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Social Fields (social + field)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences77%

Selected Abstracts

Critical Evidence: The Politics of Trauma in French Asylum Policies

ETHOS, Issue 3 2007
Didier Fassin
However obvious it might seem today that victims of persecutions suffer from psychological consequences of the violence inflicted on them, its political implications are a recent phenomenon. In the last decade, asylum seekers in France, as in other European countries, have been more and more often subject to demands of psychiatric expertise to prove the cogency of their claim to the status of refugee. This social innovation results from the convergence of two processes: on the one hand, the rapid decline in the legitimacy of asylum, leading to increasing expectations for evidence to establish the reality of persecutions; on the other hand, the emergence of trauma as a nosographical category legitimizing the traces of violence. At the crossroads of these two histories, a social field, mainly occupied by NGOs, has developed to answer this new need for proof from state institutions, with an increasing specialization on victims of torture and on psychic trauma, the two dimensions being partially independent. The final paradox is, however, that in a context of generalized suspicion toward refugees, the recognition of trauma at a collective level is counterbalanced by its limited impact on the evaluation of individual cases. [source]

Implementing evidence-based nursing practice: a tale of two intrapartum nursing units

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 4 2003
Jan Angus
ANGUS J, HODNETT E and O'BRIEN-PALLAS L. Nursing Inquiry 2003; 10: 218,228 Implementing evidence-based nursing practice: a tale of two intrapartum nursing units Despite concerns that the rise of evidence-based practice threatens to transform nursing practice into a performative exercise disciplined by scientific knowledge, others have found that scientific knowledge is by no means the preeminent source of knowledge within the dynamic settings of health-care. We argue that the contexts within which evidence-based innovations are implemented are as influential in the outcomes as the individual practitioners who attempt these changes. A focused ethnography was done in follow-up to an earlier trial that evaluated the effectiveness of a marketing strategy to encourage the adoption of evidence-based intrapartum nursing practice. Bourdieu's (1990, 1991) concepts of habitus, capital and social field were used in our refinement of the analysis of the ethnographic findings. Nursing leadership, interprofessional struggle with physicians, the characteristics of the community and the physical environment were prominent issues at all of the sites. Detailed descriptions of the sociohistorical context and of the experiences at two sites are presented to illustrate the complexities encountered when implementing innovations. [source]

Shifting Egalitarianisms and Contemporary Racism in Rural Victorian Football: The Rumbalara Experience

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
Michael Tynan
This article builds on our understanding of racism towards Aboriginal people in Australia through an examination of discriminatory belief structures pervasive in the mainstream community as evidenced through the important social field of country football in regional Victoria. It analyses the power and pervasiveness of the racial stereotyping that exists in some segments of the community by using Langton's (1997) notion of ,iconic images' as well as discussing the importance of particular ideological motivations around values such as ,egalitarianism'. This is achieved through analysing the views of players, supporters and officials of mainstream clubs towards the Aboriginal Rumbalara Football Netball Club. This analysis is structurally situated within a broader understanding of Australian national identity, in particular looking at the intersection of the powerful cultural domains of sport and evolving expressions of whiteness and egalitarianism. [source]

On coordination and its significance to distributed and multi-agent systems

CONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION: PRACTICE & EXPERIENCE, Issue 4 2006
Sascha Ossowski
Abstract Coordination is one of those words: it appears in most science and social fields, in politics, warfare, and it is even the subject of sports talks. While the usage of the word may convey different ideas to different people, the definition of coordination in all fields is quite similar,it relates to the control, planning, and execution of activities that are performed by distributed (perhaps independent) actors. Computer scientists involved in the field of distributed systems and agents focus on the distribution aspect of this concept. They see coordination as a separate field from all the others,a field that rather complements standard fields such as the ones mentioned above. This paper focuses on explaining the term coordination in relation to distributed and multi-agent systems. Several approaches to coordination are described and put in perspective. The paper finishes with a look at what we are calling emergent coordination and its potential for efficiently handling coordination in open environments. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Global Standards, Local Realities: Private Agrifood Governance and the Restructuring of the Kenyan Horticulture Industry

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2010
Stefan Ouma
abstract Over the past decade, private food safety and quality standards have become focal points in the supply chain management of large retailers, reshaping governance patterns in global agrifood chains. In this article, I analyze the relationship between private collective standards and the governance of agrifood markets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP standard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of this standard on the organization of supply chains of fresh vegetables in the Kenyan horticulture industry, focusing on the supply chain relationships and practices among exporters and smallholder farmers. In so doing, I seek to highlight the often-contested nature of the implementation of standards in social fields that are marked by different and distributed principles of evaluating quality, production processes, and legitimate actions in the marketplace. I also reconstruct the challenges and opportunities that exporters and farmers are facing with regard to the implementation of and compliance with standards. Finally, I elaborate on the scope for action that producers and policymakers have under these structures to retain sectoral competitiveness in a global economy of qualities. [source]

The blessings and burdens of communication: cell phones in Jamaican transnational social fields

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 2 2006
HEATHER A. HORST
Tracing the shift from community phone boxes to individually owned mobile (cell) phones in rural Jamaica, in this article I focus on the integration of mobile phones in Jamaican transnational communication. Equipped with a mobile phone, rural Jamaicans no longer rely on collect phone calls and expensive calling cards to initiate the connections between their friends and relatives living abroad. For many Jamaicans without access to a regular or reliable phone service prior to 2001, the mobile phone is viewed as an unadulterated blessing, transforming the role of transnational communication from an intermittent event to a part of daily life. For others, however, the mobile phone remains an object of ambivalence, bringing unforeseen burdens and obligations. [source]

Building Publics, Shaping Public Opinion: Interanimating Registers in Malagasy Kabary Oratory and Political Cartooning

JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2008
Jennifer L. Jackson
This article discusses socially productive aspects of register shifts in political oratory (kabary politika) and political cartoons of the urban capital province of Madagascar, Imerina. In their daily mediated interactions, politicians and cartoonists interanimate varying registers associated with different social fields, effectively framing and navigating particular publics for particular interests. In this context, the article will explore the semiotic process in which registers drawn from different speech contexts,the proverbs of kabary, Christian sermons, and Western political and international development rhetoric,discursively circulate to hearken toward or contest imaginaries of community belonging and solidarity undergirding these publics, the agency of participant roles they presuppose, and the public opinion they entail.,[Madagascar, oratory, political cartoons, linguistic variation, publics] [source]

Tradisi and Moderen, Village and State: Emergent Tensions in a Sasak Health Quest

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2000
Cynthia Hunter
On Lombok island, in the province of West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, indigenous medicine and biomedicine coexist. Nevertheless, biomedicine, a product of modernity and the development of the state has been superimposed on village life along with other state institutions such as education. In this paper I analyse the processes involved in Sasak villagers' quest for health. Operating within various and sometimes overlapping social fields and conflicting discourses, villagers utilise both local indigenous practices as well as the Indonesian national health system in their quest. Because local or ordinary knowledge is a rich resource for interpretation, I describe the health quest through the participant individuals: family members, neighbours, doctors and nursing personnel involved. The subjectivity of the individual participants contributes to the intricate unfolding of health seeking quests to expose the various tensions which emerge between tradition (tradisi [I]) and modernity (moderen [I]) and between state and village. [source]

Negotiating Individualist and Collectivist Futures: Emerging Subjectivities and Social Forms in Papua New Guinean High Schools

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2003
Assistant Professor Peter Demerath
This article explains the academic disengagement of a critical mass of high school students in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, as resulting in part from emerging personal subjectivities and new social networks. Based on a year of ethnographic research in 1994,95, the article describes the authority these young people attributed to their own perceptions of the limited opportunity structures facing them and to the idealized village-based egalitarian student identity being circulated through peer networks. As such, it illuminates the educational implications of youth culture, and demonstrates how local and global processes are mediated through the social fields of high schools. [source]