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Social Transformation (social + transformation)
Selected AbstractsPoor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations in Cuenca, EcuadorETHOS, Issue 1 2000Ann Miles This paper, based on eight years of observation and interviewing in southern Ecuador, examines how the processes of modernization affect the lives of poor adolescent girls growing up in the city. Focusing exclusively on the daughters of rural-tourban migrants, this paper discusses how both Hispanic gender models and a rigid class system ultimately serve to undermine the state-sponsored rhetoric promoting girls'full participation in the modernizing economy. The disjuncture between the imagined world of professional success and the real one of urban poverty is described. Using a theoretical framework that views culture and ideology as contestable domains, the author argues that consideration of the responses of adolescent girls is important for understanding future social transformations. [source] Strengthening the role of the social sciences in society: the World Social Science InitiativeINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 177 2003Ali Kazancigil There seems to be a mismatch between the societal demand for social-science knowledge and the supply of knowledge from the social sciences. The need for a re-assessment of the way the social sciences operate and their role and status in society, is the main raison d'étre of the World Social Science Initiative (WSSI), promoted by the International Social Science Council. The WSSI, which emerged as a follow-up to an OECD International Conference Series on "Re-thinking the Social Sciences" supported by the European Commission's Research Directorate-General and UNESCO's Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Programme, offers a flexible framework for enhancing both the scientific quality and the social relevance of the social sciences. [source] The MOST Project: Economic and Social Transformations Connected with the International Drug ProblemINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 169 2001Article first published online: 16 DEC 200 [source] Women and Work in the Information AgeGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 1 2000Celia Stanworth Widespread social transformation and new class structures are predicted with the coming of the ,information age', but there is disagreement about the likely outcomes for work and em-ployment patterns. Mainstream writing on the information age, both from the functionalist and Marxist traditions, tends not to consider likely consequences for women, but recent feminist research on gender and technology, treating technology as masculine culture, offers a useful framework for further research. This article argues that the information age may lead to some areas of convergence between the sexes in their experience of future work, but men may continue to defend areas of competence and to dominate the high status and powerful occupational positions of the future. [source] Urban Space and Cyberspace: Urban Environment in the Age of Media and Information TechnologyINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JAPANESE SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2002Mikio Wakabayashi Today, the many innovations and the spread of new media and information technologies are bringing new realities to contemporary society. In Japanese sociology, this social transformation is called johoka, or information,oriented transformation. The present study examines two aspects of today's urban environment, concerning this social transformation. One is the phenomenon of "Disneylandization" of the urban environment and the other is the emergence of "cyberspace" or the "cybercity". The former is the proliferation of areas and buildings filled with signs and designs that are quoted from other historical or geographical contexts, and arranged under some "theme" or "concept", such as theme parks. The latter is the emergence of "virtual spaces" and the "virtual city" in computer networks, especially on the Internet. The former is a change in the physical urban environment and the latter is a phenomenon of the non,physical environment, inside computers. However, in spite of this contrast, these phenomena can be considered to result from the same social transformation,that is, the new relationship between space and society. The semantic emptiness, and expectations and desires for a sense of "placeness" in contemporary society are the preconditions of both phenomena. Often these elements are regarded as postmodern phenomena, yet it is of interest to explore Disneylandization and the emergence of the cybercity as the latest versions of the modern urban transformation and the modern urbanism. [source] International Migration at the Beginining of the Twenty-First Century: Global Trends and IssuesINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 165 2000Stephen Castles Globalisation leads to increases in all kinds of cross-border flows, including movements of people. In recent years international migrationhas grown in volume, and is now an important factor of social transformation in all regions of the world. States classify migrants into certain categories, and seek to encourage certain types of mobility while restricting others. However,control measures are often ineffective if they are not based on understanding of the economic, social and cultural dynamics of migration. The article reviews causes and patterns of migration, and discusses some key issues: migration anddevelopment, international cooperation, settle-ment and ethnic diversity, and migration as a challenge to the nation-state. It is argued that most national governments have taken a short-term and reactive approach to migration. Effortsat international regulation are also relatively under-developed. There is a need for long-term cooperative strategies to achieve agreed goals such as: ensuring orderly migration and preventing exploitation by agents and recruiters;safeguarding the human rights of migrants; making migration an instrument of sustainable development; avoiding conflicts with populations of migrant-receiving areas, and maximising positive aspects of social and culturalchange. [source] The Identity of Place in Virtual Design StudiosJOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, Issue 1 2002TADEJA ZUPANCIC STROJAN Since independence in 1991, Slovenian society has sought models for education in the West. As in Slovenia, schools of architecture situated in other countries of rapid social transformation are offered the opportunity to critically review examples of the virtual design studio (VDS). This article investigates such examples within the concepts of "identity" and "place." These concepts are developed to include a consideration of the identity of virtual places and virtual studios and to examine the implications of globalization on architectural education. In conclusion, we develop an exploratory model for VDS as an instrument that integrates computer technology, distance learning, and design education. [source] Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape: Multilingualism, mobility and space in a South African township1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 3 2009Christopher Stroud The study of multilingual landscapes promises to introduce a new perspective into theories and policies of multilingualism, and to provide essential data for a politics of language. However, the theorization of space and language underlying the notion of linguistic landscape is not able to capture the manifold complexities of (transnational) multilingual mobility that is characteristic of many late-modern multilingual societies. Basing our argument on signage data from a contemporary South Africa in a dynamic phase of social transformation, we argue that more refined notions of space coupled to a material ethnography of multilingualism could provide a theoretically more relevant and methodologically refocused notion of (multilingual) linguistic landscape. Specifically, we take an approach to landscapes as semiotic moments in the social circulation of discourses (in multiple languages), and view signs as re-semiotized, socially invested distributions of multilingual resources, the material, symbolic and interactional artifacts of a sociolinguistics of mobility. [source] Old Tools and New Movements in Latin America: Political Science as Gatekeeper or Intellectual Illuminator?LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2009Sara C. Motta ABSTRACT This article argues that social democratic and orthodox Marxist conceptualizations of politics are unable to "engage in solidarity" with many new forms of Latin American popular politics. Such movements challenge the politics of representation, the market economy, and the state form by reinventing territorialized experiments in self-government, which politicize place, subjectivities, and social relations. Developing a critique of these frameworks of political analysis, this article argues that conceptual categories combining the insights of autonomist or open Marxism and poststructuralism and the critical reflections and theorizations by Latin America's newest social movements enable a deeper engagement with such movements. This critique challenges academics committed to progressive social change to reexamine long-held notions about the nature and agents of social transformation and the epistemological categories that orient our research. It argues that if we fail to do this, then we risk becoming gatekeepers of the status quo. [source] Environmental popular education and indigenous social movements in IndiaNEW DIRECTIONS FOR ADULT & CONTINUING EDUCATION, Issue 99 2003Dip Kapoor Practical and theoretical considerations of activist-educators using environmental popular education in indigenous social movements in India are explored. The responses of these social movements to destructive development are linked with the theoretical dialogue on environmental adult education and social transformation. [source] Using technology and innovation for planning social and economic transformation in a region of MexicoPERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2009Gonzalo Rodríguez Villanueva This article shows the possibility of achieving social transformation by applying the triple helix model, which establishes the university's participation and its research centers, the government and its three levels, and the private sector (Etzkowitz, 2002). These three allies have shared the vision and participated during the entire process, where the main focus is to increase development opportunities for the inhabitants of the southern region of Sonora, mainly from five elements: (1) creating an innovative regional system; (2) supporting creation of productive chains; (3) prioritizing investment in technology, information, and transport to improve territorial integration; (4) creating a safe and healthy environment where investments can be made; and (5) developing a government model based on a state policy and administered by projects. The methodology to create a regional plan for Southern Sonora is considered. [source] Under the cobblestones, the beach: the politics and possibilities of the art therapy large groupPSYCHOTHERAPY AND POLITICS INTERNATIONAL, Issue 1 2009Kevin Jones Abstract This paper discusses the politics and possibilities of linking the personal and political with therapeutic and social transformation through a teaching method provided in the art therapy training at Goldsmiths , the art therapy large group (ATLG). Three key ideas of May '68 are related to the ATLG and their relevance to other psychotherapies and psychotherapy trainings is considered. These ideas are: the importance of the ,capitalist' university as an essential terrain in the struggle for social change; the Atelier Populaire's use of art in an anti-capitalist critique of the commodification of art and artist in society, and the anti-imperialist character of the May events. These ideas are related to the theoretical base of the ATLG in the large verbal group literature, Performance Art and to the wide international membership of the ATLG, creating a forum for engaging with global issues. To illustrate these points, we give an example of the interface of the political and the impact of a real event , the university lecturers' strike in 2006 , and the learning that took place in relation to this through the ATLG. We conclude that through a critical engagement with the university within the global terrain of contemporary neoliberalism, the ATLG provides a territory that can integrate the political and therapeutic in arts / psychotherapy trainings; provide a critique and alternative to the commodification of art and artist and engage with issues of difference in the globalized market place. The ATLG prepares the artist / student / therapist / worker to critically engage in the personal and social transformation of the politics of art and psychotherapy provision in the public, private and voluntary sectors. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theoryTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2006Gerard Delanty Abstract Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities. [source] Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations in Cuenca, EcuadorETHOS, Issue 1 2000Ann Miles This paper, based on eight years of observation and interviewing in southern Ecuador, examines how the processes of modernization affect the lives of poor adolescent girls growing up in the city. Focusing exclusively on the daughters of rural-tourban migrants, this paper discusses how both Hispanic gender models and a rigid class system ultimately serve to undermine the state-sponsored rhetoric promoting girls'full participation in the modernizing economy. The disjuncture between the imagined world of professional success and the real one of urban poverty is described. Using a theoretical framework that views culture and ideology as contestable domains, the author argues that consideration of the responses of adolescent girls is important for understanding future social transformations. [source] Counterpoints of care: two moments of struggleJOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY RESEARCH, Issue 2010B. Gleeson Abstract This paper examines the history of care in modern society and seeks to expose how deep transformations in care arise from wider social relations. From historical survey we may discern a series of transitional points, where the practice and the experience of care was greatly, sometimes suddenly, redefined. Each betrayed deeper political and ethical struggles that went to the core of social relations, and which weren't merely therapeutic in nature. This paper explores two such ,moments'. I first examine the emergence of a new institutional landscape during the middle industrial era, in the wake of a series of legal and political reforms that sought to settle a social order uprooted and distressed by raw modernisation. I provide a composite, yet incomplete view, of how this transformation proceeded in one urban setting, colonial Melbourne. In the second instance, I review the ambitions and process of deinstitutionalisation in the late 20th century. Ostensibly, this reform sought, inter alia, to collapse the great division between ,fit' and ,unfit' established in 1834. Again, empirical reference is made to the reconstitution of care in Melbourne, Australia, this time during its late 20th experience of institutional reform. The focus in this case is the process of downscaling and closure for a major congregate facility, Kew Cottages. The major conclusion is that periods of intense transition in the ideology and mode of care are reflective of wider social transformations not merely of therapeutic or institutional shifts. [source] The revival of death: expression, expertise and governmentalityTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2003Arnar Árnason ABSTRACT This paper discusses Walter's (1994) assertion that death in the West has recently undergone a revival. In particular it focuses on his claim that this revival is composed of two different strands: a late modern strand and a postmodern strand. The former, according to Walter, is driven by experts who seek to control death, the latter by ordinary people who seek to express their emotions freely. Describing the history and work of Cruse Bereavement Care, the largest bereavement counselling organization in the UK, we question Walter's distinction. We then problematize Walter's suggestion that the revival of death is caused by general social transformations. In contrast we evoke Rose's (1996) work on ,subjectification' and seek to link recent changes in the management of death and grief to permutations in governmental rationality. [source] Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908,2009): The apotheosis of heroic anthropology (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 5 2010Albert Doja Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the greatest interdisciplinary writers of the twentieth century whose influence extends far beyond his own discipline of social anthropology. His inquiry illuminates the borderlands between ,primitive' and non-primitive, self and other, myth and history, human and animal, art and nature, and the dichotomies that give structure to culture, society, history and agency. This commemorative article of his legacy assesses disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates influenced by Levi-Strauss's inquiry and methods, and looks at potential challenges for the future. Lévi-Strauss's ideas continue to be influential in our assessments of what we mean by culture, values, social organization, including social transformations and cultural ideologies such as ethnocentrism, nationalism, fundamentalism, pluralism, neo-liberalism, post-modernism, relativism, humanism and universalism. [source] | |||||||||||||