Suchergebnisse

AbstractSociological interest in precarious labour has focused on the existential insecurity associated with the discontinuous work relations of contemporary modes of production and the difficulties produced for the formation of effective modes of social and political solidarity. This essay, by contrast, explores the continuities of precarious living in the Southern Peruvian Andes over the past century, with a focus on how the affective force of social obligations and responsibilities to wider collectives (such as the family, the peasant community, or the co‐operative) both support and interrupt the search for more stable personal and collective futures. Approaching precarity as a relational condition, the essay traces how precarity takes form in the movements between formal and informal labour practices.

This article explores the ways in which contemporary digital visualization technologies offer grounds for a reappraisal of the relationship between qualitative and quantitative data. Using the example of a 3D digital model of the city of Manchester, the question of descriptive adequacy in the social sciences is addressed.The model is an interesting descriptive device oriented simultaneously to providing an accurate account of what is present in the world and a persuasive image of what that world could become. The analysis asks what kind of descriptive device the 3D model is, and looks at how it exercises its persuasive effects. While attending to how diverse knowledge forms are rendered compatible in the model, the concept of `discontinuous data' is introduced to draw attention to incompatible knowledges that do not appear in the model.The article explores the potential of such models to reconfigure discontinuous data forms and to produce provocative counter-maps.

• What is the status of anthropology in Britain?
• What does the general non-academic public know about anthropology?
• What is the 'stereotype' of the anthropologist?
• Does anthropological knowledge travel beyond academia to broader publics?
• What is the status of anthropology within the University?

In this article, we deploy the concept of 'affect' to explore processes of state formation in contemporary Peru. Drawing on ethnography concerning a controversial engineering project in the Sacred Valley, we show how the state emerges as an affective force in the ambivalent spaces opened up by the slippages between the stable certainties promised by regulatory frameworks and the doubts generated by the ambiguities they pose. Tracing the tensions, gestures, and tiny shifts in perspective that punctuate an encounter between engineers and local politicians, we complicate the notion that a pre-existing state induces affects in political subjects. Instead, we show how the state emerges as a virtual force—neither quite present nor absent—in an uncertain, highly political field of negotiation.

AbstractIn the introduction to this volume on 'dislocating labour' we seek to lay the ground for an anthropology of labour that extends beyond the industrial heartlands from which the concept emerged. Remaining aware of the analytical purchase of the focus on the labour/capital relation, we argue that the ethnographic exploration of this relation allows us to extend the reach of the labour concept. It also allows us to explore the diverse ways in which labour relations are experienced beyond the confines of the economic, bringing kinship, personhood, affect, politics, and sociality firmly back into the frame of capitalist value creation. We draw on the notion of dislocation to extend the repertoire of labour analysis beyond that of dispossession and/or disorganization. By dislocation we refer to the unevenness of transnational capitalism's unfolding and the ways in which both places and persons are reconfigured by the movements of capital. Dislocation thus refers to the spatial movements of refugees and migrant workers, but also to other senses of disruption, such as the sentiment of feeling out of place, or of losing your bearings as things move and change around you.

Assessing course goals is often challenging; assessing an abstract goal, like empathy, can be especially so. For many instructors, empathy is central to sociological thinking. As such, fostering empathy in students is a common course goal. In this article, we report the initial findings of a semester-long assessment of empathy change in undergraduate students ( N = 619). We employ a mixed-methods research design that utilizes qualitative instructor data to determine independent instructor-level variables and student surveys to measure student empathy change. We compare empathy change between students enrolled in introductory sociology classes to students not enrolled in sociology classes and test which student and instructor variables predict empathy change. We find that students taking sociology classes have positive empathy change compared to those who do not. We interpret these findings as evidence that study of sociology promotes empathy development and discuss implications for the classroom and further research.

Abstract
Transgender adults face a health care system rife with stigma, including a lack of culturally responsive providers and high likelihood of discrimination and mistreatment. However, there is a gap in knowledge about trans men—those assigned a female sex at birth who identify as men or as transmasculine—including subgroups, such as trans men of color. Using data from the U.S. Transgender Survey, the largest transgender survey conducted in the United States, this study analyzes whether trans men's access to knowledgeable providers and their experiences of mistreatment in health care were related to demographic and mental health characteristics and degree of being "out" to providers. Among 7,950 trans men, respondent race and ethnicity, education level, disability status, psychological distress, suicidality, and being less "out" were associated with assessing one's health care provider as not knowledgeable about trans-related care. Mistreatment in health care was more common among Alaska Native/American Indian trans men; those who lived in or near poverty; those who were queer, pansexual, bisexual, or an orientation not listed; those with a disability; those experiencing distress or suicidality; and those who were more "out." This article discusses how findings can inform culturally responsive health care interventions with trans men.

In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as 'affect theory'. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this 'affective turn' through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life

The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data – brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impact and implications of new medical technologies and in marrying the visual and the body but thus far has focused only narrowly on particular kinds of technology or taken only a purely textual/visual (cultural studies) approach to images of the body. Combining approaches from three of the most dynamic and popular fields of contemporary social anthropology – the study of the visual, the study of the technological and the study of the human body – this volume draws these together and interrogates their intersection using insights from ethnographic approaches. Offering a fascinating and wide range of perspectives, the chapters in this volume bring an innovative focus that reflects the authors' shared interest in 'the body' and visualising technologies