Displaying Gender: Transgender People's Strategies in Everyday Life

Drawing upon data from in‐depth interviews with transgender people in Portugal and in the United Kingdom, this article critically reflects upon different ways through which transgender people recreate their gender displays, particularly in terms of gender embodiment and aesthetics, in order to navigate their everyday lives. I focus on four strategies of articulating gender displays with one's own gender subjectivities: “blending in,” “masking,” “naturalizing,” and “subverting.” These strategies are not exclusive of one another. They are used differently throughout the participants' own lives in accordance to the social contexts they were in.     

iDecide: supporting inclusive decision-making in European schools

iDecide is a KA3 - Support for policy reform project with partners from public and private sectors- from Cyprus, Romania, Greece, Ireland and Portugal. iDecide was conceptualised with the aim of supporting school leaders and teachers in their efforts marginalised groups, and to support their learning in their everyday decision-making. The iDecide toolkit supports the decision-making processes that the majority of schools face every day in all aspects of school life (visits and excursions, school projects, parental involvement, school canteen, homework, students’ council etc). The iDecide toolkit has the capacity to provide teachers and school leaders with practical guidelines for these common decisions in straightforward, simple language. It also gives school leaders the opportunity to retrieve pupils’ and parents' opinions through online polls and forum discussions. This short paper describes the iDecide toolkit functions.     

Was Cicourel’s critique in Methods and Measurement in Sociology too radical?

This article is a contribution to a mini symposium on the 50th anniversary of the publication of A V Cicourel’s Method and Measurement in Sociology (1964). The central theme of the book is reviewed – the problem of the relationship between everyday language and cultural meanings, and the language of measurement in social research – and the lack of an adequate ontology of social actors is identified as being the cause of the problem. The solution offered by Alfred Schütz – that social scientific language should be derived from everyday language – is discussed and it is argued that this was probably too radical at the time the book was published, and is still generally neglected in the social sciences.     

Ethical living: relinking ethics and consumption through care in Chile and Brazil

Mainstream conceptualizations of ‘ethical consumption’ equate the notion with conscious, individual, market‐mediated choices motivated by ethical or political aims that transcend ordinary concerns. Drawing on recent sociology and anthropology of consumption literature on the links between ordinary ethics and ethical consumption, this article discusses some of the limitations of this conceptualization. Using data from 32 focus groups conducted in Chile and Brazil, we propose a conceptualization of ethical consumption that does not centre on individual, market‐mediated choices but understands it at the level of practical outcomes, which we refer to as different forms of ‘ethical living’. To do that, we argue, we need to depart from the deontological understanding of ethics that underpins mainstream approaches to ethical consumption and adopt a more consequentialist view focusing on ethical outcomes. We develop these points through describing one particular ordinary moral regime that seemed to be predominant in participants’ accounts of ethics and consumption in both Chile and Brazil: one that links consumption and ethics through care. We show that the moral regime of care leads to ‘ethical outcomes’, such as energy saving or limiting overconsumption, yet contrary to the mainstream view of ethical consumption emphasizing politicized choice expressed through markets, these result from following ordinary ethics, often through routines of practices.     

Becoming cosmopolitan: encountering difference in a city of mobile labour

ABSTRACT

Many who move countries today do so for work, and labour mobility – both temporary and permanent – is the mechanism by which countless people (both movers and stayers) come into contact with cultural difference. The domain of mobile labour is thus an important context through which to consider the transformative possibilities of encounters with racial and cultural difference. Situated within debates on everyday multi-culture and vernacular cosmopolitanisms, this essay considers the question of intercultural encounter at work in relation to the layered histories of race and variegated citizenships of mobile labour in Singapore. Exploring the micro-nature of cosmopolitan practices, the paper considers under what labour conditions might an outward-looking cosmopolitan sensibility and a convivial openness to otherness emerge among migrant workers, as against a set of survival-based intercultural capacities. I reflect specifically upon two cases of ‘incongruous encounter’ in workplaces reliant on precariously employed migrant labour: a mainland Chinese man and a Filipina woman who, because of Singapore’s racialised system of work visas, find themselves working in South Asian restaurants in Singapore’s Little India. They both engage ‘cosmopolitan practices’, yet their sensibilities differ sharply. Their stories highlight how, in a place like Singapore, the ‘encounter’ needs to be understood within a regime of mobile labour, situated racial hierarchies, and a highly stratified system of work visas. I further suggest that situational factors such as the nature of work including its spatial and temporal qualities, the mixture of co-workers, and recognition relations with superiors all mattered in framing the affective atmospheres of encounter. In a context of forced encounter, I argue that learnt capacities to function and interact across difference should not necessarily be romanticised as a cosmopolitan sensibility.     

Mothering and everyday life during and in the aftermath of domestic violence among women with immigrant backgrounds in Norway

This paper focuses on how immigrant women experience and negotiate their everyday life with children prior to and after leaving a violent partner. Twenty‐three women staying at domestic violence and abuse shelters with their children were interviewed about their experiences with assistance services and their everyday life with their children. At the time of the interviews, most of the women were legally separated or divorced and were either living in or in touch daily with shelters. In this paper, we look at some of the challenges that women face when exposed to violence in a relationship that involves children. Being exposed to violence from a partner raises a number of economic, practical, and emotional concerns, both prior to and after leaving. For the mothers in our study, maintaining a regular routine is key to making the children feel safe in an unpredictable setting. For many, economic dependence on the partner is replaced with economic dependence on assistance services after leaving the partner. Services must recognize that providing help to mothers who have left a violent partner constitutes more than just practical support but is crucial for mothers' ability to re‐establish a predictable everyday life with their children.     

Responsibility,planning and risk management: moralizing everyday finance through financial education

The individualization, privatization and marketization of risk management represent a fundamental dimension of the financialization of everyday life. As individuals are required to engage with financial products and services as the main way of protecting themselves from risks and uncertainties, their economic welfare and security are construed as depending largely on their own financial decisions. Within this setting, the concept of financial literacy and accompanying practices of financial education have emerged as a prominent institutional field handling the formulation and communication of the attributes and dispositions that arguably constitute the proper financial actor. This article analyzes financial education programmes currently conducted by state agencies in Israel, examining the notions and principles they articulate when defining and explaining proper financial conduct. The study indicates that moral themes and categories occupy a salient place in the formulation of the character traits that constitute the desired literate financial actor. Notions of individual responsibility, planning ahead and rational risk management are presented not merely as instrumental resources, but as moral imperatives. Through these notions, the programmes moralize a broad array of everyday practices of personal finance such as saving, investing, borrowing and budget management, thereby connecting the sphere of financial matters to the domain of moral virtues. Offering a representation of particular modes of financial conduct as constitutive components of morally virtuous personhood, these practices imbue the financial field as a whole, especially its current generalized logic of individualized and marketized risk management, with moral meanings, hence contributing to the normalization and depoliticization of the financialization of everyday life.     

Living with dementia,interdependence and citizenship: narratives of everyday decision-making

This article argues that interdependent relationships are key in realising inclusion and citizenship for people living with dementia. We focus on decision-making as one aspect of everyday life which reflects opportunities and challenges associated with citizenship. Accounts of everyday decision-making from people living with dementia provide insight into strategies for negotiating responsibilities as they shifted with dementia. An inductive, secondary data analysis developed decision narratives from the data of 61 interviews conducted in the United Kingdom. The interviews were with 12 people with a diagnosis of dementia plus their nominated care-partner in a qualitative study which focused on information management and sense of self. The secondary data analysis identified strategies for inclusion, emphasising relational interdependency amidst challenges. The five-stage framework of an Ethic of Care positions this interdependency as a response to barriers to inclusion and citizenship. Interdependency, therefore, emerges as key to realising relational citizenship.     

以舆抗争：农民维权方式的新变化

进入新世纪以来,由土地开发、征地纠纷等引发的农民维权现象较为普遍,有些甚至升级为重大群体性事件,给人民生命财产造成了重大损失。面对这些冲突,农民维权方式先后经历了＂日常抵抗＂、＂依法抗争＂和＂以法抗争＂三种行为模式的演变。作为转型期农民维权的新方式,＂以舆抗争＂有其自己独特的产生原因和维权步骤,也有自身其正、负两方面的社会效应,需要全面把握。＂以舆抗争＂的出现并不会完全取代传统维权方式,而是会在特定的维权情境中以最优的效果和其他维权方式进行组合,成为今后一段时期内越来越常见的维权方式,更加有力地表达农民的权利诉求,实现权利的维护。     

刑法语言的向度

理解刑法是从刑法的语言开始的。但刑法的内涵不是仅仅通过阅读法条的字面就可以获得的。刑法条文的字面只是为发现刑法提供了进路。刑法的内涵是由刑法规范的目的、规范的语境及其意义脉络所决定的。理解刑法语言的向度,应该注意刑法语言与日常用语、私法语言以及刑法内部同一语词的关系。