Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change

This handbook provides the growing number of people who are developing networks for social change with practical advice based on the experiences of network builders, case studies of networks small and large, local and international, and emerging scientific knowledge about "connectivity." It is intended to join, complement, and spur other efforts to capture and make widely available what is being learned in the business, government, and civil sectors about why and how to use networks, rather than solitary organizations, to generate large-scale impact

Social Network Dynamics

This thesis focuses on the analysis of structural and topological network problems. In particular, in this work the privileged subjects of investigation will be both static and dynamic social networks. Nowadays, the constantly growing availability of Big Data describing human behaviors (i.e., the ones provided by online social networks, telco companies, insurances, airline companies. . . ) offers the chance to evaluate and validate, on large scale realities, the performances of algorithmic approaches and the soundness of sociological theories. In this scenario, exploiting data-driven methodologies enables for a more careful modeling and thorough understanding of observed phenomena. In the last decade, graph theory has lived a second youth: the scientific community has extensively adopted, and sharpened, its tools to shape the so called Network Science. Within this highly active field of research, it is recently emerged the need to extend classic network analytical methodologies in order to cope with a very important, previously underestimated, semantic information: time. Such awareness has been the linchpin for recent works that have started to redefine form scratch well known network problems in order to better understand the evolving nature of human interactions. Indeed, social networks are highly dynamic realities: nodes and edges appear and disappear as time goes by describing the natural lives of social ties: for this reason. it is mandatory to assess the impact that time-aware approaches have on the solution of network problems. Moving from the analysis of the strength of social ties, passing through node ranking and link prediction till reaching community discovery, this thesis aims to discuss data-driven methodologies specifically tailored to approach social network issues in semantic enriched scenarios. To this end, both static and dynamic analytical processes will be introduced and tested on real world data

Love and hate among the people without things : the social and economic relations of the Enxet people of Paraguay

This thesis examines the social and economic relations of the Enxet indigenous people of the Paraguayan Chaco region who place a high value on egalitarianism, generosity and personal autonomy. However, during the twentieth century their land has been colonized by cattle ranchers and they have been obliged to enter the market economy. While anthropologists have proposed a range of theories to explain indigenous social and economic relations, the main concern of this thesis is to examine how the Enxet themselves explain their social behaviour. The Enxet make salient use of "emotion words" when discussing their social and economic practices. For instance, a fundamental dichotomy in Enxet thought is between "love" and "hate" and much of their discourse centres on these two concepts. The Enxet seek to create "good/beautiful" people who know how to act appropriately. In certain contexts they should practise "love" while in other contexts "hate" is acceptable. Enxet social organization should not be understood as a structure but as a process, as something that is being continually created. I will consider different aspects of this process through an examination of kinship, co-residence, marital relations, "brideservice" and inter-community contact, and I will describe how economic transactions are key elements in the generation of "loving" social relations. However, self-centred practices create many challenges to a harmonious community life and I will consider how the Enxet strive to overcome them. Of particular interest will be demand sharing which responds, in part, to a strongly-held egalitarian ethic but can also provoke disharmony and discomfort in community life. I will also discuss commodity relations within Enxet communities and challenge the common assumption that money is necessarily destructive of indigenous social relations. I will conclude that the overriding goal of the Enxet is the attainment of tranquillity in both their personal and social lives. For the Enxet, economic relations are not about gaining material wealth but about living well with other people. They recognize that personal affective comfort is dependent on engendering tranquillity in other people. Therefore, the "emotion words" they use to explain their social behaviour should not be regarded as merely referring to "feelings" but as encompassing an aesthetics of social behaviour

Gender in Focus

This book deals with the interplay between identities, codes, stereotypes and politics governing the various constructions and deconstructions of gender in several Western and non-Western societies (Germany, Italy, Serbia, Romania, Cameroon, Indonesia, Vietnam, and others). Readers are invited to discover the realm of gender studies and to reflect upon the transformative potentialities of globalisation and interculturality

Gender in Focus

This book deals with the interplay between identities, codes, stereotypes and politics governing the various constructions and deconstructions of gender in several Western and non-Western societies (Germany, Italy, Serbia, Romania, Cameroon, Indonesia, Vietnam, and others). Readers are invited to discover the realm of gender studies and to reflect upon the transformative potentialities of globalisation and interculturality

War and Peace in American Seduction: Seduction Communities, Heterosexual Masculinity, and Mediated Intimacy in New York City

Don Juan clearly didn’t need any training in flirting skills, but many American men feel they need help. In nearly every major city of North America exists a seduction community: a community of men who train each other to pick up women. Along with digital means for meeting strangers, these communities have emerged over the past 15 years from a subculture to become a globalized industry in seduction training spanning from Brooklyn to Beijing. From online forums and subscription-based clubs to week-long intensive training courses known as bootcamps, hundreds of thousands of men participate in these groups at different levels of engagement. This dissertation asks, what gender does seduction training produce? Based on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in New York City between 2015-2016, this dissertation explores how and why men pursue seduction training – and what becomes of them and their social relationships. I argue that seduction is a form of mediated intimacy that envisions the other person as a stage for self-aggrandizement. Two things follow: one, seducers lose out on the sense of human connection that they originally intended to get. Two, seduction training becomes less about seducing women than about masculine self-help. In other words, it’s about men learning to have connections and build relationships with other men that give them a meaningful sense of identity. In fact, seduction training both reproduces and contradicts cultural norms of so-called hegemonic masculinity in the U.S. It does so because these men experience culturally-specific ambivalences around norms of self-help – including ideas of freedom, dependency, and addiction – in ways that complicate heteronormative masculine identities. I furthermore assert that self-fashioning through seduction training invokes ideas of work and play to differentiate contradictory ethics of persuasion and self-expression, and that these ideas in turn instantiate different technologies of embodiment that reproduce inequalities between men along lines of race and class

A Study of Social Network Interactions amongst Women with Dysthymia

The aim of this work was to study the higher incidence of dysthymia amongst women and to further explore the theory of gender inequality from the point of the sufferer's difference to other women. This is in contrast to the majority of health studies which have considered women as a homogenous group with little regard for individual characteristic differences. The thesis considered, `What are the mental health implications of women socialised to be different to men, but the same as other women, in a male dominated society?' Four women (21-49 years) with a diagnosis of dysthymia receiving psychodynamic short-term psychotherapy (as out-patients) were subjected to four semi-structured interviews, that ran concurrent to, but without collaboration with, their psychotherapeutic treatment. Social network graphs were compiled to produce a systematic account of how women differentiated themselves from each other within their social networks and to determine whether these individual differences could be developed as independent variables with regards the onset, maintenance and recovery from dysthymia. Data was compiled into a series of exploratory case studies and discussed in relationship to social network constellations. The emerging patterns of social interactions between social network members were then matched to feminist theory. The findings suggested that respondents' were socialised by their mothers to be stereotypical men within the context of highly dense, isolated and achievement orientated social networks. These social networks served to equate both mother and respondent with male power and differentiated them from other women. The subsequent social isolation and their ability to live up to their mother's ambitions for them generated loss and anxiety associated with dysthymia (Arieti & Bemporad, 1978). Recovery from dysthymia was directly related to the formulation of secondary and previously unidentified independent `weblet' constellations, that simultaneously reinforced respondents similarities to other women while accommodating their individual characteristic differences

Kindly Fictions: Rereading Loss in the Writings of Hélène Cixous, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Denise Riley

This thesis explores the response to loss through attention to a distinctive set of narrative texts written by Hélène Cixous, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf and Denise Riley. What connects these different writers, across time and place, is not only that each responds to loss in writing, but that each writer does so in a manner contesting prevalent associations of melancholia and trauma, giving place to an alternate ethics of mourning. Freud’s seminal essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), established the groundwork for contemporary critical examinations of loss, both a source of definitions and a framework to be revised. In particular, melancholia has been reappraised extensively as an ethically privileged response of fidelity following loss. However, as a number of critics elsewhere have noted, the moral economy of the melancholic risks reifying loss in subject-formation and, consequently, risks aggressive and exclusionary attempts at identity reconstruction and consolidation. Associated with an appeal to trauma transfigured as ethically originary, the critical ascendency of melancholia is one from which this thesis departs. As I show, Cixous, Rhys, Woolf and Riley emphasise instead the ways in which loss can be playfully and pleasurably set in motion in the present, as each chapter argues in differing ways. Articulating loss through the framework of fiction, broadly conceived, allows us to avoid the effects of vicarious identification with loss and trauma, while strategies of displacement resist the assumption of an uncritical empathy. The attitude of multidirectional encounter at work across this thesis (with loss; with the ‘other’; across genre, time, and writing) is, what’s more, an attempt to mitigate the paradigm of non-approachability and unsharability when it comes to the loss and trauma of others that, as Denise Riley contends, isolates the bereaved in contemporary life to ‘the inhuman remote realms of the “unimaginable”’