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Qualitative Sociology Review
2008
Volume IV Issue 2
Author-Supplied Abstracts & Keywords
Robert Prus
University of Waterloo Canada |
Aristotle’s Rhetoric:
A Pragmatist Analysis of Persuasive Interchange
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Approaching rhetoric as the study of persuasive interchange, this paper
considers the relevance of Aristotle's Rhetoric for the study of human group life.
Although virtually unknown to modern day social scientists, this text has great
relevance for contemporary scholarship. Not only does Aristotle's text centrally
address influence work (and resistance), identities and reputations, deviance and
culpability, emotionality and deliberation, and the broader process of human knowing and acting in political, character shaping, and courtroom contexts, but Aristotle
also deals with these matters in remarkably comprehensive, systematic, and precise
terms. Attending to the human capacity for agency, Aristotle also works with a
sustained appreciation of purposive, reflective, adjustive interchange.
Hence, whereas this text is invaluable of as a resource for the comparative
transhistorical analysis of human interchange, it also suggests a great many ways
that contemporary scholarship could be extended in the quest for a more adequate,
more authentic social science.
Keywords:
Aristotle, rhetoric, influence, activity, agency, identity, emotions, justice,
culpability, symbolic interaction, pragmatism
Larry Strelitz
Rhodes University, South Africa |
Biography, Media Consumption,
And Identity Formation
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This paper proposes that the biographical or narrative interview is an
important method in exploring the relationship of media consumption to
identity formation. The paper takes issue with those theorists who place
media consumption at the centre of identity formation processes. Rather, in
line with the work of British social theorist John Tomlinson, the paper argues
the need to see the relationship between media and culture, in the process of
identity formation, as an interplay of mediations between culture-as-lived-
experienced and culture-as-representation. On the one hand we have the media,
representing the dominant representational aspect of modern culture while on the
other we have the lived experience of culture which includes the discursive
interaction of families and friends and the ‘material-existential’ experiences
of routine life. Our media consumption choices and the meanings we take from
the media are shaped by these lived cultural experiences while the media we
consume also impacts on how we make sense of these experiences. The paper argues
that the narrative or biographical interview is a useful way to explore this
interplay of mediations in the process of identity formation.
Keywords:
Media consumption; Identity formation; Biography; Narrative interview;
South African youth
Jaroslava Gajdosova
New School for Social Research |
Literary Field and the Question of Method – Revisited
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Field theory is one of the most efficient and influential analytical schemes
in the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which he consistently developed
in his model of literary field. The analytical reliability of the model derives
from the way in which Bourdieu combines the structural category of ‘field’ with the
phenomenological categories of “doxa’ and ‘habitus’. This article argues that
Bourdieu’s selective application of the two phenomenological categories produces
a static structural model of literary field where all processes are explained in
causal and deterministic terms. The article further seeks to present an alternative
reading of the same categories within a discursive model where the processes in
literary field and the motivations of its agents are driven by field’s discourses
rather than by its rigid structures.
Keywords:
Field theory; Literary sociology; Literary history; Husserlian phenomenology;
Collective identity; Collective memory; Critical sociology
Marina Grishakova
Tartu University |
Margarita Kazjulja
Tallinn University |
Social Risks and Challenges of the Post-Socialist Transition Period in
Estonia: Analysis of Biographical Narratives
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