In 2020, the coronavirus crisis ruptured societies and their everyday life around the globe. This article is a contribution to critically theorising the changes societies have undergone in the light ...of the coronavirus crisis. It asks: How have everyday life and everyday communication changed in the coronavirus crisis? How does capitalism shape everyday life and everyday communication during this crisis?
Section 2 focuses on how social space, everyday life, and everyday communication have changed in the coronavirus crisis. Section 3 focuses on the communication of ideology in the context of coronavirus by analysing the communication of coronavirus conspiracy stories and false coronavirus news.
The coronavirus crisis is an existential crisis of humanity and society. It radically confronts humans with death and the fear of death. This collective experience can on the one hand result in new forms of solidarity and socialism or can on the other hand, if ideology and the far-right prevails, advance war and fascism. Political action and political economy are decisive factors in such a profound crisis that shatters society and everyday life.
In the Atlantic Ocean island state of Cabo Verde, silence about hunger is perennial. Elderly people who lived through devastating famines during Portuguese colonialism seldom talk about their ...memories, and contemporary experiences of food deprivation are buried in silence. Yet there is one space in which the silence is broken: music. Exploring that space, this article analyses representations of drought and hunger in Cabo Verdean music and explores the social contexts, positionalities and sentiments that the lyrics evoke. The article portrays the everyday listening to and singing of the lyrics as a kind of 'organic remembering' and demonstrates how it contributes to a view of hunger as a key symbol of the nation at the same time as the experience of hunger is surrounded by silence in everyday life. Furthermore, the article brings up the silencing of the Portuguese' colonial responsibility for the sufferings. It also presents some reasons for this, including Cabo Verde's hybrid position in the Portuguese empire as an uneasy mixture between a distant and neglected appendage to the metropole and a colony. Finally, it argues that not blaming the ex-colonisers has been an important way forward for the small and dependent postcolonial state.
A common thread has emerged in recent critiques of planetary urbanization. Whether on empirical, epistemological or theoretical grounds, critics tend to posit ‘difference against ion’, arguing that ...planetary urbanization—as an theory of large‐scale phenomena—occludes ‘everyday’ embodied, small‐scale and place‐based forms of social difference in its production and/or application. Here we engage with this critique as two queer, feminist scholars sympathetic both to critics’ arguments about the politics of knowledge production and to the planetary urbanization framework. While we agree that the theory's most visible adherents have not systematically engaged with questions of difference, especially at smaller scales of social analysis, we reject the suggestion that planetary urbanization is inherently incompatible with such concerns. Rather, we argue that the opposite is true. Using examples from our own research, we show how the planetary urbanization framework—by enforcing a multiscalar and non‐city‐centric view of apparently local phenomena—can be central to theorizing and understanding social difference at the level of everyday life in empirical research.
Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific ...aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic socialization framework that proposes that MENA citizens are not only passively socialized by religion but also have agency (within their religiosity). This disaggregates the influence of religiosity, highlights its multifacetedness, and theorizes the moderating roles that gender and sociocognitive empowerment play via gendered processes of agentic dissociations. Using 15 World Values Surveys and multilevel models, our analyses show that most dimensions of religiosity fuel opposition to gender equality. However, the salience of religion in daily life is found to increase women’s support for gender equality and cushion the negative impact of religious service attendance. Also, gender and education moderate the impacts of several religiosity dimensions; for instance, women’s (initially greater) support for gender equality more sharply declines with increased service attendance than men’s. Altogether, this study finds that religious socialization is multifaceted and gendered, and that certain men and women are inclined and equipped to deviate from dominant patriarchal religious interpretations.
Securing, and negotiating, privacy with intimate bodily needs is an ordinary but often hidden feature of our personal lives. Drawing upon a UK-based qualitative study that utilised diaries and ...follow-up interviews to explore everyday life with the health condition irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), this article explores the navigations of privacy when anticipating or experiencing symptoms. Building upon sociological understandings of privacy and personal life, this article maps the intimate and mobile ways in which privacy is sought out – disrupted or achieved – in domestic, material and public realms. It does so by following the paths to privacy and the personal belongings carried as they move through personal life. The article demonstrates how privacy is embodied and spatially, temporally, relationally and materially shaped. In doing so, the article argues that privacy comes to shift through everyday contexts and social relations with intimate materialities in mind.
This article concerns an insufficiently studied link in cultural class analysis, namely that between class-structured lifestyle differences and social closure. It employs a modified version of ...Michèle Lamont’s promising, yet under-theorised approach to the study of symbolic boundaries – the conceptual distinctions made by social actors in categorising people, practices, tastes, attitudes and manners in everyday life. Drawing on 46 qualitative interviews with people from the city of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis focuses particularly on a horizontal boundary-drawing dynamic between middle-class interviewees. It is argued that entanglements of different types of status judgements work both to construct and reinforce social boundaries between class fractions. The findings draw attention to what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the capital composition principle of social differentiation. Though fundamental to Bourdieu’s model of the social space, such systematic intra-class divisions have seldom been discussed in detail in contemporary cultural-stratification research.
People high in attachment avoidance typically respond more negatively to partner support, but some research suggests they can be calmed by high levels of practical support. In the present research, ...we attempted to reconcile these inconsistencies by modeling curvilinear associations between romantic partners' support and support recipients' outcomes and testing whether these curvilinear associations were moderated by recipients' degree of attachment avoidance. We examined the effect of partner support during support-relevant discussions (Studies 1-3) and in daily life (Study 4) on support recipients' distress (Studies 1-4), self-efficacy (Studies 2 and 3), perceived partner control/criticism (Studies 2 and 4), and distancing from the partner (Study 4). The results and a meta-analysis across all four studies (N = 298 couples) demonstrated that the curvilinear effect of practical support on recipients' outcomes was moderated by attachment avoidance. Highly avoidant recipients exhibited more negative responses as their partner provided them low-to-moderate levels of practical support, including increasing distress, perceived partner control/criticism and distancing, and decreasing self-efficacy. However, as partners' practical support shifted from moderate to high levels, highly avoidant recipients experienced more positive outcomes, including decreasing distress, perceived partner control/criticism and distancing, and increasing self-efficacy. Less avoidant individuals were resilient and experienced better outcomes regardless of the level of partner support they received. These results demonstrate the utility of curvilinear models in reconciling the costs and benefits of support, and indicate that high levels of practical support can overcome the defenses of highly avoidant individuals by offering undeniable evidence of the partner's availability.
Understanding our beliefs and experiences means we must often explore our childhood experiences, and reflect on how, at certain points in our life, a range of barriers, obstacles, and societal or ...social constructs have resulted in shaping the opportunities we had and our behaviours in accessing them. Herein we consider and reflect on the paper ‘“Muddy Glee”: rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork’ and take inspiration to reframe and discuss a broader context of childhood experiences in setting the background for the observations made within the paper. We highlight and discuss three key provocations, which provide a framework to explore how social constructions of gender, from within the womb onwards, impact women's experiences, challenges, and pleasures of fieldwork in geography, and moreover link these experiences to the restrictions on access to the outdoors women experience in everyday life.
Short
Understanding our beliefs and experiences means we must often explore our childhood experiences, and reflect on how, at certain points in our life, a range of barriers, obstacles, and societal or social constructs have resulted in shaping the opportunities we had and our behaviours in accessing them. Herein we consider and reflect on the paper ‘“Muddy Glee”: rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork’ and take inspiration to reframe and discuss a broader context of childhood experiences in setting the background for the observations made within the paper.
An Adaptationist Framework for Personality Science Lukaszewski, Aaron W.; Lewis, David M.G.; Durkee, Patrick K. ...
European journal of personality,
November/December 2020, Volume:
34, Issue:
6
Journal Article
The capacity to relax and letting one's mind wander is one of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis. In cases where this capacity seems hindered, the reasons are characteristically sought from ...particular and specific inhibitions: what is thereby taken to be interfered is not the capacity of relaxation but only the activation of this capacity in a particular regard. In contrast to this mainstream way of thinking, Winnicott argues that the capacity for mental relaxation is a developmental achievement and presupposes a safe sense of integration. The present article investigates this dynamism. It clarifies how an integral sense of self arises out of primary unintegration, explains how a well-established sense of self grounds the ability to relax, and underlines the centrality of relaxed unintegration in everyday life as well as in the analytic situation.