2024

JCS Focus

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社會學·國際頂刊

Current Sociology

(《當代社會學》)

的最新目錄與摘要

期刊簡介

- Current Sociology -

About journal

Current Sociology 是國際社會學會的官方期刊，也是目前世界范圍內(nèi)歷史最悠久的社會學刊物之一。本刊采用同行評議的審稿方式，發(fā)表原創(chuàng)性研究文章和評論文章，旨在促進以社會學發(fā)展為目的的學術(shù)討論并展現(xiàn)社會學家在全球化進程中對現(xiàn)代社會的貢獻。

Current issue

Current Sociology 每年發(fā)布7期，其最新一期（Volume 72 Issue 7, November 2024）共14篇文章，詳情如下。

原版目錄

- Current Sociology -

Articles

- - Current Sociology - -

Caste and its implications for sociologies of inequality

Gurminder K Bhambra

The concern to think about the place of caste as a conceptual category – within, and in relation to, broader sociological understandings of inequality – was the primary motivation of the British Sociological Association Presidential event on ‘Caste and its Implications for Sociologies of Inequality’ held at the London School of Economics in late autumn 2023. It sought not only to engage with caste sociologically but also to ask the question of what a consideration of caste could bring to sociological thinking more generally.

Race and caste in the making of US sociology

Suraj Milind Yengde

In this article, we take a look at the influence of 20th-century provenance of caste as a category of academic importance meriting a debate in American sociology and beyond. Two actors participated in the animating discourse of caste and race in the annals of American sociology. Oliver Cromwell Cox took a class position to define caste, unmaking the hierarchies set in social structures. Instead, he advocated for a racialized system to understand the post-slavery capitalist America. Gerald Berreman represented a different camp that found social hierarchies to be co-determinant of relations and division arranged into a caste society. The debate over caste, nevertheless, admitted to the plausibility of castes contrasted with India’s caste system. However, caste categorization was found to be an appropriate application to the conditions of social inequalities. Gunnar Myrdal and other scholars of repute contributed to the debate. What remained limited in their theoretical contributions to the discussion was an inadequate focus on the lived reality and politics of the caste formulations in the postcolonial, socialist mode of production. A serious examination of untouchability, sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that regulate the kernel of the caste system as well as the racialized castes in India were not studied or referenced in detail. This article adds to that void a theoretical understanding of the discussion on caste, race and colour in sociological and anthropological disciplines.

Comments on Suraj Yengde’s lecture

Faisal Devji

Emerging out of religious conflict in early modern Europe, the terms race and caste as we understand them today went on to define hierarchical relations in different parts of the globe. Yet, they have never completely parted ways and Suraj Yengde’s essay explores these hidden connections in the use that American sociologists made of both categories. They generally did so by setting one term against the other in the attempt to account for racial discrimination in the United States. Race and caste were mediated by class in these debates, a category seen as being more modern and progressive than either of them. The comments that follow argue that caste and race are not simply the precursors of class and continue to interact with each other without the latter’s mediation. Anti-race and anti-caste politics are also more connected to religious forms of universality.

Race and/or caste: What is at stake?

Meena Dhanda

This brief response raises a few key questions emerging from Suraj Yengde’s lecture and suggests a critical direction they can be steered towards. It considers in what sense caste may deserve an epistemology of its own. It suggests that we must look at what is at stake in answering the conundrum of which framework to use as primary, though a comparison between anti-racism and anti-casteism is preferable to one between race and caste. A continuing challenge is to bear witness to the experience of the subordinated. What is at stake is the intellectual and political consensus necessary to move towards action – to bring about an institutional or social change. Therefore, what is at stake is the power of the concepts deployed to communicate with and convince agents of change, principally, the activists. During these trying times, revisiting conceptual histories to provide a fresh perspective is immensely challenging; Suraj Yengde has done well to bravely undertake this challenge.

Race, caste and colonialism

John Holmwood

This article addresses Oliver Cromwell Cox’s criticisms of the application of the concept of caste to understand race relations in the southern states of the Unite States. It proposes that there are deep similarities in the experiences of Dalits in India and Blacks in the United States, but argues that these derive from the modern construction of caste and race in the conjunction of colonialism and capitalism. In each case, the problems do not derive from the resilience of ‘pre-modern’ social structures, but from modern structures of colonialism that continue in the post-civil war United States and post-independence India. They are problems of democracy, not problems to be solved by the application of democratic values.

Caste, gender, race: Signposts of a feminist anti-caste approach

Kalpana Kannabiran, Bandana Purkayastha

This commentary responds to the essay by Suraj Yengde titled ‘Race and Caste in the Making of US Sociology’, picks up a few threads in Yengde’s argument and attempts to unravel them in the interests of deepening this conversation on an issue that has returned to the foreground of global sociology and anthropology. Given the thin and tenuous disciplinary separations between sociology and social anthropology in India, especially evident in studies on caste, this commentary straddles these two disciplines in the Indian context and points to some interesting disciplinary intersections in the American context. Specifically, Yengde’s discussion of questions of caste, race and class is extended to look at Indian and diasporic contexts to speak to the specific intersections of caste, race, gender, class, region and temporality in contexts of caste formation drawing on the work of Joan Mencher and Gail Omvedt, among others.

Are public sector organizations still relevant for poverty reduction? Frontline workers’ personal resources and the centrality of trust

Einat Lavee

This study draws on 214 in-depth interviews with frontline Israeli workers providing services in the public sector to investigate whether organizational embeddedness helps individuals living in poverty accumulate resources from public organizations in times of reduced government support. Findings show that public sector workers provide clients with informal, personal resources that allow better coping with poverty. Beyond local, short-term assistance, these personal resources are provided in the hopes of strengthening trust among low-income populations, thereby achieving long-term improved well-being and social inclusion. Findings expose new dimensions in the relations between organizations and their low-income clients, as well as the importance of organizational embeddedness in coping with poverty.

‘No way. You will not make [insert country here] home’: Anti-asylum discursive transfer from Australia to Europe

Madeleine Geibel, Farida Fozdar, Fiona McGaughey

This article analyses the ways Australia’s overseas ‘public information campaign’ on asylum based around the phrase ‘No way. You will not make Australia home’ has been adopted by far-right movements in Europe. Considering examples of anti-asylum online video campaigns and activism in a range of European countries, we note semiotic and discursive similarities with the Australian campaign. We discuss the implications of such discursive transfer from official Australian government policy to far-right campaigns promoting a blatantly racist agenda in Europe. We also consider the broader question of the fundamental challenge to international law inherent in the promulgation of information that denies the right to seek asylum in Refugee Convention signatory states.

Middle-class responses to climate change: An analysis of the ecological habitus of tech workers

Robert Dorschel

The question of how the digital economy responds to ecological issues has gained salience in recent years. So far, though, social scientists have primarily taken interest in the ecological positionings of tech entrepreneurs. Little attention has been paid to the middle-class fraction of ‘tech workers’ who are responsible for programming, designing, and managing the digital technologies that reconfigure socio-material relations. Based on 52 interviews with data scientists and user experience designers, the article analyzes the ecological habitus of this new professional segment. Four central ecological schemas are identified: (1) managing limited resources, (2) critical techno-optimism, (3) academic concern, and (4) lifestyle struggles. Simultaneously, the article discusses how these four schemas relate to the different forms of capital held by tech workers. This mapping of the ecological habitus of tech workers shows how social relationships with nature are underpinned by class positions. The article thus pursues dual aims, contributing to research on green capitalism as well as to debates on how the middle class relates to climate change.

Sustainability and the politics of the body in alternative food consumption: An embodied materialist perspective

Alice Dal Gobbo

Health is a key dimension of contemporary food consumption. This preoccupation is beginning to overlap with ecological concerns, as healthy diets are said to largely correspond with sustainable diets. Nevertheless, this link remains rather vague and under-researched in practice. This article adopts an ‘embodied materialist’ perspective to inquire into how the health–sustainability nexus is articulated in the everyday labour of people engaging in alternative food consumption. The interviews, carried out in Milan (Italy), suggest that focusing on health might not always be straightforwardly effective for the promotion of deep and systemic changes. The analysis finds three ways in which the health–sustainability nexus is articulated in daily life. If framed within the dominant articulation of labour and value, health is an individualistic preoccupation with limited potential for socio-ecological transformation. When food labour is guided by the very different logic of care, which emphasises relationality, fragility and the search for a shared wellbeing, more ecological practices emerge, but with some ambivalent implications especially with regards to social justice. Collective engagement in alternative food networks politicises the body more deeply, making it a concrete site of struggle against unsustainable food regimes.

Femtech apps and quantification of the reproductive body in India: Issues and concerns

Paro Mishra, Ravinder Kaur, Shambhawi Vikram, Prashastika Sharma

This article examines datafication of the reproductive body in India through use of femtech mobile phone applications (henceforth, apps). Femtech apps quantify reproductive processes such as periods, conception, pregnancy and hormonal health and promise their users greater ‘self-awareness’ and ‘control’ through ‘self-management’. Most studies on femtech refer to users in the Global North, while there are few studies on femtech adoption in the developing countries. This article, based on qualitative and quantitative data, and informed by a feminist technoscience framework, illustrates how femtech’s promise of empowerment through datafication of reproduction is fraught with contradictions and tensions, and has exclusionary and risky consequences for Indian users. It examines the gendered technological landscape’s bearing on concrete practices of design and innovation, and shows how femtech reinforces gendered social hierarchies rather than dismantling them and liberating users. Under datafication, health standards become extremely narrowly defined, marginalising those whose reproductive health trajectories may not conform to normative standards. Femtech’s proliferation in India has also failed to recognise the structural inequalities and socio-economic disadvantages that characterise healthcare access. Finally, the legal grey areas and ill-defined data privacy policies in India allow for easy commercialisation of users’ bodies and personal data possible. This further undermines the liberational rhetoric of femtech, as data privacy breaches are embodied forms of violence with consequences for users’ bodily autonomy and dignity. Femtech’s pursuit of maximising commercial gain is thus at odds with the feminist technoscience project of minimising women’s exploitation and oppression.

The power of a look: Tracing webs of power in intimate partner violence through an everyday act

Ewa Protasiuk, Alicia Chatterjee, Melissa E Dichter

The relationship between power, control, and violence defines the experience of intimate partner violence, abuse that occurs within the context of a current or former intimate relationship. Coercive control, including using violence and threats of violence to restrict another’s freedom, is an especially dangerous manifestation of intimate partner violence. In this article, we point to an under-explored modality of power and control as well as resistance to intimate partner violence: the act of looking. Our analysis of interviews with 18 intimate partner violence survivors in the United States identified ‘looking’ as an emergent category in their experiences. We read these mentions of ‘looking’ through select insights from symbolic interactionism, post-structuralism, and postcolonial studies. We argue that acts of looking are everyday mechanisms for both the contestation and the maintenance of power and control in survivors’ lives, highlighting dynamics of intimate partner violence that extend beyond physical violence. Paying attention to everyday forms of interaction like looking helps illuminate the webs of power in which survivors’ intimate relationships are situated, including at the social and institutional levels. Tracing the ‘looks’ of survivors also underscores both the social nature of abusive intimate power and the social embeddedness of survivor healing.

‘Being old’ and ‘feeling old’ in contemporary Italy: Active ageing and COVID-19

Valeria Cappellato, Eugenia Mercuri

Over the last 20?years, ageing has been studied through the lens of an active ageing perspective, which considers older adults as responsible for their own conditions. However, the COVID-19 health emergency has highlighted its limits. Drawing on a sample of semi-structured interviews – collected before and during the pandemic – with people aged 65?years and above who are self-sufficient and live in Turin, Italy, this article explores the representations and perceptions of ageing, to highlight the possible effects of the COVID-19 emergency. The results show that representations of ageing revolve around two fundamental viewpoints: one considers older adults as a cost for the community because of their unproductiveness; the other overlaps the loss of self-sufficiency with a definition of ‘real’ old age. Furthermore, the interviews introduce a distinction between those who – considered productive despite their age – were called to provide a service to the community during the lockdown, and those who were judged vulnerable because of their age. Such ambiguous messages have raised new questions about an active and successful ageing imperative.

What is left unsaid: Omissions in biographical narratives

Sónia Bernardo Correia, Ana Caetano

When we ask people to tell us the story of their lives, it is not the full extent of their biographies that we have access to, but only a partial version of it. Biographical narratives are permeated by processes of selection that imply highlighting some things while omitting others. Most of the time, what is left unsaid cannot be fully acknowledged, precisely because it is not explicitly verbalised. In the scope of the research project Biographical echoes, we were able to identify significant events and relationships in a person’s life that were not disclosed in autobiographical accounts but were unveiled in hetero-biographical ones by close people who were interviewed about that person’s life. The triangulation of data allowed us to access elements of a biography that would otherwise have remained unseen. By taking omissions as units of analysis, we characterised their main features and identified three distinct profiles of omissions using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis: relational, light and taboo. We argue that the act of omitting something is a meaningful social action with implications at both the biographical and analytical levels.

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