Overcoming Functional Fixedness in Naming Traditions: A Commentary on Pilcher’s Names and “Doing Gender”

Because people’s names are central to everyday life, their role in the gender system is often overlooked. In the target article, Pilcher (2017) brings novel attention to the ways in which naming traditions allow individuals to enact gender in their lives. In this commentary, I expand on Pilcher’s argument that naming traditions merit more attention than they currently receive. Specifically, I begin by discussing links between forenaming and the gender binary. I then describe the ways in which the marital surname tradition reflects gendered power dynamics. In an effort to spur additional scholarly attention to naming traditions, I also delineate fruitful areas for future research. These future directions primarily focus on identifying why and how individuals “do gender differently” through their naming practices.     

Reciprocating Desires: The Pursuit of Desirable East Asian Femininity in China’s Commercial Sex Industry

ABSTRACT

This article examines how socioeconomic conditions impact heteronormative sexual desires between high-tier sex workers and their non-Chinese clients in urban South China. Drawing from Hoang’s interpretation of ‘dealing in desires’, Rofel’s ‘Desiring China’, and cultural capital, the article considers how desire circulates in high-end bars and its impact on how workers and clients negotiate their relationships. I move beyond Hoang’s and Rofel’s framework to include cultural capital that help sex workers perform an East Asia femininity and develop their image as cosmopolitan tempting girls to practice ‘reciprocating desires’ with their non-Chinese clients. The article unfolds as a theoretical exercise in unearthing and understanding the underpinnings of how socioeconomic context impacts our understanding of what qualifies as desirable East Asian femininity. Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in a high-end bar in South China from the summer of 2015 to the summer of 2017, this article first examines desire and the meanings attached to sex workers’ body capital, and cultural capital that exemplify desirable East Asian femininity. Second, cultural capital explains how desire operates within high-tier heteronormative sex work spaces to construct social identity, which can help sex workers achieve professional success and become a source of personal satisfaction.     

Erotic Authenticity: Comparing Intimate Relationships between High-End Bar and Low-End Bar in China’s Global Sex Industry

Research on the sex industry generally focuses heavily on the economic relationship between sex workers and their clients but typically fails to consider the role and significance of intimacy within these interactions. By drawing upon over 36 months’ ethnographic work conducted in high-end and low-end bars in Dongguan from 2008 to 2009 and 2011 to 2017, the article argues that sex workers and their clients are not only involved in pecuniary transactions but also may exchange intimate and non-remunerative feelings. In order to understand the factors that both facilitate and limit experiences of intimacy in sex work, relevant socioeconomic circumstances must be deconstructed. The dynamics that characterize contemporary Dongguan must be considered within the unique subcultures that characterize the high-end and low-end sex markets. In order to extrapolate from the aforementioned factors, this article examines the interactions of concepts such as economic and cultural capitals, emotional labor, and bounded authenticity to provide insights into how intimacy occurs in China’s global sex industry. The article will also draw from these insights and explore how Chinese and foreign clients overcome social and cultural barriers to develop intimate relationships with sex workers.     

The Ethnomethods of Ethnography: A Trans-situational Approach to the Epistemology of Qualitative Research

The article is concerned with the everyday activities of sociology, focusing on ethnography. It argues that empirical study of the ethnomethods of ethnography allows for a deeper insight into the dynamics and procedures of this research practice. Based on empirical data from two ethnographic studies (in a martial arts club and in a flamenco class), I suggest to observe how such an investigation is conducted in various situations: in the field, on the ethnographer’s desk, in data sessions, in conferences and in written papers. This serves to gather and produce empirical traces from the field. These are de- and re-contextualized while they are taken into the sociological field(s). This process can be analyzed drawing on Goffman’s notion of Frame Analysis, particularly drawing on his notion of keyings. Ethnography can thus be described as a trans-situational practice that systematically couples situations and communications in order to understand and reconstruct other social practices for sociological reasons.     

The moral maze: Dutch Salafis and the construction of a moral community of the faithful

The Salafi movement presents itself as a moral guardian of Muslims in a world that, according to many, is filled with moral crisis, temptations and anti-Islam tendencies. Salafis claim that it is essential to return to the community of the pious forefathers seen as the most outstanding community of all times with the highest absolute moral standard. In this article I will show how individual participants engage with this idea of a moral community of believers yet remain vulnerable to the ambiguities and ruptures inherent in everyday life and within the Salafi movement. By exploring how Salafis passionately try to search for the ‘correct’ knowledge and strive to maintain a unity between knowledge, conviction and behavior, and the role of friendships therein, I argue that Salafism does not remain separate from the troubles of everyday but that these issues enter into and exist in Salafi thought and practice, not by being resolved but by being transformed into personal struggles. These ambiguities and ruptures may cause problems but also provide an incentive for Salafis to continuously work at the self-improvement of one’s piety, authenticity, and sisterhood and brotherhood.     

Interventions in everyday lives: How clients use psychotherapy outside their sessions

The purpose of psychotherapy is to help clients address and overcome problems troubling them in their everyday lives. Therapy can therefore only work if clients include it in their ongoing lives to deal with their problems. Detailed, systematic research is needed on how clients do so in their everyday lives outside their sessions. A design of exploratory case studies on this topic is presented in this article. The main outcomes of such a case study on family therapy are then laid out in general terms. They highlight how treatment practices and clients’ ordinary everyday practices interact when clients change their everyday lives to overcome their troubles. They also highlight what it involves for clients to accomplish this. It is concluded that we need more research on how to understand intervention; on the interaction between interventions and clients’ conduct of their everyday life; on sessions as a particular, secluded part of clients’ ongoing everyday lives, and on how to consider therapists’ procedures and conduct of sessions accordingly.     

Everyday rhetoric: Argument and persuasion in everyday life

While the study of rhetoric in the humanities has an impressive pedigree, rhetorical analysis in organization studies is rather less developed. In this article, I want to provide an introduction to rhetorical analysis, drawing particularly on the work of Billig (1996) and Potter (1996), and illustrate its application to organizational issues through a case example concerning technological change in a public sector organization. In doing this, I demonstrate how alternative approaches to traditional positivism may augment the explanatory power of research in work and organizational psychology. In particular, I want to argue that an awareness of the everyday rhetoric of organizational talk can be illuminating in explaining how the work of an organization is accomplished.     

Defining Islamic modernity through creative writing: a case study of Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong

Indonesian domestic workers (IDWs) have been frequently stereotyped as uneducated and submissive women with little or no bargaining power in transnational labour migration. This article examines why and how literacy practices help foster the activism of IDWs in Hong Kong. In particular, I seek to understand the significance of IDWs’ writing in relation to Islamic modernities. Using the framework of alternative modernities, I argue that the creative process of IDWs’ writing sheds light to their attempts to exercise individual and collective agency. Specifically, the article looks at the role of Forum Lingkar Pena (Pen Circle Forum, FLP) Hong Kong, an IDW writing community, to reveal how its collective literacy practices help affirm Islamic values as part of a modernisation process on IDWs’ own terms.     

The struggle to be seen: Muslim–Christian relations and religious (in)visibility at the Hispano–Moroccan borderland

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the ways in which Muslim–Christian relations occur in the Hispano–Moroccan borderland, more precisely, in the North-African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. It argues that, in these two Spanish autonomous cities, the relations between Christians and Muslims are articulated through a symbolic system in which the former exercise the capacity of being apparent, whereas the latter tend to be ‘pushed away’ from the visible, although they exert resistance. This results in a decrease of Muslims’ degree of public exposure. The article critically assesses the relational dynamics between Muslims and Christians in Ceuta and Melilla against the trope of ‘invisibility’, by looking at how they use religion to exert these enunciations: a) I briefly contextualize historically the setting, b) I explore how religion is racialized, c) I look at the use of historical vocabulary and narratives on religion to manifest intergroup conflict, d) I expose how the regime of (in)visibility unfolds, e) I scrutinize the recent development by which Christians participate in making Islam more visible and the resulting consequences this has on the relations between the two groups. The article assesses why and how religion provides the language through which these particular forms of ‘othering’ are manifested.     

Everyday lived Islam: religiosities and identities of Muslim women in the Republic of Macedonia

In the Republic of Macedonia, most Muslim women belong to the Albanian minority. Particularly due to the current fractured nature of the Macedonian societal body and the diverse historical developments that have led to this, the importance of ethnic identities is emphasised and religious identities, especially Orthodox Christian and Muslim identities, fortify them. Everyday lived religion, its active enacting, and the values Islam represents can be important to Muslim women in the Republic of Macedonia and manifest themselves, for instance, in the human relationships within Muslim communities. Everyday lived Islam may also be an important factor when women’s roles in the larger societal context are examined. The 19 Albanian women whom I interviewed during the period 2008–2009 described in a relatively detailed manner their everyday lived Islam and religiosities, how these affected their lives and how these were localised in everyday situations. This also gave an insight into the way the Muslim women negotiated their identities in different contexts. In this article I examine, drawing on the concepts of everyday lived religion, religiosity, and identity, how Islamic values and traditions could be localised through women’s narratives in relationships within the Muslim communities, between men and women, between different Muslim communities, and in the wider societal context.     

Lost in translation? The emergence of the digital Guru Granth Sahib

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of the digital online environment on the religious lives of Sikhs with a particular focus on the emergence of the ‘Digital Guru’, i.e. digital versions of the Guru Granth Sahib. Using data gathered through interviews and an online survey, I examine how the ‘Digital Guru’ is impacting on the transmission of the Sikh tradition and on Sikh religious authority. I then explore some of the issues faced in engaging with the ‘Digital Guru’ and the consequences of the emergence of online translations. Given that ‘going online’ has become an everyday practice for many, this article contributes to understandings of the impact of the online environment on the religious adherents in general, and on Sikhs in particular.     

Emotions,ethnography and crack cocaine users

There is little acknowledgement of researcher emotions in qualitative texts, especially so, within the context of street drug users. In these contexts, there is little reflection on how emotion is shaped in the field, not only with research participants, but also within the research environments. Based on a project which used visual ethnographic methods with a cohort of crack cocaine users in south London, this paper offers some reflection on these issues. It considers the practical, methodological and ethical tensions of managing relationships when repositioning ethnography within ‘visual ethnography’ to fit the remit of another qualitative project. Using both interview and observation data, I will exemplify this through two case study ‘scenes’ which follow the narrative of ‘Blood’.¹ I firstly argue that the methodological, emotional, ethical, and pragmatic characteristics of ethnography become ‘magnified’ in the process of capturing visual data. Secondly, I also suggest that many of the ‘everyday’ interactional faculties available to ethnographers are difficult to maintain when using such visual methods in drug-using locations because awareness of social dynamics are amplified. My conclusion offers critical reflections and reflects on the emotional consequences for the researcher when withdrawing from the field.     

Rhetorics of Health Citizenship: Exploring Vernacular Critiques of Government’s Role in Supporting Healthy Living

This article explores how older adults negotiate and partially counter normative expectations of “health citizenship” that stress individual responsibility for maintaining health and preventing health problems. Based on interviews with 55 participants in Canada and the U.K. about what healthy living means to them in their everyday lives, we examine how the dominant discourse of personal responsibility in participants’ responses is counterpointed by a more muted, yet significant, alternative critical perspective on the relative roles and responsibilities of government and citizens in making healthy living possible. Drawing on Hauser’s (1999) concept of vernacular rhetoric along with recent theories of environmental citizenship, we analyze how participants exercise their civic-political judgment by using a logic of dissociation to argue that what government says about the importance of healthy living is incompatible with what government does to support citizens’ abilities to eat healthily and live actively. By deploying this technique of argumentation to address structural-political-economic dimensions of healthy living, participants enact, in modest ways, an alternative, critical-collective mode of health citizenship that complicates and, at least partially, disrupts neoliberal constructions of the individually responsible, “good” health citizen.     

Happiness,eudaimonia, and other holy grails: What can job loss teach us about ‘One-size-fits-all’ theories of well-being?

Abstract

Positive psychology has made significant advances in our understanding of well-being, yet agreement about the definition and nature of well-being remains elusive. This study explores the experience of well-being from a bottom-up, naturalistic point of view and compares these inductive notions with existing a priori theories. Using a qualitative-focused case study methodology, this paper explores how everyday people describe well-being in the context of job loss among a sample of 20 workers from the Ottawa, Canada technology sector. Findings support integrated conceptualizations of hedonia and eudaimonia while also potentially identifying new notions of well-being. Identified themes include (a) life evaluation, (b) transitory experiencing, (c) growth and grounding, (d) environmental mastery/stability, (e) mental ill-being/ill-health, and (f) motivational mindsets/conditions. This study shows well-being to be a rich, pluralistic construct which includes the non-dualistic notions of both subjectivity and objectivity as well as encompassing notions related to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of well-being.     

Integration sozialarbeiterischer Kompetenz in die psychotherapeutische Versorgung

Social and socioeconomic issues are a risk factor for the development of mental health problems and have the potential to negatively impact the psychotherapeutic treatment process. In addition, mental disorders can also result in socioeconomic stress. Neither professional training nor parameters of everyday practice of medical or psychological psychotherapists are geared towards acquiring sufficient competence to adequately handle complex social problems of highly impaired patients. Especially in times of social crises, three interrelated strategies may be helpful: to enhance psychotherapists’ sensibility and competence to recognize and deal with severe social crises, to promote cooperation with clinical social workers and to incorporate sociotherapeutic elements in the overall treatment planning. Using an approach of integrated care at a university medical department as an example, this article presents examples of how to implement these strategies into everyday therapeutic practice.     

Discussion of “Taking the Sting Out: Manifesting Aggression and Containing Difficult States in a Relational Group Psychotherapy”

Ravit Raufman’s paper contributes to the bridging gap between relational approaches and group therapy. It is also important in its recognizing the (group) therapist’s aggression and suggesting how to use it in the service of the group development. In this review I focus on the dynamics of a group of women led by a woman to explain some of the phenomena that Raufman describes in her article, and I add some social unconscious ideas to enrich our understanding of that group.     

Chronic pain as a posture towards the world

This article discusses what chronic pain is “about”, what the intentional object is of pain, and what is the intentional relation like? My approach is based on Maurice Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenology, with an aim is to understand a two‐way relationship: how the sufferers bestow meaning on chronic pain, and how pain, on the other hand, signifies peoples’ life. In contrast to biomedical and cognitive‐behavioral theories, chronic pain is not only meaningful, but as an intentional emotion as well; it does not simply “happen” in the nervous system. I analyzed meanings assigned to pain through the narratives of three patients with chronic pain. Pain is described as creating a discontinuity in the patient’s Lebenswelt at the narrative level. When attempting to find meaning to their pain, patients point both to everyday life and biomedical referents. The structure of bestowing meaning is, metaphorically, like a necklace with everyday world and biomedical interpretations strung like beads, one after the other. The intentional object of pain, on the contrary, is constituted of the patients’ world in its wholeness. My results don’t confirm Drew Leder’s idea of disrupted intentionality, but underline directness as the basic relation of human experience also in case of pain and disease. Pain in itself is an e‐movere, an intense passionate movement, an intentional relation with and a bodily posture taken towards the world.     

Representing diabetes: ‘Brightside’ and ‘chaos’ in autobiography

This paper examines six autobiographical sources written by people with type 1 diabetes. In seeking to improve the understanding of diabetic lifeworlds; some of the autobiographies present heroic stories of ‘overcoming’ diabetes while others present a more ‘chaotic’ narrative. Regardless of their form, all the autobiographies highlight how the everyday problems and concerns associated with diabetes can be hidden and silenced. Therefore, I ask the question of how to use autobiographies as sources of evidence, being aware of the power constructs that may have directed their form. Despite this question, I argue that autobiographies remain crucial sources for exploring the experience of everyday life and much of the silencing in the texts reflects spatial and emotional challenges faced by the authors. I also consider the limitations of representation in the autobiographies calling for an understanding that the experience of diabetes carries with it feelings, emotions and affects that are non-representable and so never entirely knowable. Thus, this paper builds on recent geographical research on emotion and ‘contested’ illnesses, especially those that are not obviously visible or are easily hidden.     

Simulation and Irrationality

Abstract

In this paper, I hope to show how a recent theory in the philosophy of mind concerning how we ‘read’ the minds of others—namely, Heal's version of simulation theory—is consistent with the view that the kind of understanding we bring to bear on the irrational is different in kind from the way we understand one another in the course of everyday life. I shall attempt to show that Heal's version of simulation theory (co-cognition) is to be favoured over its rival ‘theory theories’ in the light of its accommodation of deeply irrational mental states. I claim that simulation theory preserves an asymmetry of psychological explanation which is not similarly preserved by a theory theory account, and I argue that this preservation of asymmetry is an advantage of Heal's account.     

‘That's just what I do’: Placing emotion in academic activism

In this paper, I wish to critically reflect on the role of emotion/s in how I position myself with regards to research, teaching and learning, drawing on experiences over the past three years as a human geography lecturer ‘doing’ research with refugees and asylum seekers in a local inner city area. While there has been increasing debate regarding what constitutes ‘the activist-academic’, in particular deconstructing any dualism or border between ‘academic’ and ‘activist’, the motivation for undertaking such a role is generally ascribed to an ‘ideological commitment’ to social and personal change of one type or another. For me, such a commitment cannot be separated from how I feel about the issues that I research, learn and teach about. In particular, I explore how emotions relate across different spaces and places in my life to produce motivation for activism and how that activism – specifically the encounters with people through it – feeds back into emotional geographies across my professional (and personal) endeavours. More broadly, I'm concerned with the ways in which emotional becomings and the interconnectivities across spaces of activity/ism and everyday life play out beyond my own individual subjective experience, but rather are caught up in ‘situated, relational perspectives’ (after Bondi, 2005). I argue that recognising the significance of emotion has implications for how we conduct and disseminate research.