniques. This paper provides an examination of the potential for study participants to opt in/opt out of consecutive Delphi rounds. The literature proposes that this is a positive feature of the approach but evidence to support this position is lacking. This paper provides a brief review of the Policy Delphi method and than presents details of participation patterns in a study where the opt‐in/opt‐out option was available. Findings showed that participants exercised the option of opting in/opting out of different Delphi rounds. Although only 20.6% of the original participants completed all three Delphi rounds, the response rate (regardless of participants’ involvement in previous rounds) across all three Delphi rounds held fairly consistent at around 40%. These findings are significant as they relate to the need for an expanded repertoire of research tools that can address the complex, non‐linear questions emerging in post‐modern society.     

A Microcomputer Management of Information System for Community-Based AIDS Prevention Ethnographic Team Research

Abstract

Ethnographers working on community-based intervention projects increasingly face the task of collecting and analyzing large amounts of qualitative data. In addition, these data sometimes must be simultaneously gathered across diverse populations and at multiple locations. A cost-effective approach that addresses the difficulties in conducting this type of qualitative research is the use of an ethnographic team. Yet, the team concept requires sophisticated strategies for managing large volumes of unstructured textbased data. This article documents how the Houston Nalional AlDS Demonstration Research (NADR) project configured specific basic microcomputer technologesto asslst and enhance the management of ethnographic team research. Specifically, this system was a valuable and affordable tool to increase the speed, efficiency and rigor of data collection and analysis.     

Suburban Fear,Media and Gated Communities in Durban,South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the queer writings of Boston-born Edward Perry warren (1860–1928) and the spaces of his Lewes House, East Sussex, that formed the basis of his Uranian ideal. warren, along with his personal secretary (aka lover), John Marshall, amassed an impressive collection of mainly antiquities, most of which helped to form the Boston Museum of Fine Art. At Lewes House warren conceived a community of younger, liked-minded men, many of whom benefited directly from his financial generosity and guidance. For the owner of the house education and intellectual pursuits were the guiding principles behind what was ultimately an ancient-Greek inspired homosocial community. Lewes House was austere and coded as a space for both his much celebrated collection and community, each being an extension of the other. In his three-volume The Defence of Uranian Love (1928), written under the pseudonym of Arthur Lyon Raile, warren falls within a specific literary tradition of queer authors at the end of the nineteenth century who turned back to ancient Greece as a preferred exemplary society in which an older male figure took a younger male under his tutelage and protection, guiding him to his adult life. An important missing component of the Greek ideal that men like warren espoused and wrote about was the space in which this ideal could be performed, worked through, and aestheticized.     

Patterns of linguistic variation among Glaswegian adolescent males1

This article presents the results of an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic investigation of Glaswegian Vernacular and examines the intersection between language and identity using data collected from a group of working‐class adolescent males, over the course of three years, from a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, called Banister Academy. Through the fine‐grained acoustic analysis of the phonetic variable cat (equivalent to the trap/bath/palm set, Johnston 1997 ), coupled with ethnographic observations, this article shows how patterns of variation are related to Community of Practice membership, how the members of the Communities of Practice in Banister Academy use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another, and how certain patterns of variation acquire social meaning within the peer‐group. This article contributes to the under‐researched area of adolescent male language use and offers one of the first ethnographically supported accounts of linguistic variation in Glasgow.     

St. Clair Drake,the Chicago School,and the Emergence of a New Urban Black Perspective

St. Clair Drake was responsible for a major shift in the way urban sociologists studied cities. While educated by Chicago school scholars in sociology and anthropology, such as Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Drake was one of many Black doctoral students who veered from the dominant perspective of his White teachers on race. His skills in ethnographic research were indebted not only to Park and Burgess, but also to the work of Black scholars who came before him, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. His unique personal approach to cities and their racial problems transitioned into a more global focus on the Black diaspora, colonialism and the history of African people, and cultures which connected him to a world of social action.