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Full-Text Articles in Theory, Knowledge and Science

The Continued Importance Of Research With Children And Youth: The “New” Sociology Of Childhood 40 Years Later, Melissa Swauger, Ingrid E. Castro, Brent D. Harger Mar 2017

The Continued Importance Of Research With Children And Youth: The “New” Sociology Of Childhood 40 Years Later, Melissa Swauger, Ingrid E. Castro, Brent D. Harger

Sociology Faculty Publications

This chapter presents the broad themes of this special issue by introducing the contributions and connections among the chapters in the volume. Recent theoretical constructions of childhood have positioned children as social actors resulting in a growth of child- and youth-centered empirical research. Yet, there is a continued importance for researchers to discuss ethical issues that arise in research with youth, contend with the competing constructions of children as social agents and in need of protection, and explore innovative methodological strategies used in research with youth.


Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael Jan 2017

Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes …


Girls(') Speak: Criticality As Agency, Annalise Trudell Apr 2016

Girls(') Speak: Criticality As Agency, Annalise Trudell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

I seek to contribute knowledge about girls’ embodied sense of agency, as well as to provide empirical insights into anti-violence community programming. Rather than a focus on girls as victims, I want to illuminate the conditions of possibility for girls’ exercise of agency. Working with a feminist post-structuralist framework, and drawing heavily on Judith Butler (1990; 1997), I ask: How does anti-violence programming impact girls’ sense of themselves as agential subjects rather than victims, and, hence, as capable of exercising agency in their subjectivization? Which conceptions of agency do girls mobilize, and how do certain identity categories come to bear …


Social Systems And Psychic Confluence: Flash Mobs, Communications, And Agency, Nicholas John Hauman Aug 2015

Social Systems And Psychic Confluence: Flash Mobs, Communications, And Agency, Nicholas John Hauman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation involves two components: 1) an analysis of the history of flash mobs including detailed descriptions of specific flash mobs and 2) an exploration of what this analysis elucidates concerning the interaction between individuals and social structure. By focusing on the flash mob as a form of communication, the dissertation displays how the flash mob has communicated multiplicitously through various social systems (e.g. art, mass media, economy, politics) to achieve various and often divergent ends. Within this larger understanding of the interaction between flash mobs and social structure this dissertation also finds, through an application of Luhmannian systems theory, …


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …


Between Structure And Agency: Assassination, Social Forces, And The Production Of The Criminal Subject, Cary H. Federman Aug 2011

Between Structure And Agency: Assassination, Social Forces, And The Production Of The Criminal Subject, Cary H. Federman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Assassins are often regarded as ahistorical figures of evil. In this article, I contest this view by analyzing the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz in 1901. There are two purposes to this article. The first is to situate McKinley’s assassination within the history and development of the social sciences, principally sociology, rather than assume that the assassin is a trans-historical representation of willful irresponsibility. The second is to describe and critique the discourse that made Czolgosz into a rational agent once he entered history as an assassin.


Agency: The Internal Split Of Structure, Yong Wang Jul 2008

Agency: The Internal Split Of Structure, Yong Wang

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this article I first examine the ways in which the dual terms of structure and agency are used in sociological theories. Then, relying on Lacan’s notions of split‐subject, the formula of sexuation, and forms of discourses, and Laclau’s theory of ideological hegemony, I argue that agency in most current sociological formulations is but a posited other of the structure that dissolves if examined closely; it is similar to the Lacanian fantasmic object. To resolve the fundamental paradoxes in structure‐agency theories, I reformulate structures as paradoxical, incomplete, and contingent symbolic formations that are always partial and unstable due to their …