Toward a sociology of global comparative placemaking

I call for a globally informed sociology of comparative placemaking that integrates historical and contemporary processes and includes the ephemeral, institutional, and personal. By placemaking, I am referring to the explicit or tacit cooperation among people to create, maintain, and give meaning to places in space through bodily occupation given differential resources and constraints. I review select place, space, and community-based literature about urban, Black, migrant, LGBTQ, and international populations to think about how we can build upon and integrate multiple theoretical, methodological, and epistemological insights to form an explicit placemaking research agenda. A US focus on neighborhoods contrasts with a comparative examination of global urban networks, social polarization, and transformation of the built environment in the interdisciplinary field of global urban studies (Ren, 2018). I argue for a placemaking research agenda that bridges insight from US Urban Sociology with Global Urban Studies to consider how various structures and actors constrain and facilitate place projects. With a globally reaching and comparatively informed sociology of placemaking, we can illuminate our multi-structured story of place and agency in context. We can answer questions about how and why we co-create and are simultaneously disciplined by the process of creation.     

Humor and satire in politics: Introducing cultural sociology to the field

The landscape of political humor and satire is changing rapidly, and it is becoming an increasingly relevant aspect of our culture. Although scholars have been actively trying to capture this change, majority of the existing frameworks for understanding humor and satire in politics still reduce these phenomena to mere genres or rhetoric tools. In addition, they provide insufficient accounts concerning the reception of humor and satire, and neglect to interpret and explain what they communicate. In the article, a general understanding of humor and satire outside of a political context, followed by an overview of studies discussing humor and satire in politics through their applications in social movements, as leadership tools, and through their manifestations in mass media has been presented. Lastly, a cultural sociological perspective to the field has been introduced. It has been argued that approaching humor and satire in politics through a structural hermeneutic method of the Strong Program will enable us to recognize and treat political humor and satire as autonomous and complex cultural systems which carry an internal power to move people.     

Land markets and migration trends in Tanzania: A qualitative‐quantitative analysis

While migration has been found to enhance welfare across a range of settings, most of the literature focuses on rural‐to‐urban migrant flows. Using a unique dataset from north‐western Tanzania, this article probes an important, yet overlooked, link between land markets and rural‐to‐rural migration. A mixed‐methods approach is used to discern how these two forces are intertwined in village life. Results indicate that household decisions to migrate are particularly influenced by the ease of market‐based land access in their new communities. This suggests that labour mobility may be facilitated through the development of a well‐functioning land market.     

Overcoming Old in Age-Friendliness

In this article, we explore views on an age-friendly space in the Netherlands by analysing the responses of older individuals (N = 54) in focus groups and by examining the perspectives around an age-friendly zone in the Netherlands, Parkstad Limburg. We found that a central issue in the wishes for living at a later age are adjustments to envisioned physical limitations that come with the ageing process; this includes adjustments to ensure safety, accessibility and mobility, in order to facilitate older individuals' efforts to stay engaged with the world around them. In their wishes, the older participants constructed ideal dwelling places that closely resembled a senior home, but at the same time they rejected wishing to live in a place that was identified as a senior home. We explain this paradox by the representation of such a space as being for old people, i.e. needy older individuals, which was not how the older participants wished to be identified. We conclude that the conception of age-friendly environments will have to face the difficult challenge of overcoming the association with old age, while simultaneously taking into account adjustments that signify and relate to the ageing process and that seem inescapably tied to oldness.     

Childbearing and Marriage: Investigating the Importance of Context for Meaning-Making of First-Time Marriage

Previous research reveals that the temporal ordering of childbearing and marriage can have an impact on the meaning of first-time marriage. This article aims to obtain a deeper understanding of meaning-making of first-time marriage in relation to childbearing. Narrative interviews with 16 brides and grooms in 8 couples in Sweden were conducted. The material was analyzed in relation to the temporal ordering of childbearing and marriage. The study reveals that the construction of meaning of marriage does not only relate to the temporal context. Social factors such as social class or family formation might also be relevant for how meaning is constructed. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of meaning-making as a relational process constructed within particular contexts.     

20世纪30年代初胡秋原的庸俗社会学批判

庸俗社会学的木质，在于无视艺术规律，取消中间环节，把文艺这一精神现象与人类社会的基础性结构直接关联，从而对文艺的性质、功能作出简单性规定和强制性要求。胡秋原是中国文论界从学理的层面．对庸俗社会学作出深入剖析的第一人。其理论资源，来自于普列汉诺夫的“中介论”。他对弗里契《艺术社会学》“图式化”弊端之批评，亦发时人所未见。其地球“自转”与“公转”之喻，表明了他对文学“自律”与“他律”关系的洞见与把握，并给后人以启发。＋     

后现代主义对教育评价研究的启示

后现代主义是 2 0世纪末西方社会流行的一种哲学和文化思潮 ,其影响遍及各个领域。强调反思和批判精神、反中心和提升非理性、倡导多元化的方法论和提倡对以及淡化价值判断是其显著特征。自 2 0世纪 90年代以来 ,许多教育学者开始借助后现代主义的有关思想来审视教育 ,笔者通过对后现代主义有关思想的观照 ,展开由后现代主义引发的对当前教育评价研究有关问题的思考。     

Social identities and political cleavages: the role of political context

Summary. Using a novel method, the paper investigates the influence of social group identities on attitudes and on voting in a variety of political contexts. Examining the major regions of Britain, Canada and the USA, we find considerable national and regional diversity in the nature of social cleavages. For example, social class and race had widely different effects across societies, but within societies their effects on attitudes and on voting were very similar. However, despite that, age and religion had a similar effect on attitudes across societies; the effects on voting varied considerably. The significant within-country differences underline the importance of using region, rather than country, as the unit of analysis. More importantly, these results highlight the role of political context, especially competing cleavages and the structure of party competition, in the establishment of politically relevant social cleavages.     

环境问题的社会学探索

环境社会学是二十世纪六、七十年代以来出现的社会学的一门分支学科。社会学在对环境问题的理论探索过程中争论的一个主要焦点是,环境问题是属于自然界的问题,还是属于社会的问题。本文通过对环境社会学理论历程的梳理,试图展现环境问题本身是一个具有复杂性的问题。