Reproductive rights or duties? The rhetoric of division in social media debates on abortion law in Poland

This study explores the argumentative schemas used in claimmaking and the rhetorical resources for stance-taking in the online abortion law debate in Poland in late 2016. It shows how these discursive devices were used to divide and discredit the opponent in the social media by two social movements: the Stop Abortion coalition of conservative and religious organizations that sponsored the legislative proposal to considerably restrict abortion, and the Save Women committee that stood behind the ‘black’ protests opposing the project. The textual material is drawn from social media profiles of the two movements following a week of intense street protests and publicity activities (19–26 October…

Social worlds and symbolic boundaries of cannabis users in Poland

Many legislations and cultures undergo liberalization regarding cannabis use, and users in Poland make constant references to, and are part of, a burgeoning global cannabis culture. Still they have to relate to conservative drug discourses and legal frameworks. This paper explores this discrepancy between users’ experience on the micro level and the macro context in which they live. The aim is to explore the boundary making processes cannabis users engage in to detach themselves from punitive legislation and conservative social reactions. The concept of social worlds is used to theorize and better understand their situation. The boundaries between the users’ social worlds are analyzed with …

Crossing borders of academia from the perspective of an internationalizing university (editorial)

The Stigmatization of Drug Addiction in South-East Turkey the Case of Drug Abuse Prevention Programme for Youth Project in Turkey

Cannabis use undergoes a dynamic redefinition under selected legal frameworks globally. Many prevention programs face a dilemma between delivering abstinence objectives and pursuing more nuanced, harm reductionist aims. However, drug use in South-East Turkey is strongly stigmatized and is absent from the official life of the community, so neither of these discussions takes place. The authors participated in the development of a Drug Abuse Prevention programme for Youth and this article is grounded in qualitative data from Turkey. A follow-up study was conducted among the youth participants of a pilot phase of the program (n = 20), developed by an international group of professionals in the …

Risk behavior of youth – social definition of risk

Social defining of the risk behaviors is rooted in a diverse, multidimensional world of norms, values, rituals and discourses. Including social contexts of engaging in the risk behaviors and production of knowledge about them allowed us to go beyond standard cause-and-effect descriptions and examine these actions as an essential element of everyday practices and rituals of youth. The aim of this paper was to analyze the risk behaviors of youth in the framework of sociological categories of risk, reflexivity and interactional order. The paper is based on the results of the qualitative study conducted within the project “Problem Behaviors of Youth – Study in the Opole Region 2019–2020,” that …