JCS Focus | The Sociological Review最新目录与摘要

Budgets and biologicals: The bio-economization of HIV governance 

Po-Chia Tseng

Changing global responses to HIV/AIDS entail shifting biological loci of surveillance which are believed to constitute HIV risk. Meanwhile, various local institutions and organizations are mobilized to play a key role in HIV service delivery and surveillance. Drawing on a socio-material approach to the body and the economy, this study theorizes the emergence of three ‘HIV service bio-economies’ devised to provide HIV services while controlling HIV transmission in Taiwan. Instead of presuming a divide between the social and the biological, it analyzes how different bodies are produced through differing modes of HIV surveillance and economization, buttressed by global health sciences, state budgets and quantitative metrics. The analysis of multiple ontologies of HIV underscores the political nature of risk-framing in a transnational context, but also how certain bodies incapable of being enrolled in these economies could be further marginalized – a process which might be understood as an ontological politics of HIV.

Care, choice, complexities: The circulations of hormone therapy in early menopause 

Jacinthe Flore, Renata Kokanović, Kate Johnston-Ataata , Martha Hickey, Helena Teede, Amanda Vincent, Jacqueline A. Boyle

Navigating whether to prescribe hormone replacement therapy (HRT) requires that health practitioners approach a woman’s individual life circumstances, and early menopause (EM) as a particularly intricate experience and condition. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 16 practitioners in Australia, this article examines the modalities of care that emerge in the nexus of EM and HRT. Early menopause emerges in participants’ narratives as far from a ‘unitary’ medical condition, but rather one that reaches across other embodied changes for women which may be moderated by HRT. Thus, different modes of care and tensions surface, and we suggest that these constitute an oscillation between ‘caring for’ and ‘caring with’ in medical practice. This oscillation combines experimentation with and adjustment of HRT, while contending with responsibility, risk and choice, and shared, knowledgeable care. Our goal is not to neatly split ‘caring for’ from ‘caring with’. Rather, we discuss how ambiguities of care circulate through a complex diagnosis and its treatment options. We argue that care, in this context, manifests as potentiality and as a set of flexible practices that at times cannot be fully disentangled from issues of choice and control, and HRT itself.

The caring classes: A socio-demographic and occupational analysis of caring values 

Lorenzo Velotti Luca, Michele Cigna

In the past, the working class was perceived as a cohesive social and political subject, although this was never fully the case, and it is certainly less the case today. Class, in fact, is not just defined by economic attributes, but also by social, cultural and ethical ones. Care, understood either as work or values, is fundamental for better understanding class. The implications of the relationship between care values and class are yet not fully understood. In this article, building on David Graeber’s intuition regarding the caring classes, we theorise and statistically explore the existence of a working-class care ethos by examining which socio-demographic and occupational groups share care values. Using European Social Survey (ESS) data and ordinal logistic regressions, we test to what extent self-perceptions of care for others are associated with occupational/working profiles and socio-demographic characteristics. We find that caring for others is a value shared, transversally, by an intersection of different individuals who experience a few conditions of subalternity in the context of patriarchal and racial capitalism; a left-wing political orientation and a background of political/union organising; some specific occupational profiles marked by interpersonal interaction; and, most significantly, by explicit forms of care work. We conclude by speculating that the concept of caring classes can be a useful one towards a fertile terrain of political struggle.

Cultivating cultural capital and transforming cultural fields: A study with arts and disability organisations in Europe 

Ann Leahy, Delia Ferri

This article critically discusses participation by people with disabilities in the arts, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. It is informed by a qualitative study with representatives of organisations working on arts and disability in 22 European countries. The article highlights that experiences of inequality at various levels, including within education systems, and medicalised understandings of what disability is, continue to hamper arts participation and development of cultural capital by people with disabilities. A Bourdieusian analysis unveils how organisations working on arts and disability consciously engage in ‘high’ arts practices as an expression of distinction and in a way that is designed to reframe what is culturally valued within their fields. It also demonstrates the continued relevance of Bourdieu’s theorising of cultural capital and of arts practices as distinction for potentially marginalised groups. Furthermore, participants often linked arts participation involving high artistic standards to potential change in how societies understand and relate to disability, connecting cultural practices and political struggles.

Revisiting young masculinities through a sound art installation: What really counts? 

Rachel Thomson, Alex Peverett, Janet Holland

What Really Counts? was a sound art installation created in 2019 through a collaboration between a sociologist and a multidisciplinary artist, working with in-depth interviews with young men recorded as part of a British feminist social research project in 1990, exploring sexualities and the threat of HIV/AIDS. In this article, we describe the evolution and staging of the sound art installation project, situating it within interdisciplinary literatures on the use of sociological archives and reanimation of analogue media in a digital age. Working within a fractured tradition of curated sociology, we consider the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration for refreshing sociological analytic practice, revealing the unrealised potential of archived data sets and utilising temporal displacement as a generative analytic strategy for feeling history. We are working with a 30-year time span characterised by a stretching of intergenerational experience in relation to expectations for and mediation of sex/gender. The project attempts to realise the potential for an experimental sociological practice through the staging of open-ended past–present encounters.

Scripting the nation: Crisis celebrity, national treasures and welfare imaginaries in the pandemic 

Jessica Martin, Kim Allen

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, celebrities occupied a highly contested space within the popular and political imaginary. Whilst the mass suffering unleashed by the pandemic led some to herald the death of celebrity culture, many celebrities also took part in fundraising initiatives, public health campaigns and philanthropic ventures, with some taking on the status of ‘national treasure’. This article examines two such figures who gained particular luminosity as ‘Covid Heroes’ for their charitable and campaigning work during the pandemic: war veteran Sir Captain Tom Moore and footballer Marcus Rashford. Through a discourse analysis of UK national newspaper articles and television documentaries, we consider what ideological work these celebrities perform within times of heightened crisis. The article expands upon Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin’s theorisation of the ‘national treasure’ in a number of ways, considering how, in ushering forth particular ideas about the nation, these figures secure or contest contemporary welfare imaginaries. Identifying how Rashford and Moore play a crucial role in what Stuart Hall called ‘scripting a national story’ within the pandemic, the article highlights the significance of ‘crisis celebrity’ as a site of hegemonic struggle over national identity, welfare, deservingness and belonging.

Nonsuicidal self-injury and intersubjective recognition: ‘You can’t argue with wounds’ 

Peter Steggals, Ruth Graham, Steph Lawler

This article explores the relevance of intersubjective recognition and the ‘recognition theoretical turn’ to our understanding of nonsuicidal self-injury. While previous research has demonstrated that self-injury possesses an important social dimension alongside its intrapsychic characteristics, a major challenge for any social approach to self-injury has been to find a way to describe and analyse this dimension without reductively implying that self-injury is a form of ‘attention-seeking’, where this describes a pejorative accusation of social manipulation. One possible solution to this challenge lies in the concept of intersubjective recognition and the idea that what some have interpreted as ‘attention-seeking’ behaviour is perhaps better understood as recognition-seeking. As such, we draw on data from a 2016–2017 English pilot study to examine three basic questions: (1) does self-injury constitute, at least in some cases and amongst its many other observed intrapsychic and social functions, a form of recognition-seeking? (2) if so, how does self-injury work as a claim to recognition? and (3), how do we solve the apparent contradiction of using a stigmatic mark as a means of claiming a normative status? Our study suggests that one of self-injury’s intersubjective imperatives is the need to be listened to and taken seriously, to have one’s feelings and experiences confirmed by others as being legitimate and valid. As such, intersubjective recognition does appear to form a distinct part of the overdetermined complex of meanings and effects associated with self-injury and may be an important factor in a number of cases.

The body as a canvas: Memory, tattoos and the Holocaust 

Alice Bloch

This article explores the decision amongst the children and grandchildren of Auschwitz survivors to replicate the concentration camp number of their survivor family member on their own body. The article sheds new light on the complex intergenerational legacy of the Holocaust and on memorial practices. By focusing on the tattoo as a form of memorial practice, the article captures the intersections between the contemporary trend of tattooing and the concentration camp number as the visual symbol of the crimes of the Nazis. Drawing on data from qualitative interviews with 13 descendants of Holocaust survivors, the article considers motivations for getting the tattoo, conversations with the survivor parent or grandparent about the tattoo (if they were still alive), as well as the design and placement on the body. The decision to replicate the number was a statement about family relationships and was often a way of expressing love, legacy and continuity and pride. Some descendants who replicated the number, which had dehumanised and stigmatised their ancestor, saw it as a way of reclaiming. The tattoo also had a dialogical function, keeping family stories and histories alive as we enter the post-witness era. The sociological analysis is this article shows how personal lives are shaped by memories, as well as secrets and silences, and how they connect with history, relationships and identity. This article contributes to our understanding of the legacy of the Holocaust on families and family relationships and the corporeal impacts across generations.

De-centring the human: Multi-species research as embodied practice 

Nickie Charles, Rebekah Fox, Mara Miele, Harriet Smith

This article focuses on embodiment and the centrality of embodied methods to multi-species research. We argue that taking the body as our methodological starting point is essential to researching human–animal relations but that bodies engage with and are engaged by the research process in a multiplicity of ways. In this we follow Vinciane Despret’s analysis of the partial affinities between animal scientists’ bodies and the animals they are researching and suggest that sociology’s distinction between sociology of and sociology with the body glosses over the complexities of inter-corporeal encounters. We explore these questions through a discussion of our multi-species ethnography of dog training cultures in the UK, looking at the training of companion dogs, guide dogs and police dogs. We pay attention to the different forms of embodied engagement that these training cultures make possible for us as researchers and reflect on the place of embodied communication in both the training and research relationship. We consider the disembodied training necessitated by the transition to online classes during the Covid pandemic and the consequences of this for our ability to create partial affinities with the dogs and their humans. We argue that the methodological challenges of our times require that we develop methods that attend to our multi-species world, rather than focusing exclusively on the human, and that bring into being a social reality which is less anthropocentric.

Monitoring care, curating suffering: Law, bureaucracy and veterinary expertise in contemporary animal politics 

Marie Leth-Espensen

This article critically explores responses to the suffering of animals caused by industrialised agriculture aiming to reflect on broader aspects of the current state of animal politics in the 21st century. Focusing on the regulatory schemes introduced to control the welfare of animals in Denmark, the article foregrounds sites of law enforcement and industry regulation, in which animal suffering is ‘carefully’ curated. The analysed material comprises inspection reports and interviews with veterinary officers and technicians charged with monitoring the level of care in Danish agribusinesses. The article builds upon Kelly Oliver’s theory of witnessing to develop a sociological perspective on the function of expert testimony within regulatory and administrative domains – what is defined as acts of juridical eyewitnessing. Through this framework, it becomes evident that law and bureaucratic procedures wield considerable influence in transforming a social and legal expectation to reduce animal suffering into specific ethical-scientific and bureaucratic standards. Furthermore, in adopting a de-human-centred sociological lens, the article presents an alternative interpretation of the evolution of anti-suffering sentiment – understood as negative emotional responses to animal suffering – one in which the state plays a prominent role in shaping particular attitudes towards other animals based on ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ suffering.

Lung cancer after the genomic turn: From the biopolitics of ‘lifestyle’ to the transcorporeality of breath 

Jianni Tien, Katherine Kenny, Alex Broom

The lungs serve as a site of interchange between the bodily and environmental, an interface between the internal and external world, enacted through breath. We draw on the primacy of this exchange to explore the complexities of living with lung cancer amidst the enduring social challenge of stigma and the advent of ‘targeted therapies’ at the cutting edge of precision medicine. Lung cancer’s association with smoking and resulting stigmatisation of those with lung cancer has been well documented – positioning those with lung cancer as failed subjects of a biopolitics of lifestyle. However, recent developments in ‘precision medicine’ have drawn attention to alternate, genetic causes of lung cancer, disrupting easy equivalences between deviant cells (malignancy) and deviant conduct (smoking). Despite this, and drawing on interviews with 32 people receiving targeted therapy for lung cancer in Australia, we identify enduring resonances of deviance and stigma which still foreground individual lifestyle and blame, even for those – like many participants in this study – who have never smoked. Even in the context of uncertain causal origins and genetic mutations, the stigma of lung cancer and the figure of ‘the smoker’ as an object of abjection and disavowal persists. We find Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality instructive for moving away from this biopolitics of lifestyle, toward greater recognition of the collective, though unequal, conditions of ‘carcinogenic capitalism’ in which we all must live and breathe. In turn, our analysis of the specificities of lung cancer may inform broader sociological approaches to tackle stigma at a structural level.

Strategic naturalizing in the Anthropocene: Managing cells, bodies and ecosystems 

Marianne Mäkelin, Elina Helosvuori, Mianna Meskus

Discussions on the Anthropocene have called for increased attention to how the effects of human actions on the planet are accounted for. While much of this debate remains at a theoretical level, more studies on situated Anthropocene realities have been called for. Contributing to the latter, this article explores how experimental and clinical interventions are being accounted for in life science laboratories. Drawing on three research cases, genetically modified mosquitoes, laboratory-grown stem cell lines and assisted reproduction in the IVF clinic, the article traces how ‘strategic naturalizing’ is conducted to make sense of and justify human interventions on cells, bodies and ecosystems. Strategic naturalizing in laboratory work is situated, fluid, and also implicates the presence of the social scientist. Although naturalizing biotechnologies is not a new phenomenon, according to our observations scientists increasingly draw on notions of a planet profoundly transformed by human intervention as they conceptualize their own accountability. Consequently, we propose that strategic naturalizing is emerging as an elemental logic in the patchy local enactments of the Anthropocene and its concerns. In the context of experimental and clinical laboratory work, it is a key element in enacting good science and orienting the work towards making biotechnology acceptable in wider society. In studying this, the social scientist also is implicated in situated local enactments of the Anthropocene.

【注：以上内容均为TSR 文章观点，不代表本刊立场】