Soc. Sci., Volume 4, Issue 3 (September 2015) – 24 articles , Pages 469-908

The transnational ex-gay movement is an important context affecting lesbians and sexual minority women around the world. In 2015, the UN Human Rights Commissioner called for all nations to ban conversion therapies. This research investigates a neglected area of scholarship on the ex-gay movement by deconstructing and analyzing the implications of ex-gay discourses of female homosexuality in a global context. The ex-gay movement originated in the United States and has proliferated to nearly every continent. We argue that it is the main purveyor of public, anti-lesbian rhetoric today, constructing lesbianism as sinful and sick to control women’s sexuality, enforce rigid gender roles and inequality, and oppress sexual minority women. Guided by Adrienne Rich’s theory of compulsory heterosexuality and Barbara Risman’s gender structure theory, we analyze how, in ex-gay discourse, lesbianism is demeaned and demonized in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of the gender structure. Finally, we examine the impact of ex-gay discourse on sexual minority women in global context. Full article

Drawing on in-depth interviews with rural Christians living in the South who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB), this study analyzes how they negotiate their religious, geographic, and sexual identities. We find that most interviewees employed two strategies to reconcile their Christian and gay identities: emphasizing a personal connection to an accepting God and finding a local church in their rural community in which they felt accepted. We argue that rural contexts influenced interviewees’ reliance on these strategies and show how individuals can construct multiple interpretations about themselves, which do not always align with existing cultural assumptions. In addition, we argue that gender differences exist with regard to participants’ residential choices and the importance they place on “community”. We find that, in general, women value the privacy and freedom afforded to them in rural areas, a sentiment that is echoed in their religious choices while many of the men value the close knit community they find in their small towns. Full article

While LGBT studies have been problematizing normative categories of sexuality primarily in Western cultures, the status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals in non-Western societies remains understudied. This study examines the political attitudes toward LGBT individuals in Turkish society and explores the experiences of transgender individuals. While Turkey holds a strong economic position among Western countries, the situation of sexual minorities lags behind international standards. This study explores two research questions. First, what is the Turkish government’s outlook for the LGBT community? Secondly, what kind of problems and challenges do trans-individuals experience in Turkey? This study first introduces a macro-level analysis of the politics of gender identity in Turkey by analyzing the debates of four deputies in the Turkish Parliament, each representing their parties’ disparate viewpoints. Secondly, a micro-level analysis of previously collected interviews with twenty-five trans-individuals are also examined that shed light on the difficulties of being a trans-individual in Turkey. The content analysis shows that trans-individuals experience physical, sexual, and emotional violence, in addition to experiencing discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare. The findings of this micro-level analysis elucidate the continuous discrimination, inequality, and violence that these individuals experience, while the macro-level analysis portrays the state’s discriminatory policies toward LGBT individuals in Turkey. Full article

During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly every state revised its laws or adopted new legislation facilitating the transfer of juvenile offenders from juvenile court to criminal court. Previously, transfer was reserved for the “worst juveniles”, or those youths who were charged with serious violent offenses. This paper compares and contrasts girls and boys who were judicially waived to adult court in one state from 1994 to 2000. These data suggest that there may be other factors that influence judicial decision-making on the issue of transfer. Policy considerations are also discussed. Full article

In this paper, an overview of the history of education in railway and metro engineering in Brazil is presented, including its beginnings, its apogee, its near extinction, and its return at the beginning of the 21st century. The trajectory of the Brazilian professional education began with the implementation of small railway workshops located along the railway which were outside of the regular education system. At the end of the 20th century, the economic crisis, privatization, and drastic reduction of investment led to the scrapping and almost eradicating of the Brazilian rail network, followed by the death of railway education in Brazil. In recent years, the railway industry was stimulated, giving way to large investments, impacting and creating new opportunities for development in Brazil. This was one of the fundamental aspects for the development of new professional higher education programs in the railway and metro sector in Brazil. The first project to be implemented in Brazil was the course on railway and metro engineering of the Federal University of Santa Catarina. This course aims to provide structured training in four main areas: vehicle design, operation, maintenance, and train and metro management. Full article

Outlined below are selected results of a 5-year long national survey which investigated the knowledge, values and attitudes of 430 Year 11 and 12 Muslim students in eight Muslim High schools towards the mainstream Australia and Australians society. The findings reflect a wide spectrum of responses with a strong implication that much work is needed to bring about an appropriate degree of adjustment. Providing awareness sessions to students and parents—both non-Muslims and Muslims—which address critical social, religious and cultural issues including stereotyping and inclusivity, is key. Full article

A few literary scholars have long claimed that Shakespeare did not write some of his best plays (history plays and tragedies) and proposed at one time or another various suspect authorship candidates. Most modern-day scholars of Shakespeare have rejected this claim, arguing that strong evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems being his name appears on them as the author. This has caused and led to an ongoing scholarly academic debate for quite some long time. Stylometry is a fast-growing field often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed texts. Stylometric attempts to resolve this literary puzzle have raised interesting questions over the past few years. The following paper contributes to “the Shakespeare authorship question” by using a mathematically-based methodology to examine the hypothesis that Shakespeare wrote all the disputed plays traditionally attributed to him. More specifically, the mathematically based methodology used here is based on Mean Proximity, as a linear hierarchical clustering method, and on Principal Components Analysis, as a non-hierarchical linear clustering method. It is also based, for the first time in the domain, on Self-Organizing Map U-Matrix and Voronoi Map, as non-linear clustering methods to cover the possibility that our data contains significant non-linearities. Vector Space Model (VSM) is used to convert texts into vectors in a high dimensional space. The aim of which is to compare the degrees of similarity within and between limited samples of text (the disputed plays). The various works and plays assumed to have been written by Shakespeare and possible authors notably, Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, John Fletcher, and Thomas Kyd, where “similarity” is defined in terms of correlation/distance coefficient measure based on the frequency of usage profiles of function words, word bi-grams, and character triple-grams. The claim that Shakespeare authored all the disputed plays traditionally attributed to him is falsified in favor of the alternative authors according to the stylistic criteria and analytic methodology used. The result of this validated analysis is empirically-based, objective, and involves replicable evidence which can be used in conjunction with existing arguments to resolve the question of whether or not Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote all the disputed plays traditionally attributed to him. Full article

This article analyzes what can happen to forced returnees upon arrival in their country of nationality. Subjective configurations of state agents in the Global South have created return risks, which in turn transform subjectivities of post-colonial citizens. The article contributes to this Special Issue by tracing repercussions of the externalization and internalization of border controls. In the case of Cameroon, these connections have resulted in the criminalization of emigration. Aspiring migrants are prosecuted if their departure projects fail to respect the entry requirements of countries in the Global North. The article is based on research conducted in Douala, Cameroon, in the form of discussions with control agents at the international airport, investigations at a prison, a review of related case law, police registers and interviews with Cameroonians returnees (November 2013–January 2014). Border controls and connected anti-fraud programs suppress family-based forms of solidarity and allow only for subjectivities rooted in state-managed forms of national identity. The article illustrates how efforts to combat fraud fuel corruption in returnees’ social networks, whereby, instead of receiving remittances, families in emigration countries have to mobilize financial resources in order to liberate returnees from police stations or prison complexes. Migration related detention of nationals in the Global South highlights the growing significance of exit controls in migration management. Full article

This paper discusses the importance of leadership talent in the rail industry in Australia. Like many other countries around the world, rail is troubled by its ability to attract new talent as older leaders with specialized knowledge retire. This study sought to identify whether the sector is making the most of the talent already existing within, knowing the barriers faced in attracting new industry entrants, and questions what can be done to strengthen current approaches to developing leaders. In exploring the meaning of leadership talent, from a skills based perspective with three levels of leaders, blended methods using semi-structured interviews and a survey were utilized. The study is important because it focuses on the people aspects of the industry, a little researched area of rail that has major implications for how employees are engaged and retained. The findings identified a certain mindset, culture and approach about leadership talent in organizations that overlooked the heterogeneity of rail organization populations, precluding certain groups of people from becoming leaders. The project identified that leadership and other soft skills required in the rail industry are both under researched, and often undervalued, for the impact that they can have on performance and productivity of companies. There are key messages from this study for both organizations as well as inspiring rail industry leaders. Full article

Among the most significant issues facing welfare states are the implications of economic globalization for employment policies. This issue is confronted from the viewpoint of workfarism, the incentives created by social policies for increasing participation in the labor market. To measure the limited changes involved, the analytical framework also includes institutional stickiness, pointing to the capability of welfare state institutions to resist external pressures. Panel data on capital flow, an active labor market policy (ALMP), and unemployment benefit (UB) expenditures in 19 welfare states between 1985 and 2010 are drawn from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the KOF Index of Globalization (KOF). The Vector Autoregressive Moving-Average model with exogenous regressors (VARMAX)-regression analysis found institutional stickiness to be a more significant factor than capital flow in 61% of the observations. The impact of capital flow was particularly significant in the United Kingdom, and in northern and continental Europe, and a tendency toward workfarism was detected in 37% of the welfare states. From a comparative perspective, the impact via the increased capital flow to workfare-related policies is a matter of contrasts rather than a unilateral phenomenon. Full article

This study aimed to examine the process of the changes that one survivor of suicide following a loved one’s suicide experienced during the postvention. We first describe our rationale for using a forgiveness postvention, as well as the details of the postvention; then, we describe findings from a case study focusing on the key postvention moments identified through the single case postvention. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed. Full article

In this article, we apply three theoretical frameworks, poststructural feminism, queer, and sociology of gender to the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) in order to better account for heterosexual female perpetration and same-sex IPV. Although the traditional feminist paradigm—that assumes men use violence as an extension of patriarchy against their female victims—has been useful in explaining some instances of IPV, it does not adequately frame instances of heterosexual female perpetration and IPV in same-sex relationships. Therefore, in this article we seek to add to existing literature by re-theorizing IPV using poststructural feminism, queer, and sociology of gender perspectives, and their attendant understanding of power as dynamic, fluid, and relational and gender as both interactional and structural, in order to open up new ways of framing IPV and encourage new lines of empirical research resulting in better policy proscriptions and treatment interventions. Full article

In this paper, I argue that we need to rethink how we conceive of death as “inevitable”. There are two main strands to my analysis. First, I use the work of Stengers to trace the complex and, occasionally, contradictory ways in which the concept of entropy was developed within physics in the 19th and 20th century. I argue that this has led to a general but ill-conceived notion of the universe as wasting away, as dying. This is a form of inevitability which has infected our understanding of what constitutes the death of individual humans. I then turn to the contrast that Whitehead draws between creativity and “perpetual perishing”. I suggest that this contrast might help us to develop a wider, more coherent, approach to thinking about the status of death, and its supposed inevitability. In the final section, I reflect upon my father’s death in 2013 in light of some of the concepts and problems raised throughout the paper. Full article

The aim of this paper is to describe the postgraduate course in “Railway Infrastructure and Systems Engineering” at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, funded by rail companies operating in Italy. It represents a successful example of cooperation between academia and industry in the field of railway transport. The success of the program is attested by its placement (the 90% of the graduates find an employment within six months in the companies which support the course; this percentage reached the 98% in the last three editions) and by the fact that every year it receives many more applications (almost 400 last year) than the maximum number of students that can attend the course (30). The main factors that make this course successful are its multidisciplinary training and the very close collaboration between the University and partner companies. In fact, the program of each module is designed both by academics and by managers of the companies in order to ensure an up-to-date teaching, which provides both the academic and the industrial point of view of any rail subject; this enables students to obtain a complete vision of the railway system, so to be able to work in any of the partner companies. Full article

Scholars generally are in agreement that the pace of globalization is rapidly accelerating. Globalization’s impact, beyond the socio-economic and political discourses, is affecting conceptions of culture and cultural studies, and changing and restructuring spaces, global, national and personal interactions and relationships. The “texts” and artifacts borne of culture—activities, events and our conception thereof are a mechanism for the propagation of culture. Simultaneously Westernization/Americanization impacts local cultures through consumerism, which obfuscates local traditions, knowledge and experiences. This research argues that culture is a dynamic, adaptive concept and practice, “borrowing” liberally from ideological and technological innovations of other cultures and integrating these borrowed aspects into the construction and modification of culture across spatial and geographical divides to ensure particular cultures’ survival. The research shows that the local affects the global, and vice versa. It selects local communication “texts” to show that cultures are not “victims” of globalization or the proliferation of mass media. Cultures actively adopt and integrate globalization’s technological artifacts. Globalization’s positive effects are dynamic and span cultural interactions and permeate structures of authority at personal, national and global levels. Full article

This paper sets out to explore the thinking and the direct and often indirect influence of the social theorist Philip Rieff on later generations of social theorists, especially in regard to the key sociological concept of community. It is argued that the work of this culturally-conservative social theorist has had a powerful, if somewhat shadowy, influence on such key radical critics of modern societies such as Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett, revealing the need to acknowledge the significant resources of a Rieffian cultural sociology for critical thought. Full article

This article discusses the lack of knowledge and awareness that hampers end of life experiences, for both the dying and those left behind. It draws on personal experiences, and explores working creatively with dying people, using observations, painting and writing to communicate ideas. Asking the dying to tell us and show us what it is like is very successful in raising awareness, and the article concludes that less separation within our communities from the dying would normalise the process and lessen the fear. Full article

My analysis places the assertions of political presence by non-citizen immigrant youth in the U.S. (often referred to as DREAMers) within a rapidly globalizing world; this placement re-frames the DREAMers’ movement from a fight for U.S. citizenship to a broader critique of the limits and impossibility of liberal democratic citizenship, which claims to be all-inclusive. Increased transnational migration has brought into stark relief the inequality that current frameworks of nation-state citizenship, as a caste-system of rights, have codified. I am interested in the activism of immigrant youth as a place to explore where immigrants themselves are reasserting the right to politics. This reassertion privileges the social embeddedness of family ties and community above the notion of individual choice or individual rationality. In doing so, this articulation of politics is a critique of the liberal order by forcing the consideration of the contexts and structures that create migration, exploitation, and transnational communities of belonging. Full article

We examine the lived experiences of high-school students who participated in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)-centered activism of some kind, highlighting the promise of gay-straight alliance groups by comparing the experiences of students at schools with gay-straight alliances (GSA schools) with the experiences of students at schools that did not have an LGBTQ-specific group (no-GSA schools). We compare students at GSA and no-GSA schools based on their experiences of harassment, experiences of support from authority figures, and patterns of friendships. We find that students at both types of schools experienced harassment and heard negative comments about lesbian and gay people. However, students at GSA schools reported more support from teachers and administrators than students at no-GSA schools, who have stories of teachers and administrators actively opposing equality for LGBTQ people. Students at GSA schools reported a wide variety of friendships across sexual identities, while students at no-GSA schools felt more isolated and withdrawn. This much-needed qualitative comparative analysis of students’ experiences brings a human face to the improved quality of life that schools with gay-straight alliances can bring to young people. Full article

This article analyses self-portrayals and gender constructions among Swedish male bodybuilders who are engaged in fitness doping. The empirical material comes from a larger ethnographic investigation into gym culture. The results show that there is a strong propensity to conform with particular gender fantasies that rests heavily on a binary understanding of gendered, doped bodies. However, this storyline does not apprehend the entire self-presentation of the analysed drug users. Negotiations and inclusive subversions of traditional gender norms are also expressed. For example, the narratives show how the use of performance-enhancing substances makes it possible for (heterosexual) men to approach, touch and express feelings of desire towards other men and their bodies. As such, this practice can be viewed as a contestation of hegemonic gender values, in which masculinity and fitness doping are detached from a quite heterosexist understanding, and turned into a symbolic world of homoerotic pleasure. Full article

This essay aims to clarify what it means to de-essentialize the concept of “resilience”. Pre-determinated assumptions regarding its normativity or positive character are to be disproven in order to conceptualize it as an open (social) process; thus to adopt a social constructivist perspective on the phenomenon to which this term refers, while avoiding the typical pitfalls of relativism. Full article

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, members of the Chicana/o Movement reached across class, borders, and ideologies to proclaim a political solidarity with the Mexican Left. Both, Chicana/os and Mexican activists expressed a narrative of political solidarity that encompassed a perceived shared experience of oppression and struggles for liberation. I contend, however, that both groups saw the source of their oppression and forms of resistance through different lenses. Chicana/o activists identified racism, discrimination, and cultural erasure with oppression, and they retrofit Mexican nationalism with political radicalism. In contrast, Mexican activists celebrated Marxist ideologies as radical political resistance against an increasing authoritarian government and associated Mexican nationalism with state repression and political manipulation. Full article

The paper analyses cross-border co-operation with regard to its degree of formalization. Herewith, the focus is not on single cross-border organizations, but on the encompassing governance systems in the respective regions. That means that the specific combination of differently organized cross-border arrangements is analyzed. Cross-border governance systems are facing multiple governance challenges which ask either for a certain degree of institutionalization or for more informal solutions. Based on an empirical comparison of the two experienced, but differently organized, cross-border regions in Europe the Lake Constance Region and the Upper-Rhine Region, the paper illustrates that the organizational variation of cross-border governance systems show specific patterns. From these findings, first arguments are deduced for balancing formalized and more informal co-operations in cross-border governance systems. Full article

This thirty-year case study uses surveys, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis to examine the adaptive capacity of Zanjera San Marcelino, an indigenous irrigation management system in the northern Philippines. This common pool resource (CPR) system exists within a turbulent social-ecological system (SES) characterized by episodic shocks such as large typhoons as well as novel surprises, such as national political regime change and the construction of large dams. The Zanjera nimbly responded to these challenges, although sometimes in ways that left its structure and function substantially altered. While a partial integration with the Philippine National Irrigation Agency was critical to the Zanjera’s success, this relationship required on-going improvisation and renegotiation. Over time, the Zanjera showed an increasing capacity to learn and adapt. A core contribution of this analysis is the integration of a CPR study within an SES framework to examine resilience, made possible the occurrence of a wide range of challenges to the Zanjera’s function and survival over the long period of study. Long-term analyses like this one, however rare, are particularly useful for understanding the adaptive and transformative dimensions of resilience. Full article