Collective Memory and Collective Fear: How South Africans Use the Past to Explain Crime

The past is a resource that individuals can draw upon as they try to make sense of the world around them, and scholars have long assumed that individuals internalize and utilize collective memories in their daily lives. Yet capturing and analyzing the deployment of collective memory has proven elusive. This paper offers a novel approach for tapping whether, and how, individuals selectively draw on their collective pasts to explain the present. Analyzing interviews with young South African managers and professionals, this paper demonstrates racial variation in how respondents organically introduce the country’s apartheid past as an explanans for current crime, and suggests how these differences are related to divergent levels of commitment by blacks and whites to the South African nation-building project. In so doing, the paper offers a method for examining how individuals selectively use the past to construct, justify, and explain their present-day attitudes and behaviors. The study further highlights the importance of attending not only to what people remember, but also to how they think through and with collective representations of the past.     

Transvlogs: online communication tools for transformative agency and development

This paper examines how 21 transgender individuals used YouTube transvlogs to co-create their own transformative agency. Drawing on a social justice framework, I conduct narrative content analysis to explore how a historically marginalized population enacted their own transformative development without researcher intervention. I suggest that by questioning the status quo, explicating and envisioning new activity patterns, and committing to concrete online and offline actions, transvloggers develop themselves and their community in transformative ways. Vloggers’ resistance and pursuit of new developmental pathways illustrate the power of individuals to design their own technological transformative systems even amidst challenging circumstances.     

A Quantitative Examination of Identity Integration in Gay,Lesbian, and Bisexual People of Faith

Much of the religious/spiritual development of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals (GLBs) has focused on experiences of conflict and distress, providing little insight into how these identities can be integrated. The present study explored the religious and spiritual lives of GLBs with a specific focus on the integration of these identities. We conducted a retrospective secondary data analysis of 750 GLB individuals from the Northern California Health Study to quantitatively assess sexual orientation and religion/spirituality integration using hierarchical cluster analysis. Resulting MANCOVA analyses of the five revealed groupings (integrated, gay identity struggle, anti-religious/spiritual, secular, and low gay salience) present numerous statistically significant differences between these integration clusters and a variety of dependent variables including measures of demographics, religiosity/spirituality, gay identity, and multiple mental health outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings while also making suggestions for future research.     

Marital Outcomes and Consideration of Divorce Among Orthodox Jews After Signing a Religious Prenuptial Agreement to Facilitate Future Divorce

This study examined marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, and consideration of divorce among Orthodox Jews in North America (N = 2,652). These marital outcomes were compared for individuals who signed or did not sign a religious prenuptial agreement that facilitates a woman’s future ability to receive a religious divorce from her husband. Results indicated a higher level of marital satisfaction among those who signed the religious prenuptial agreement, and no significant difference in marital adjustment or tendency to consider divorce between groups of individuals who signed or did not sign the religious prenuptial agreement.     

谈契诃夫女性观之成因

契诃夫的女性观是逐步成型和成熟的.他来自下层社会,同情人民、同情女性是形成他的女性观的思想基础;他嫉恶如仇、刚直不阿、对社会罪恶和不公现象的不调和精神,光明磊落、谦虚谨慎、具有高度社会责任感的品格,是形成他的女性观的重要因素;而他所处的时代环境是形成他的女性观的深厚土壤.     

Clinicians’ Perspective of the Relational Processes for Family and Individual Development During the Mediation of Religious and Sexual Identity Disclosure

Although the psychological literature regarding gay men from religious families is continually expanding, it is also limited in that few studies focus on the use of therapy in the negotiation of the interrelated systems of religion, sexuality, and family. Utilizing a cultural historical activity theory-based process of analysis, this study focuses on the narratives of 12 clinicians discussing 230 conflicts and how those conflicts are mediated in both productive (e.g., seeking secular support) and unproductive ways (e.g., bringing one’s son to an exorcist) by gay men and their religious families independent of and at the advice of their therapists.     

Controlling for Consensus: Commemorating Apartheid in South Africa

According to the literature, commemorations of difficult pasts can be categorized into two main types, fragmented and multivocal—both of which serve to express, if not to enhance, social conflicts. Our analysis of the first apartheid museum in South Africa, however, points to a commemorative type that aims at agreement, not through disagreement and debate but through overarching consensus. That consensus is constructed through a large degree of control in terms of the form and content of the mnemonic object. Having outlined the techniques used to control for consensus, we briefly explore the social context of the commemorating society, which informed and enabled such a mnemonic construction.