Search results for "General Social Sciences"

The Affective Geography of Paris in the 19th Century Romanian Novel: Between Admiration and Aversion

2020

Based on “The Emotions of London”, a research project initiated at the Stanford Literary Lab, my article focuses on two relevant issues. First of all, I aim to demonstrate, as the “geography of emotions” experiment has already proved, that distant reading approaches and big data interpretation do not necessarily have to replace traditional methods of analysis. In other words, by using a corpus of 157 texts, I intend to outline the affective image of Paris as presented in the nineteenth century Romanian novel. Secondly, the aspect that makes my article different from “The Emotions of London” is that my purpose does not lie in analysing emotions associated with certain place-names in Paris, b…

POSTPONING OR REJECTING PARENTHOOD? RESULTS OF A SURVEY AMONG FEMALE ACADEMIC PROFESSIONALS

2003

The current surge in childlessness is often seen as an alternative lifestyle amidst growing pluralism and individualism. The results of this study indicate that several subgroups of childless women need to be differentiated: those who actively decide to forgo children in favour of other life pursuits and those who merely defer the decision. Both have accumulated a high degree of human capital in their education or career-building paths. Thus, the increase of a woman's time invested in education or career formation takes its toll on the time available for childrearing. A survey performed among female academics (N=193) brought to light that among childless women, many merely mean to postpone …

Factors affecting the choice of cooking fuel, cooking place and respiratory health in the Accra metropolitan area, Ghana.

2005

Indoor air pollution resulting from the combustion of solid fuels has been identified as a major health threat in the developing world. This study examines how the choice of cooking fuel, place of cooking and behavioural risk factors affect respiratory health infections in Accra, Ghana. About 65·3% of respondents use charcoal and 4·2% use unprocessed wood. A total of 241 (25·4%) respondents who cook had had respiratory health symptoms in the two weeks preceding the study. Household socioeconomic status and educational attainment of respondents were found to have a significant impact on respiratory health through their particular influence on the choice of cooking fuel. Households that use w…

Time to care? Temporal variations of agency of the Finnish adult foster carers.

2020

This article analyses a hybrid form of housing and care service for older people called adult foster care. In Finnish adult foster care model, an older person moves to a foster care home and is cared for by a semi-professional foster carer who is not related to them. A foster care home is thus simultaneously a personal dwelling and a site of intensive care work which also changes the rhythms and routines of both the foster carer and older person. In the article I ask, how do foster carers express their temporal agency and its variations (identity, pragmatic, life course) through time work? By temporal agency I mean individuals' ability to impact on their experience of time, which is done th…

Impact of psychological risk factors on disaster rescue operations: the case of Italian volunteers.

2007

This paper reports on research into the characteristics of emergency rescue workers, with a focus on psychological distress. We present the results of a study of volunteers from the Italian national civil protection programme. A questionnaire was administered to 2,576 subjects from all over Italy. Most respondents were men, mostly unemployed, whose average level of education was higher than that among most Italian volunteers. Many were poorly endowed with basic skills, with large differences according to geography. Many expected to convert their volunteer activities into permanent jobs. Using this data, we employed a logistical regression model to analyse the risk of low, moderate and sever…

TESTING THE EFFECT OF THE EPIDEMIOLOGIC PARADOX: BIRTH WEIGHT OF NEWBORNS OF IMMIGRANT AND NON-IMMIGRANT MOTHERS IN THE REGION OF VALENCIA, SPAIN

2013

SummaryThe epidemiological paradox and ‘healthy migrant effect’ refer to the favourable health outcomes in unprivileged groups under unfavourable socioeconomic conditions. Weight at birth is associated with the epidemiological paradox. However, differences in fertility structure (mainly mother's age and first maternity) might be the cause of the difference in weight at birth between children of immigrant and non-immigrant mothers. This paper aims to analyse the impact of the epidemiologic paradox by distinguishing between the factors related to fertility structure, in addition to other socio-cultural factors. The importance of fertility structure as the cause of weight-at-birth differences …

Introduction

2021

Abstract The contributions in this special issue focus on different phenomena and conceptual approaches dealing with “the Posthuman” as a discourse of renegotiating nature-culture-relationships that has emerged over the past decades. The selected articles from fields of sociology, political science, and social anthropology demonstrate how to work with and discuss posthumanistic and post-anthropocentric perspectives, but also how to irritate and criticize universal assumptions of particular posthuman approaches empirically and theoretically. The introduction aims to position the particular contributions in a field of tension between de- and re-centering human beings and human agency.

Foucault and Agamben on Augustine, Paradise and the Politics of Human Nature

2023

This article focuses on Foucault’s and Agamben’s readings of Augustine’s account of human nature and original sin. Foucault’s analysis of Augustine’s account of sexual acts in paradise, subordinated to will and devoid of lust, highlights the way it constitutes the model for the married couple, whose sexual acts are only acceptable if diverted by the will away from desire and towards the tasks of procreation. While Agamben rejects Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and reclaims paradise as the original homeland of humanity, his reappropriation of paradise remains conditioned by our turn towards our true nature, from which we have been estranged by sin. Agamben’s politics of reclaiming par…

The elephant in the living room: Centenarians' autobiographies, co-authorship and narratives of extreme longevity.

2020

Everyday life and the new shapes of identities : The different meanings of ‘things that did not happen’ in the lives of Finnish older persons during …

2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives in many ways since the end of 2019. This paper investigates the everyday lives of Finnish older persons during the first three months of the pandemic when they were required to stay in “quarantine-like conditions.” The study utilises the ‘sociology of nothing’ in exploring the meanings of nothingness in the everyday lives of older people; that is, the things, events and people that were absent from their lives because of the pandemic. The main interest of the article is to reverse the typical analytical focus from ‘things that happened’ to ‘things that did not happen’ and to shed light on the experiences and descriptions of older persons' unlived…