Sociology Commons^™

You Need Love And Friendship For This Mission!: The Final Fantasy Series As Social Education For Japanese Youth, Ben Hourigan

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

From the mid to late 1990s, popular and academic discourse on video games, particularly in the United States, has focused on their supposed capacity to engender violent and otherwise anti-social behavior in youth. Much like ludologists' recent claims that video games are not a narrative medium, at least one reason for this is that commentators have too narrow an understanding of the diverse range of games that exist. In addition to this, game demonizers have demonstrated an inadequate understanding of the ways games are related to real life. In order to combat these misunderstandings, this chapter analyzes the role of …

The Postmodern Hoard: Rates Of Exchange In Role-Playing Games, Carlos Hernandez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

What makes Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) unique among games is the way it merges storytelling with game mechanics. Before the invention of D&D, both acting/narrative-based games and strategy-based war games that made use of fantasy-genre elements existed, but the way D&D integrates both elements invented a whole new category of game, one in which the immersive draw of a plot proves just as important as good tactics or luck of the dice. This chapter explores the relationship between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of D&D. Specifically, it argues that the rules of the game provide quantitative corollaries to aspects of …

The Game's Afoot: Images Of Infinite Games In Samuel Delany's Trouble On Triton, Marc R. Zaldivar

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Games are frequently used in speculative literature as a metaphor for real-world activities. In Trouble on Triton, Samuel Delany uses several sorts of games in order to explore complex systems of modeling and interrelationships between fiction and reality, extending a tradition in science fiction of placing games at the very center of social reality. Zaldivar's essay seeks to define some of the concepts of game theory that can be used to understand this complex novel and its representation of human social life. In particular, Zaldivar explores finite and infinite games and their uses within a deconstructive theoretical framework. A …

Geeks At Play: Doing Masculinity In An Online Gaming Site, Natasha Chen Christensen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper uses data taken from chat logs within a first person shooter game, Quake Online, in order to explore the performance of gender online. Previous research has shown how physicality is given a position of importance in institutions where masculinity is developed and reproduced such as sports and war; cyberspace offers the opportunity of divorcing the performance of masculinity from the body. Researchers of gender in cyberspace are divided into two perspectives about the effect of the absence of a physical body on the performance of gender: One camp believes that without the constraints of the body, gender in …

Imagined Cities, Real Futures: Simcity And The Co-Production Of Urban Dystopias, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While the author of this chapter agrees with anthropologists who reject an urban studies predicated on postmodern surfaces and insist that we analyze cities in regional, national and global contexts of political economy, he nevertheless suggests that the urban imaginary has never been so important: Movies, television and music have proven all too useful in the continued vilification of an urban underclass. In 2001, in order to explore the role media might play in the structuring and delimitating of the ways we think about cities, Collins assigned SimCity, a computer simulation game combining models of urban development with cellular automata, …

Shooters To The Left Of Us, Shooters To The Right: First Person Arcade Shooter Video Games, The Violence Debate, And The Legacy Of Militarism, Karen J. Hall

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Adult concerns about video games erupted in the 1990s when parents and politicians came forward with claims that Doom, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct and games like them were partially responsible for the rash of school shootings in predominantly white, middle class communities. The author of this chapter argues that arcade games serve the national interest by entertaining consumer-citizens and creating a consumer-based demand for military technology. However, when adolescent shooters disrupt the status quo, it is the games rather than militarist social and economic structures that are criticized by the news media, politicians, and parents. The author of …

Allegorical Reductions And Social Reconstructions: An Introduction To Games, Gamers, And Gaming Cultures, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Games have become a central metaphor in representations of society, and most people are familiar enough with Lewis Carroll's Alice to know that when she passes through the looking glass she finds herself embroiled in a game a Chess which is also much more (Carroll 1992 [1897]). This strange game of Chess is simultaneously a simulation and an enactment of social life in Wonderland, and Carroll plots out Alice 's narrative path as a series of tactical Chess moves, which can be understood as both an attempt to win the game and to navigate through Wonderland and her …

When A Killer Body Isn’T Enough: Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While sports games try to recreate the atmosphere of a stadium or of television broadcasts of games, role-playing and action-adventure games attempt to duplicate cinematography through animation. For Tomb Raider, the virtual reality created by the cinematic animation of the game produces an environment for male-to-female cross-gender identification, a topic that has received little critical attention. The sense of identification intended in this chapter comes from psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, who describe identification as a psychological process in which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, a characteristic of another and transforms himself [or herself] totally or partially …

Body Matters In Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The virtual body is already here. Though not as “seamless” as the virtual body envisioned in cyberpunk literature and made popular in films like The Lawnmower Man (1992), hundreds of thousands of people in over 114 countries (“Visitor Center”) daily log into massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Everquest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, and Earth and Beyond. These massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs or MMOs for short) [1] combine the extensive rule systems of traditional role-playing games (or RPGs) such as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with computer graphic technology and online chat. In these computer …

The Criminal Justice Response To Elder Abuse In Nursing Homes: A Routine Activities Perspective, Brian K. Payne, Randy R. Gainey

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Politicians and researchers have begun to pay more attention to elder abuse in recent times. Most of the research on elder abuse has focused on cases of abuse perpetrated by family members, treating the phenomenon as a social problem, but it is increasingly being conceptualized as a crime problem. The current study examines elder abuse in nursing homes from a criminological perspective. Using routine activities theory as a guide, particular attention is given to the criminal justice system's response to abusive activities committed by nursing home employees. In all, 801 cases of abuse investigated by Medicaid Fraud Control Units are …

Predictors Of Paternal Involvement In Childcare In Dual-Earner Families With Young Children, Julie N. Jacobs, Michelle L. Kelley

Psychology Faculty Publications

Dual-earner parents (N = 119) of preschool children enrolled in licensed childcare centers completed anonymous questionnaires that examined work and family variables as related to paternal involvement in three areas: engagement (i.e., one-on-one interaction with the child), responsibility (i.e., taking care of the child’s needs), and accessibility (i.e., being available to the child without directly interacting). Paternal responsibility was predicted by beliefs about fathering and structural variables (e.g., hours fathers and mothers worked). The percentage of time fathers spent as their child’s primary caregiver was predicted by structural variables (e.g., mothers’ work hours) and belief variables (e.g., men’s beliefs about …

A Cross-Cultural Study Of Hearing And Hearing-Impaired Children’S Human Figure Drawings, Chia-Liang Timothy Hu

EVMS School of Health Professions Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to further the research of human figure drawings as useful assessment tools and add to the understanding of children’s human figure drawings from a cross-cultural perspective.

In this quantitative study, 147 human figure drawings made by 59 hearing and 64 hearing-impaired Taiwanese children and 24 hearing-impaired American children were collected. In addition, 50 drawings done by hearing American children were randomly chosen from the children’s drawing database of Eastern Virginia Medical School Graduate Art Therapy Program. Five Formal Elements Art Therapy Scales (FEATS) scales were modified for use with human figure drawings and were …

On Brian Attebery’S Decoding Gender In Science Fiction, C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The premise of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction is, as Brian Attebery states in the first chapter, that “Science fiction is a useful tool for investigating habits of thought, including conceptions of gender. Gender, in turn, offers an interesting glimpse into some of the unacknowledged messages that permeate science fiction” (1). What we have in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction is the most comprehensive analysis of gender tropes in Science Fiction from its origins in Gothic literature to today. Attebery states in his introduction that he was surprised to find there was no historical study of the development …

On Justine Larbalestier’S The Battle Of The Sexes In Science Fiction, Joe Bisz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Science Fiction, writes author Justine Larbalestier, has always told the tale of the battle between the sexes. The battle can be witnessed from afar, as in the grainy 1930’s letter columns in old sci-fi magazines like Astounding where quarrels over innate sexual differences were published and debated, or from up close in today’s literature. Larbalestier declares that the goal of her book is to illustrate how necessary and important this former, pre-70’s period of science fiction (1926 to 1973) is to contemporary feminist science fiction. The pre-70’s time period has been consistently ignored by critics, who fixate on …

Boys Will Be Boys: A Social Control Approach To Assessment Of Gender-Based Sentencing Disparity In Norfolk Circuit Court Cases, Fay F. Spence

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study evaluated the relationship between gender and sentencing severity for defendants convicted of violent crimes, victimless crimes, and theft crimes in Norfolk Circuit Court during 2001 and 2002. Based upon social control theories, the author hypothesized that women receive harsher penalties than men for violent crimes and victimless crimes, but that men receive harsher penalties for theft crimes. To test these hypotheses, the author relied, in part, upon data collected by the Norfolk Commonwealth Attorney's office on 3368 criminal cases filed in 2001 and concluded by May 22, 2002. After eliminating cases not pertinent to the study, the data …

The Trouble With Trills: Gender And Consciousness In Star Trek, Susan J. Wolfe

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The Star Trek series, which have been both praised for radical inclusiveness and criticized for their neo-conservative agendas, de-essentialize identity, gender, and sexual orientation through their depictions of the Trill, an alien race in which humanoids join with symbionts, slug-like creatures each of which lives in the abdominal cavity of its host, with whom it then shares a single fused consciousness. Hosts are selected independently of their sex, so that a symbiont dwells alternatively inside males and females; each new host, as well as the symbiont, is heir to the memories of all previous hosts.

The notions of unified selves …

On Lillian Robinson’S Wonder Women: Feminisms And Superheroes, Carlos Hernandez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Sure, we all know that one of the primary functions of comic books is to titillate the proto-patriarchal penises of 12-year-old boys. But might this all-American art form have more to offer women than wedgie-prone bikini bottoms and cleavage from the Planet of the Fembots? According to Lillian Robinson’s Wonder Women, the answer is “Yes, but ....” The “Yes” part comes primarily, and foundationally, through the original Wonder Woman comics of the 40s, which told a story that to this day remains almost unheard-of in comic books: the story of a fully-realized female protagonist. For Robinson, the …

What Have Bagels Got To Do...?, Michael Kula

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

“What Have Bagels Got to Do with Midwesternness?” is a creative nonfiction essay that examines the way my own “exile” from the Midwest has influenced my writing and my self-concept, and how, in turn, my writing has subsequently altered my perspective on the regional label “Midwestern.” Drawing from sources ranging from Charles Baxter to James Baldwin to the 1970’s film, Breaking Away, the essay examines how it is not only the “place” itself that shapes us as writers, but perhaps more importantly, our own filtered view of that “place.”

Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity, John Shelton Lawrence, Marty S. Knepper

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paired set explores the experience of cultural identities constructed by and experienced through popular film. The essay “Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity” reflects the authors’ decades of residence in the state of Iowa and their personal irritation with the stereotypes that Hollywood regularly calls upon in evoking the American rural. We gained a new perspective on this sort of imagery when it surfaced again in Field of Dreams (1989) and The Bridges of Madison County novel (1992) and film (1995). Each of these films triggered unprecedented film tourism for the state. Through an exploration of these films and others …

The Place Of Race: Ethnicity, Location And Progress In The Fiction Of Chinua Achebe And Ralph Ellison, Harry Olufunwa

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper examines the ways in which ethnicity and location intersect in selected works of fiction of Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison. It argues that the traceable correlation between ethnic origin and geographical location in the novels of these writers affects perceptions of and possibilities for personal and communal growth. Drawing upon Achebe’s No Longer At Ease and Ellison’s Juneteenth, the paper explores the ways in which characters and situations demonstrate the significance of ethnicity as major determinant of progress or catastrophe in multiethnic societies. It argues that the central characters of the two texts are culturally dislocated and …

Placemaking: A Democratic Project, Lynda H. Schneekloth, Robert G. Shibley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Democracy in a post-industrial society such as the United States is increasingly characterized as a system of governance orchestrated by the media to shape a mass of passive consumers who live in non-places. Because of the scale and structure of the political economy, we have come to understand the body politic as an adversarial system in which the primary responsibility of the citizen is to vote and consume. After 9/11, an additional alienating element, fear, has entered into our national imagination of passivity leading many people to believe that they are collectively powerless in the face of unknown terrors. If …

All The World's A Coffee Shop: Reflections On Place, Community And Identity, Anthony M. Orum

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay uses a personal experience, the routine of daily activity at my local coffee shop, to illustrate the importance of places to the nature of human experience. Every day, I argue, the conversations and interactions that take place at the White Hen store nearby my house serve to reaffirm a number of important features of my life: (1) a sense of my own identity; (2) a sense of a larger community of people outside my family and close friends; (3) a sense of civility, of small kindnesses and courtesies among people who, on the face of it, seem very …

Corporal Punishment And Its Relation To Race, Psychological Well-Being, And Parental Relationship, Michelle P. Kravitz

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Previous research has documented the numerous negative effects associated with corporal punishment (Gershoff, 2002). The present study examined whether experiencing corporal punishment as a child is related to one's perception of the legitimacy of corporal punishment, race, the nature of the parent-child relationship (i.e., biological parent versus step-parent), and psychological well-being. Compared to college students who did not experience corporal punishment during childhood, college students who experienced higher levels of corporal punishment are expected to report that corporal punishment is a more acceptable form of discipline. College students who grew up with a stepfather were expected to be more likely …

The Determinants Of Academic Performance Of African American Males, Marvin K. Hall

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

In this research on the academic performance of African American males I used data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study: Base Year 1988 to examine the factors that effect academic performance of one small group, the African American male. Independent variables that were used were SES, self-efficacy, self-esteem, two cultural variables, marital status of parents, and discipline. After controlling for SES two variables were related to GPA. The higher the self-efficacy of African American males the higher their GPA and the more discipline problems they had the lower their GPA. Results of this research identify the need to address cultural …

Social Class And Art Therapy, Heather B. Ring

EVMS School of Health Professions Theses & Dissertations

Research regarding social class and its effects is limited in mental health services, including art therapy. The purpose of this study was to increase awareness about social class differences and their effects on therapeutic services by exploring how social class impacts adolescents’ attitudes and approach toward artmaking as a form of expression and communication. Two artmaking workshops were conducted with two groups of adolescents from contrasting socioeconomic settings. A sample of 14 volunteers participated. It was hypothesized that adolescents from both groups would use art as an effective and desirable means of personal communication and expression.

Results are based on …

Heuristic Research Study: Implications For Art Therapy In Smoking Cessation, Sarah Roberts

EVMS School of Health Professions Theses & Dissertations

This study explored the implications for the use of art therapy in smoking cessation, using a heuristic research design. The participant is a 22-year-old female smoker currently enrolled in the graduate art therapy program at Eastern Virginia Medical School. The data in this study consisted of spontaneous art expressions, audio-recordings, and visual and written journal entries throughout smoking cessation. Audio-voice recordings were made during art making and were followed by reflective writings about the art-making experience. Over an 8-week time period the researcher refrained from smoking and relapsed on three occasions. Each period of smoking cessation and relapse was considered …

Reading In The Future: Literacy And The Time Of The Internet, David R. Cole

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David R. Cole's Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet locates the literacies of the internet -- itself read as the end game of western technology or the Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere -- in a contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an unlimited …

On Bill V. Mullen's Afro-Orientalism, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For two decades Edward Said's Orientalism has occupied a significant place in how we think through the cultural relations between what we now call ‘North’ and ‘South’. Conceived in the 1970s, Said’s model mounted a challenge to readers in the west, suggesting they should unlearn what they know of the east. Despite its influence, one weakness of this approach was the underlying suggestion that orientalism was a one-way street, constituting a fixed set of perceptions or timeless discourses. In and without the Orientalist imagination, what is to be done with those in ‘the Occident’ who find themselves treated …

Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, And Cultures Of The Screen, Christine Scodari, Becky Mulvaney

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Christine Scodari's and Becky Mulvaney's Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, and Cultures of the Screen investigates the 2003 romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers as exceptional in its featuring a fifty-something woman as leading actress. Beginning with an analysis of the filmic text itself, the authors do not confine themselves to it, but go on to critically engage with its reception in both the press and academia. While the focus is thus shifted from the film to the meta- and para-texts produced in the course of its reception and promotion, the underlying questions asked …

Citizen's Satisfaction With The Police, Kim Barshanet Baskerville

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this research project is to examine three competing models of citizen satisfaction with the police: 1) citizen characteristics, 2) citizen experience with the police, and 3) citizen quality of life issues. Data were taken from Criminal Victimization and Perceptions of Community Safety in 12 Cities, 1998. The relationship between citizen satisfaction and the three models were tested by examining different types of contact between police and citizens, race, age, gender, and quality of life, which was measured by satisfaction with neighborhood and satisfaction with city. In addition, an item labeled disorder, which takes into consideration acts of …