Search Results (17)

This paper examines the ways in which Christian prayer in the literary fiction of Felix Timmermans is represented as a spiritual practice that produces behaviour that is prosocial, or in other words, beneficial to others. The authors combine readings of two texts (the short story Triptych of the Three Kings and the novel A Peasant Farmer’s Psalm) with insights stemming from recent sociological debates on prayer and prosociality to show how Felix Timmermans’ prose can prove helpful for understanding how praying transforms individuals by allowing them to behave in a more altruistic way. Full article

Postmodern picture books offer valuable opportunities for children to engage with multiple perspectives and develop critical thinking skills. When used in pedagogical practices that prioritize children’s rights, agency, and voices, these books can effectively challenge dominant social norms and promote justice and equity. Within the framework of the SMOOTH project (Educational Common Spaces, Passing through Enclosures and Reversing Inequalities, Horizon 2020, EU), this qualitative study explores how children aged six to eight attending a public primary school in Lisbon, Portugal, make sense of gender through postmodern picture books. Grounded in the Educational Studies and Sociology of Childhood, the research analyses children’s understandings of gender and the meanings they construct concerning it. A six-month intervention program, consisting of read-aloud sessions, was conducted with children from diverse linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Data were collected through focus groups and observation. Qualitative content analysis highlights how picture books can stimulate critical discussions on the social construction of gender, providing children with opportunities to reflect on differences, power relations, and social change. These findings indicate that embedding a care perspective further strengthens the recognition of children’s lived experiences and enriches educational practices by fostering inclusiveness and deeper understanding. Full article

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (hereafter AI) in education, particularly through large-scale language models such as ChatGPT and Bing, offers both challenges and opportunities. These models facilitate interaction in conversations and can perform tasks that require natural language processing, from answering questions to solving problems. However, their integration into education raises concerns about the credibility and reliability of the information they provide and about the role of the teacher, emphasizing the need for guided use in educational environments. This article contributes to the discourse from the perspective of the pedagogy of sociology, focusing on the role of chatbots in analyzing texts within the social sciences and humanities fields. Our pilot study, conducted with 17 first-year master’s students studying sociology, reveals that while chatbots can optimize the creation of summaries and the provision of basic information, their reliance on sources such as Wikipedia calls into question the depth and impartiality of the content. In addition, students have criticized chatbots for providing biased or inaccurate outputs. A significant part of our research has compared the epistemological and methodological approaches of chatbots with a traditional, independent literature analysis (deep reading), and we found notable differences in learning outcomes. However, a hybrid approach that combines AI tools with conventional methods offers a promising way to improve learning and teaching strategies and can enhance the critical analytical skills that are crucial for future pedagogies. Full article

Using English prison inspectorate reports, the article presents an Ervine Goffman-inspired sociological discourse analysis of official political accounts about the living conditions of incarcerated children held in London’s Feltham prison. Through a close reading of inspection reports, we develop a critical window into their lived experiences in an exceptionally harmful UK prison regime. The construction of this prison estate conjures its dilapidation, unhygienic conditions, and endless social danger. The stigmatizing construction of the child prisoner intimates a pervasive culture of violence and bullying, resulting in their aversion to purposive activities. While, at first blush, prison inspectorate reporting is based on the policy of efficiency to ensure a safe and rehabilitative prison experience for youth, it is argued that the nature of the reporting of incarceration obviates a critique of the wider political fabric that custodial interventions will invariably reproduce. The Inspectorate operates within the state’s dominant class-stratified political ideology. The adoption of a generic labeling discourse in the reports minimizes the communication of harms inflicted on children by criminal ‘justice’ that can only worsen their wellbeing and reproduce the harmful intensity of their pre-existing marginality. Full article

This article discusses the œuvre of Artemisia Gentileschi, a prominent Baroque painter who was rediscovered by art historian Roberto Longhi in the 1910s. Today, her art is interpreted through various lenses, including art theory, women’s studies, and psychoanalysis. Gentileschi’s paintings are often “read” in close reference to her painful biography, with a focus on the “chiaroscuro” of trauma and its overcoming. Significantly, such biography-oriented approaches seem to be predominant in scholarship on art created by women. The argument presented is that Gentileschi’s works require a thorough re-reading free of “compulsive biographism”, as postulated by Salomon. The focus should shift from an empathic Einfühlung (or empathic projection) towards an objective analysis based purely on art-historical or sociological criteria. This article also explores the presence of the socially mediated and mediatised figure of the artist in fine literature (novels by Banti, Lapierre and Vreeland), cinematic biographies (Artemisia, directed by Merlet, documentaries (Artemisia Gentileschi: Warrior Painter, directed by River), anime (a series titled Arte, directed by Takayuki Hamana), and graphic novels (Ferlut and Baudouin; Siciliano). In this artistic constellation Artemisia is labelled as an art/feminist “icon”, a female genius, and as in numerous scholarly texts dedicated to her, “a victim”. I propose that the discussed literary and visual texts related to Gentileschi be interpreted as symptomatic (in line with Panofsky’s concept of ‘iconology’) of the contemporary mentality, which is filtered through feminist and subaltern thought. Full article

The objectives of this review were to identify the population groups most frequently studied, to determine the methods and techniques most commonly used to show health inequities, and to identify the most frequent socioeconomic and health indicators used in the studies on health inequities due to socioeconomic inequalities that have been carried out on the Spanish healthcare system. A scoping review was carried out of the studies conducted in the Spanish State and published in literature since 2004, after the publication of the Law of Cohesion and Quality of the National Health System. The PRISMA extension for scoping reviews was followed. The methodological quality of the studies was assessed using the critical reading guides of the Joanna Briggs Institute and an adaptation of the STROBE guide for ecological studies. A total of 58 articles out of 811 articles were included. Most of the articles were (77.59%, n = 45) cross-sectional studies, followed by ecological studies (13.8%, n = 8). The population group used was uneven, while the main geographical area under investigation was the whole state (51.7%, n = 30) compared to other territorial distributions (48.3%, n = 28). The studies used a multitude of health and socioeconomic indicators, highlighting self-perception of health (31.03%, n = 19) and social class (50%, n = 29). The relationship between better health and better socioeconomic status is evident. However, there is variability in the populations, methods, and indicators used to study health equity in Spain. Future health research and policies require greater systematization by public institutions and greater cooperation among researchers from disciplines such as sociology, economics, and health. Full article

In New Testament scholarship, there is a division between practitioners of performance criticism and those who engage the sociology of reading and reading cultures in the ancient Mediterranean context. The former, as the name of their methodology implies, tend to emphasize the performative nature of engaging textual traditions and downplay the importance of the physical document in a performance event. The latter stress the importance of the physical text in a reading event. This article reaches across the division between performance and reading, suggesting that written manuscripts play different roles in different kinds of performance and reading events. It surveys primary source evidence of two types: one in which the physical text is absent from or de-emphasized in the performance event and another in which the document is explicitly present and figures prominently in the reading event. The article concludes by suggesting that performance critics ought to be more explicit about what role they imagine physical documents to have in hypothetical performance events and that those engaging the sociology of reading ought to be more attuned to the performative potential of communal reading events. Full article

This paper presents an initiative in which QR codes on public transport are used to provide citizens with books that they can read and that will improve their general knowledge. It builds on the concept of the learning city and combines it with smart city tools. This paper aims to use a descriptive–empirical approach, including an experiment in Bucharest. This research aims to contribute to the academic world, urban sociology, public administration, and lifelong learning education. Full article

This article analyses the process of reversion to Salafism in Pekanbaru, Indonesia in the context of Muslims who have returned to Islam as a solution to their sense of deprivation. This return to Islam is considered by many as an initial solution to a feeling of deprivation which often manifests itself as a form of spiritual ‘emptiness’, accompanied by anxiety, depression and a lack of direction in life. The analysis in this article is based on extensive reading of relevant literature, participatory observation, and interviews conducted during fieldwork in Pekanbaru from July 2015 to June 2016. The discussion is based on three case studies of Salafi members, detailing their reversion to Salafism and the personal and sociological reasons for their choice to return to Islam, i.e., Salafism, after a certain period of time in their lives. Findings show that those who join the Salafi movement have previously experienced relative deprivation which led to a sense of existential deprivation. Full article

One of the strengths of Critical Mixed Race Studies is that it represents research methodologies and frameworks from multiple disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. However, if these disciplines are not in dialogue with each other, that benefit may be lost. Here, we use psychological and sociological research on Multiracial populations as examples to argue how strict disciplinarity and methodological trends may limit scientific production. We propose that reading and citing work across disciplines, expanding methodological training, and rejecting hegemonic “white logic” assumptions about what is “publishable” can enhance Multiracial research. First, the ability to cite effectively across disciplines will shorten the time it takes for new theories to be developed that focus on empirically underrepresented populations. Secondly, increasing understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methods will allow more effective reading between disciplines while also creating opportunities to engage with both causality and the richness of experiences that comprise being Multiracial. Finally, these changes would then situate scholars to be more effective reviewers, thereby enhancing the peer-reviewed publication process to one that routinely rejects color evasive racist practices that privilege work on majority populations. Full article

This article explores the concept of ‘love jihad’ and the love jihad discourse in a Scandinavian setting, with a particular emphasis on contemporary works of art and popular culture in Norway. Arguing that ‘love jihad’ may be understood as part of a larger cluster of meaning related to fear of love across religious and cultural boundaries, and of losing ‘our women’ to ‘foreign men’, the article demonstrates that the love-jihad discourse and its related tropes exist in the Norwegian public sphere. It is directly articulated in far-right blogs and Facebook groups and indirectly present in the works of art and popular culture that this article explores. Indeed, read intertextually and in light of recent research in sociology and media studies about Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric on the Internet, works such as Disgraced, Heisann Montebello, SAS plus/SAS pussy, and Norskish demonstrate—through challenging, mocking or discussing the love-jihad discourse—that ‘love jihad’ has echoes in contemporary Norway. Full article

The aim of this paper is to explore the strong connections between the topics of this special volume of Religions: the current crisis of political Catholicism and religious Catholicism; the new questions posed about the relationship between Catholicism and advanced modernization; the relationship between Catholicism and European institutions; and the importance of the North Atlantic relationships within Catholicism. The paper sheds light on these questions through an analysis of a particular but indicative case study, namely, the “Catholic 68” in Italy. Deconstructing the predominant narrative about the relationship between Vatican II and the events of 1968 (or, better, those of the 2-year period 1967–1969) helps to clarify the connections between the topics of this volume in important ways. In fact, the predominant narrative about the “Catholic 68” still pays undue tribute to both an oversimplified reconstruction of the “parties” who fought one another during the Second Vatican Council and an oversimplified reading of the late 1960s. In this perspective, the Italian case is particularly relevant and yields important sociological insight. The starting point of the paper is the abundant literature on the “long 60s”. This scholarship has clarified the presence of an important religious dimension to the social and cultural processes of this period as well as a (generally accepted) link between the Council-issued renewal and “1968”. At the same time that literature has also clarified that the “long 60s” paved the way for a deep social transition which has also marked the first two decades of the 21st century. The nature of this religious renewal and social change has often been described as the triumph of liberal parties over conservative parties. This paper instead proposes a “three parties scheme” (conservative, progressive and liberal) to better understand the confrontation that occurred at the Council and that at the end of the same decade and its consequences for Catholicism and European politics today. Full article

Asexuality is often defined as some degree of being void of sexual attraction, interest, or desire. Black asexual people have been made invisible, silent, or pathologized in most fiction, scholarly literature, and mainstream LGBTQ movements. Claire Kann’s 2018 young adult romance novel, Let’s Talk About Love, explores Black asexuality at the intersection of race and (a)sexuality. Through the story of the Black, bi-romantic, asexual, 19 year-old college student Alice Johnston, this text illuminates the diversity of Black sexuality in the Black Diaspora. Using a Black feminist sociological literary analysis to complete a close reading of the novel, I interrogate what Let’s Talk about Love offers for defining a Black asexual politic. To consider Black asexual politics beyond the controlling images of the asexual Mammy figure, and not merely in juxtaposition to the hypersexual Jezebel, calls us to instead center agency and self-definition. This project seeks to answer what Conscious Black Asexuality is, why it is a necessary concept for asexuality studies and the Diaspora, where we locate Black asexuality in Black history, and how Let’s Talk about Love by Claire Kann presents a depiction of Black agentic queerness that reclaims agency and intimacy within one’s sexual politics. Full article

In modern democratic consumer societies, decentralized, participative, and consensus-oriented forms of multi-stakeholder governance are supplementing, and often replacing, conventional forms of state-centered environmental government. The engagement in all phases of the policy process of diverse social actors has become a hallmark of environmental good governance. This does not mean to say, however, that these modes of policy-making have proved particularly successful in resolving the widely debated multiple sustainability crisis. In fact, they have been found wanting in terms of their ability to respond to democratic needs and their capacity to resolve environmental problems. So why have these participatory forms of environmental governance become so prominent? What exactly is their appeal? What do they deliver? Exploring these questions from the perspective of eco-political and sociological theory, this article suggests that these forms of environmental governance represent a performative kind of eco-politics that helps liberal consumer societies to manage their inability and unwillingness to achieve the socio-ecological transformation that scientists and environmental activists say is urgently required. This reading of the prevailing policy approaches as the collaborative management of sustained unsustainability adds an important dimension to the understanding of environmental governance and contemporary eco-politics more generally. Full article

This paper discusses the study of Chartist and working-class literatures, noting that the pronounced development of aesthetic criticism in these areas uncomfortably corresponds with the rejection of “aesthetics” in other fields. Chartist, working-class, and laboring-class scholars have broken free from monolithically sociological or political readings that only a generation ago too often dismissed artistic endeavors as, at best, merely a re-accenting of the mainstream. Current studies focus on the aesthetic innovations that emerged out of working-class entanglements with mainstream counterparts. The paper argues that the rejection of “aesthetics” generally fails to recognize marginalized and group aesthetics (including the critical work done on marginalized and group aesthetics) and specifically what it meant for a political cohort—the Chartists are my example—to think aesthetically. Full article