Information posted by youth in online social media contexts is regularly accessed, downloaded, integrated, and analyzed by academic researchers. The practice raises significant social justice considerations for researchers including issues of representation and equitable distribution of risks and benefits. Use of this type of data for research purposes helps to ensure representation in research of the voices of youth who participate in these online contexts, at times discussing issues that are also under-represented. At the same time, youth whose data are (...) harvested are subject to the risks associated with this research, while receiving little if any direct benefit from the work. These risks include the potential loss of online social community as well as threats to participant rights and wellbeing. This paper explores the tension between the social justice benefit of representation and considerations that would suggest caution, the latter including inequitable distribution of research-related costs and benefits, and the traditional ethics concerns of participant autonomy and privacy in the context of youth participation in online discussions. In the final section, we propose guidelines and considerations for the conduct of online social media research to assist researchers to balance and respect representational and participant rights or wellbeing considerations, especially with youth. (shrink)

The goal of this project is to identify guidelines for privacy policies that children and teens can accurately interpret with relative ease. A three-pronged strategy was used to achieve this goal. First, an analysis of the relevant literature on reading was undertaken to identify the document features that affect comprehension. Second, focus groups were conducted to examine their experience and practices in the interpretation of privacy policies found on sites that have been identified as favorite kids’ sites. Based on the (...) results of the literature review and focus groups, a set of potential guidelines were identified. Finally, the efficacy of these guidelines was tested in the final phase of the research project. The result of this work is a set of 14 guidelines for the drafting of privacy policies that make a difference, by improving the comprehensibility of privacy policies encountered by Canadian children and teens as they surf the Net. (shrink)

I argue that Classical American Pragmatists—Royce, James, Dewey, Perice, Addams, Du Bois, and Locke subscribed to this view and practiced philosophy by focusing on experience and directing a critical eye to major problems in living. Thus Royce and Dewey explored the nature of genuine community and its role in developing a flourishing individual life but also a public, democratic life. Royce and James engaged in a phenomenological analysis of human experience including religious experience developing a rich understanding of human psychological, (...) social, and religious development. Dewey, Royce and Perice applied the lessons of the scientific communal experience to problem solving in everyday life. Dewey explored life’s aesthetic dimensions. Addams, Du Bois and Locke applied philosophy to problems of living with discrimination as an immigrant or an African American. (shrink)

Historically, the nomadic traditions of pastoralists have been alternately attacked and romanticized. In fact, pastoral groups represent a range of production systems with wide variations in pastoral and cultivation activities. Given this range and the ecological and sociopolitical constraints facing pastoralists today, agroforestry interventions appear not only feasible, but perhaps imperative for some pastoral groups. However, their design and implementation must be carried out with keen awareness and respect for the unique ecological and cultural position traditionally nomadic pastoral people hold. (...) A review of the sociopolitical and natural resource management literature on existing sylvopastoral and agrosylvopastoral technologies points to the importance of social issues such as gender, land and tree tenure, equity, and cultural context. These provide the basis for discussing the feasibility of agroforestry interventions in terms of their aims, potentials, and risks for pastoral groups. (shrink)

This collection of essays, which includes a revised version of a famous article on the "male lesbian," addresses such issues as race, gender, and sexuality, and explores the body as a physical, psychological, and cultural construct.

In this article, I draw on research carried out in Europe, primarily in Germany, on patients’ and scientists’ perspectives on mitochondrial replacement techniques in order to explore some of the complexities related to collective representation in health governance, which includes the translation of emerging technologies into clinical use. Focusing on observations, document analyses, and interviews with eight mitochondrial disease patient organization leaders, this contribution extends our understanding of the logic and meanings behind the ways in which patient participation and collective (...) representation in health governance initiatives take shape. My findings highlight the ways in which a commitment to a global mitochondrial disease patient community and a sense of patient solidarity influence expressions of support with regard to legalizing mitochondrial replacement techniques. My analyses illustrate how normative practices and expectations of participatory governance potentially foreclose opportunities for sustained collective patient engagement with the complex ethical, social, and political dimensions of emerging technologies and may silence diverse and potentially dissenting embodied and lived responses to the prospects of particular technological developments. (shrink)

We provide a comprehensive analysis of differences between socially responsible investment and conventional funds in terms of manager characteristics, performance and fund styles. We use holdings-based analysis to evaluate fund performance and style, which allows us to perform a more in-depth analysis than the extant literature. We find that SRI managers have longer tenure and are more likely to be a female. However, these differences do not result in any significant difference in the performance of SRI and conventional funds. Further, (...) it is possible to find an SRI fund of any style, although these funds are under-represented in value styles. (shrink)

Prior literature on socially responsible investment has contended that excluding “sin stocks” from a portfolio will reduce performance and increase risk. Further, incorporating stocks of firms with positive social responsibility scores will improve performance and reduce risk. We simulate portfolios designed to mimic typical equity mutual funds’ holdings and investigate these propositions. We remove the potentially confounding influences of differences in manager skill, transaction costs and fees, and conduct a clean experiment on the effect of positive and negative portfolio screening. (...) We find no difference in the return or risk of screened and unscreened portfolios. We conclude that a typical socially responsible fund will neither gain nor lose from screening its portfolio. (shrink)

At the peak of its influence and prestige, theology offered a compelling and complex analysis of the relation of Revelation, Scripture and Word. In Ecriture et Révélation, Breton asks how that relationship might be described in the contemporary world in which the situation of theology, its relation to metaphysics, and the very conditions of understanding have changed. Retaining from Thomas the term “spiritual sense,” Breton uses the notion of “scriptural space,” on which all things can be written, to describe the (...) way in which the self “writes itself in the world.” In place of the classic emphasis on God as author of Scripture Breton focuses upon the Christian community in its search for unity, forming a canon in light of what he calls the “Christic present.” As he critiques different ways in which Scripture is read today, he argues that it is too often objectified or evacuated of meaning. Instead of complacent answers, he asks for continuous and profound interrogation so that praxis be informed by the cross. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the debate between Derrida and Levinas on Hebraism and Hellenism, Christian thought that retains a place for philosophy is often regarded as “Graeco‐Christian”, a monolithic system with an unfortunate history. The work of the French philosopher Stansilas Breton suggests that the reality is more complex. In Le Verbe et la croix , he examines the function of the term logos staurou in Paul, arguing that this untranslatable term stands as a question mark in a world of (...) language that could only speak “Jew” or “Greek”. Far from being a sign of Christian superiority, the cross signals an imperative for dispossession intrinsic to Christian language. In its “nothingness” the cross functions as a principle of critique that makes innovation and engagement possible. Thus while the cross involves negation it moves beyond negative theology. Drawing upon neoplatonist philosophy, Breton delineates the way in which the cross makes possible “the writing of the self in the world”. This paper draws upon Breton's understanding of the function of the cross to argue that the heritage of Athens endures and must be re‐thought, always recognizing the limits of all human language. After examining Breton's understanding of the logos staurou, it relates this notion to his broader understanding of revelation as “writing”. Finally it shows how Breton appeals to neoplatonist meonotology to speak in more universal terms of the need for a principle of dispossession at the heart of all religious language. For Christians the cross is this principle, enabling human beings to be causes of themselves who engender new being. (shrink)

Exercise-based rehabilitation forms a key part of the UK National Health Service patient-care pathway for cardiac rehabilitation (CR). Only around half of all eligible patients attend core CR, however, with social inequalities affecting participation. Few qualitative studies have explored in-depth the key factors influencing engagement with CR, specifically from a sociological theoretical, and ethnographic perspective. Utilising an ethnographic approach allowed us to get a sense of the embodied experiences of 10 participants attending or declining core CR, together with a further (...) seven family members/significant others. This provided in-depth appreciation of participants’ lifeworld contexts as key influences on CR participation. The article draws on these qualitative data and focuses on 1) participants’ initial thoughts about CR; and 2) navigating the field of CR, analysed via thematic analysis. We utilise a Bourdieusian theoretical perspective to theorise the findings, including salient socio-cultural factors influencing attendance/non-attendance and (non)adherence. The article findings highlight how perceptions of CR and the ability to navigate the field are strongly influenced by habitus and capital, and how personal biographies and socio-material conditions affect adherence to CR programmes. The study provides original insights into embodied experiences of exercise-based CR, and novel understandings of the reasons for drop-out/poor adherence, theorised from a Bourdieusian perspective. (shrink)

The ability to extrapolate essential gist through the analysis and synthesis of information, prediction of potential outcomes, abstraction of ideas, and integration of relationships with world knowledge is critical for higher-order learning. The present study investigated the efficacy of cognitive training to elicit improvements in gist-reasoning and fact recall ability in 556 public middle-school students (grades seven and eight), versus a sample of 357 middle school students who served as a comparison group, to determine if changes in gist-reasoning and fact (...) recall were demonstrated without cognitive training. The results showed that, in general, cognitive training increased gist-reasoning and fact recall abilities in students from families in poverty as well as students from families living above poverty. However, the magnitude of gains in gist-reasoning varied as a function of gender and grade-level. Our primary findings were that seventh and eighth grade girls and eighth grade boys showed significant increases in gist-reasoning after training regardless of socioeconomic status. There were no significant increases in gist-reasoning or fact recall ability for the 357 middle school students who served in the comparison group. We postulate that cognitive training in middle school is efficacious for improving gist-reasoning ability and fact recall in students from all socioeconomic levels. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between mothers and medical discourse, drawing from oral narratives of 20 Jewish women who gave birth to their first children between 1928 and 1940. The author shows that women encounter medical discourse not only as a system of technical knowledge but also as a package of cultural and social enterprises. Jewish mothers during this period mobilized medicalized mothering practices to signify their advancement from immigrant culture into the American middle class. Mothers portray themselves as benefiting (...) from the new opportunities of American freedoms, as actively seeking self-improvements, and as engaging medicine in the context of their changing group membership. In more general terms, the author shows that medicalization's effect on social difference extends beyond men's control of women's subjectivity or social position; it also involves women in the creation and maintenance of status hierarchies between women. (shrink)

This article presents qualitative interview data to explore the health-related carework of low-income women caregivers with special-needs children and the implications of carework for women’s financial security. The author documents “direct” and “advocacy” carework as two types of caregiving that low-income women carry out in the context of declining government resources for poor disabled children. The author shows that the unique demands of carework responsibilities and the conditions of low-wage work combine to limit caregivers’ employment and education options as well (...) as their long-term prospects for financial stability. (shrink)

In Canada, as in many developed countries, healthcare conscientious objection is growing in visibility, if not in incidence. Yet the country's health professional policies on conscientious objection are in disarray. The article reports the results of a comprehensive review of policies relevant to conscientious objection for four Canadian health professions: medicine, nursing, pharmacy and dentistry. Where relevant policies exist in many Canadian provinces, there is much controversy and potential for confusion, due to policy inconsistencies and terminological vagueness. Meanwhile, in Canada's (...) three most northerly territories with significant Aboriginal populations, whose already precarious health is influenced by funding and practitioner shortages, there are major policy gaps applicable to conscientious objection. In many parts of the country, as a result of health professionals' conscientious refusals, access to some legal health services – including but not limited to reproductive health services such as abortion – has been seriously impeded. Although policy reform on conscientious conflicts may be difficult, and may generate strenuous opposition from some professional groups, for the sake of both patients and providers, such policy change must become an urgent priority. (shrink)

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of heat. (...) Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: (1) warming up, and (2) thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

In order to address sociological concerns with embodiment and learning, in this article we explore the ‘weathering’ body in a currently under-researched physical-cultural domain. Weather experiences, too, are under-explored in sociology, and here we examine in depth the lived experience of weather and, more specifically, ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’ in one of the most extreme and corporeally challenging environments on earth: high-altitude mountains. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and an interview-based research project with 19 international, high-altitude (...) mountaineers, we investigate weather as lived and experienced both corporeally and cognitively. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing and theorizing the ways in which embodied beings relate to the environment through different aspects of their being. The novel concepts of ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, we argue, provide salient examples of the mind-body-world nexus at work, as an embodied practice and mode of thinking, strongly contoured by the physical culture of high-altitude mountaineering. (shrink)

Despite considerable growth in understanding of various aspects of sporting and exercise embodiment over the last decade, in-depth investigations of embodied affectual experiences in running remain limited. Furthermore, within the corpus of literature investigating pleasure and the hedonic dimension in running, much of this research has focused on experiences of pleasure in relation to performance and achievement, or on specific affective states, such as enjoyment, derived after completing a run. We directly address this gap in the qualitative literature on sporting (...) and exercise embodiment by contributing novel insights on the mind-body pleasures of running via focusing analytic attention towards the pleasures recalled by runners as experienced during positive, rewarding running experiences. Applying conceptual insights drawn from sociological phenomenology, we analyse data from an in-depth, event-focused interview study with distance runners who reported positive, rewarding experiences in recent recreational runs. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we present findings in relation to three themes: (1) ‘running feels like it should’; (2) sensory engagements; and (3) time out. The study contributes fresh perspectives, both conceptually and in relation to data-collection approach, to a small literature on the lived experience of pleasure in sport, exercise and physical cultures. (shrink)

This essay explores the criteria for lesbian identity attribution through the case study of "male lesbians": biological males who claim to be lesbians. I analyze such sex/gender identity attribution through the lens of postmodernism, which provides a workable theoretical framework for "male lesbian" identities. My conclusions explore the historicity and cultural constructedness of the body's sex/gender identities, revealing the limitations of both "the postmodernized body" and "the essentialized modernist body.".

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted between 1998 and 2000 in British Columbia, Canada. In this article Luce brings together the narratives of queer women she interviewed about their experiences of trying to become parents with her own stories about doing the research. Both sets of stories explore the ways in which relationships between people are reproduced and represented through images of sexuality, reproduction, queerness, parents, and families. Shifting between telling about the tensions she experienced while doing ethnographic (...) fieldwork and retelling women's stories about how their relationships to partners, fetuses, babies, and donors were perceived, the article draws attention to both political and methodological questions. (shrink)

Abstract The last two decades have witnessed a vast expansion in research and writing on the sociology of the body and on issues of embodiment. Indeed, both sociology in general and the sociology of sport specifically have well heeded the long-standing and vociferous calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to social theory. It seems particularly curious therefore that the sociology of sport has to-date addressed this primarily at a certain abstract, theoretical level, with relatively few accounts to be found (...) that are truly grounded in the corporeal realities of the lived sporting body; a ‘carnal sociology’ of sport, to borrow Crossley’s (1995) expression. To portray and understand more fully this kind of embodied perspective, it is argued, demands engaging with the phenomenology of the body, and this article seeks to contribute to a small but growing literature providing this particular form of ‘embodied’ analysis of the body in sport. Here we identify some useful intellectual resources for developing a phenomenology of sporting experience, specifically its sensory elements, and also subsequently examine the potential for its evocative portrayal and effective analysis via different kinds of textual forms. (shrink)

In this commentary on Joyce Trebilcot's "Dyke Methods or Principles for the Discovery/Creation of the Withstanding," I discuss four areas of difficulty in Trebilcot's proposed methods: (1) an overly negative view of "the intention to persuade," (2) a tendency towards epistemological relativism and loss of cultural authorities, (3) a circularity in defining the proposed methods as dyke methods, and (4) a hint of repressive tolerance towards differences among lesbians by avoidance of painful confrontation involving those differences. Unlike Trebilcot, I make (...) a distinction between the abuse of persuasion and the art of persuasion, re-claiming the latter as a caring and challenging strategy, rather than an invasion of adversarial heteropatriarchal tactics. (shrink)

New forms of neoliberal femininity create demanding horizons of expectation for young women. For talented athletes, these pressures are intensified by the establishment of dual-career discourses that construct the combination of high-performance sport and education as a normative, ‘ideal’ pathway. The pressed time perspective inherent in dual-careers requires athletes to employ a variety of time-related skills, especially for young women who aim to live up to ‘superwoman’ ideals that valorize ‘success’ in all walks of life. Drawing on existential phenomenology, and (...) in-depth interviews with 10 talented Finnish sportswomen (aged 19-22), we explored their experiences of lived time when pursuing dual-careers in upper secondary sport schools. Exploring participants’ bodily experiences of inhabiting the achievement life-world, we analyze how these sportswomen either learned ways of living up to this ambitious script or came to understand the detrimental effects of the script, necessitating other ways of being. For those who experience a disjuncture between the ‘perfect’ and their embodied experience, self-care practices are needed to restore life-world harmony, and orient to alternative futures. (shrink)

In this article, following on from earlier debates in the journal regarding the ‘thorny issue’ of epochē and bracketing in sociological phenomenological research, we consider more generally the challenges of engaging in reflexivity and bracketing when undertaking ethnographic ‘insider’ research, or research in familiar settings. We ground our discussion and illustrate some of the key challenges by drawing on the experience of undertaking this research approach with a group of competitive swimmers, who were participating in a British university performance swimming (...) programme at the time of the doctoral study. The primary researcher was highly familiar with the phenomenon of competitive swimming, having been both a competitive swimmer and swimming coach. Some of the key elements of a sociological phenomenological approach to studying physical-cultural embodiment are first delineated, before addressing the considerable challenges of engaging in sustained reflexivity and bracketing, using the swimming research for illustrative purposes. We suggest some practical ways in which researchers in sport and physical cultures might approach epochē and bracketing in ethnographic ‘insider’ research. -/- KEYWORDS: Sociological phenomenology, competitive swimming, insider research, epochē/bracketing. (shrink)

Modern phenomenology, with its roots in Husserlian philosophy, has been taken up and utilised in a myriad of ways within different disciplines, but until recently has remained relatively underused within sports studies. A corpus of sociological-phenomenological work is now beginning to develop in this domain, alongside a longer-standing literature in feminist phenomenology. These specific social-phenomenological forms explore the situatedness of lived-body experience within a particular social structure. After providing a brief overview of key strands of phenomenology, this article considers some (...) of the ways in which sociological, and particularly feminist, phenomenology might be used to analyse female sporting embodiment. For illustrative purposes, data from an autophenomenographic project on female distance running are also included, in order briefly to demonstrate the application of phenomenology within sociology, as both theoretical framework and methodological approach. (shrink)

In this article, we address an existing lacuna in the sociology of the senses, by employing sociological phenomenology to illuminate the under-researched sense of temperature, as lived by a social group for whom water temperature is particularly salient: competitive pool swimmers. The research contributes to a developing ‘sensory sociology’ that highlights the importance of the socio-cultural framing of the senses and ‘sensory work’, but where there remains a dearth of sociological exploration into senses extending beyond the ‘classic five’ sensorium. Drawing (...) on data from a three-year ethnographic study of competitive swimmers in the UK, our analysis explores the rich sensuousities of swimming, and highlights the role of temperature as fundamentally affecting the affordances offered by the aquatic environment. The article contributes original theoretical perspectives to the sociology of the senses and of sport in addressing the ways in which social actors in the aquatic environment interact, both intersubjectively and intercorporeally, as thermal beings. (shrink)

The French existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, long ago signalled the potentially empowering force of outdoor exercise and recreation for women, drawing on feminist phenomenological perspectives. Feminist phenomenological research in sport and exercise, however, remains relatively scarce, and this article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing a feminist phenomenological theoretical framework to analyse lived experiences of running in ‘public’ space. As feminist theorists have argued, such space is gendered and contested, and women’s mobility remains constrained by fears (...) of harassment and violent attack. Running also generates intense pleasure, however, and embodied empowerment. Drawing on findings from two separate but linked automethodological running research projects, here I explore salient and overlapping themes cohering around lived experience of pleasure and danger in both urban and rural spaces. (shrink)

There is growing regulatory pressure on firms worldwide to address the under-representation of women in senior positions. Regulators have taken a variety of approaches to the issue. We investigate a jurisdiction that has issued recommendations and disclosure requirements, rather than implementing quotas. Much of the rhetoric surrounding gender diversity centres on whether diversity has a financial impact. In this paper we take an aggregate (market-level) approach and compare the performance of portfolios of firms with gender diverse boards to those without. (...) We also investigate whether having multiple women on the board is linked to performance, and if there is a within-industry effect. Overall, we do not find evidence of an association between diversity and performance. We find some weak evidence of a negative correlation between having multiple women on the board and performance, but that in some industries diversity is positively correlated with performance. (shrink)

We investigate the performance and risk of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) equity funds in the Australian market and find no significant difference between the returns of SRI and conventional funds. In an extension to prior literature, we examine the impact of the number of positive, negative and total screens funds impose on performance and risk. We find little evidence of positive or negative screening impacting total return, but find weak evidence that funds with more screens overall provide better risk-adjusted performance. (...) Positive screening significantly reduces funds’ risk. However, negative screening significantly increases risk and reduces funds’ abilities to form diversified portfolios. (shrink)

For over a decade, practice-based research degrees in art and design have formed part of the United Kingdom research degree education portfolio, with a relatively rapid expansion in recent years. This route to the PhD still constitutes an innovative, and on occasion a disputed, form of research study and students embarking upon the practice-based doctorate find themselves in many ways undertaking pioneering work. To date there has been a dearth of empirical studies of the actual experiences of such students. This (...) article, based upon qualitative interviews with 50 students based at 25 institutions, represents an attempt to begin to fill this lacuna. The article charts the biographical change which students undergo as they pursue their doctorates. It examines the ways in which they construct, maintain, and modify their identities whilst in the role of ‘creator/maker’, and seek to manage and combine the different modes of being required of a ‘creator’ and a researcher. (shrink)

This paper reflects on masculinist biases affecting scientific research on the Premenstrual Syndrome. Masculinist bias is examined on the level of observation language and in the choice of explanatory frameworks. Such bias is found to be further reinforced by the social construction of “the clinical body” as an object of medical interrogation. Some of the political implications of the medicalization of women's premenstrual changes are also discussed.

This review essay covers the lesbian writing of philosopher Jeffner Allen, contrasting her fiercely separatist earlier work with her more recent experimental writing. A quest for a separate ontic space-defining difference qua Lesbian and consistently characterized by Allen as "the open"-links her earlier work with her more recent atonalities richly coded with ritual, myth, memory, and play.

This paper reflects on masculinist biases affecting scientific research on the Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS). Masculinist bias is examined on the level of observation language and in the choice of explanatory frameworks. Such bias is found to be further reinforced by the social construction of "the clinical body" as an object of medical interrogation. Some of the political implications of the medicalization of women's premenstrual changes are also discussed.

This paper reflects on masculinist biases affecting scientific research on the Premenstrual Syndrome. Masculinist bias is examined on the level of observation language and in the choice of explanatory frameworks. Such bias is found to be further reinforced by the social construction of “the clinical body” as an object of medical interrogation. Some of the political implications of the medicalization of women's premenstrual changes are also discussed.

When an anxiety‐reducing drug with virtually no side effects is used to enhance performance, is that cheating? Is it drug abuse? Is it an admission of professional weakness?