Perverse pleasures - identity work and the paradoxes of greedy institutions

Women's studies struggle for a location in the academy has always involved feelings of deep ambiguity. The outsider/insider relation is a peculiarly vexed one in times when the demands on professional identity appear to erase the more political claims on our identity such as being a feminist. This paper considers aspects of these complex navigations across the personal, private, public and professional aspects of identity through the concept of pleasure. It explores the discrepancy as well as the interrelations between the moral climate of higher education and the more elusive, secret or at least unspoken nature of our persistent (over?) commitment to intellectual labour. I draw on key concepts such as 'seduction' and 'repression' (Bauman, 2001), in order to tease out the complicities secured by the rewards and the displacements won by our repression. What positions and identities do we stake out in the hyper-competitive world of higher education and is the feminist project sustainable in these crisis times

Perverse Pleasures – Identity Work and the Paradoxes of Greedy Institutions

Women’s studies struggle for a location in the academy has always involved feelings of deep ambiguity. The outsider/insider relation is a peculiarly vexed one in times when the demands on professional identity appear to erase the more political claims on our identity such as being a feminist. This paper considers aspects of these complex navigations across the personal, private, public and professional aspects of identity through the concept of pleasure. It explores the discrepancy as well as the interrelations between the moral climate of higher education and the more elusive, secret or at least unspoken nature of our persistent (over?) commitment to intellectual labour. I draw on key concepts such as ‘seduction’ and ‘repression’ (Bauman, 2001), in order to tease out the complicities secured by the rewards and the displacements won by our repression. What positions and identities do we stake out in the hyper-competitive world of higher education and is the feminist project sustainable in these crisis times

Childhood in Sociology and Society: The US Perspective

The field of childhood studies in the US is comprised of cross-disciplinary researchers who theorize and conduct research on both children and youth. US sociologists who study childhood largely draw on the childhood literature published in English. This article focuses on American sociological contributions, but notes relevant contributions from non-American scholars published in English that have shaped and fueled American research. This article also profiles the institutional support of childhood research in the US, specifically outlining the activities of the ‘Children and Youth’ Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and assesses the contributions of this area of study for sociology as well as the implications for an interdisciplinary field.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Privilege, agency and affect: who do you think you are?

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The contrasting social logics of sociality and survival: Cultures of classed be/longing in late modernity

Late modernity has been characterized as a space, place and ‘series of flows’, marking conditions of complexity, contradiction and diversity as the global economics of capital restructuring reach down into the local/e to radically disorganize prior social forms of collective and political identity and allegiance (Giddens, 1998). Individualization implies a de-coupling of self from the weight of group, community and tradition, thus more local, idiosyncratic and syncretic trajectories are now said to structure ‘biographies of choice’. My starting points for reflecting on this are Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the ‘social logics of the individual’ conceived as a thoroughly social subject. I use this idea to frame how two contrasting locales shape the subject within their respective interpersonal relations. Gender and class are central terms of the following discussion examining the newly improvized identities of the digitally enhanced and networked middle class, alongside the survival identities impelled by those ‘muddling through’ within disconnected locales

The strange case of Nietzsche's tears: the power geometries of passionate attachments in education

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The Girl in the Mirror: The Psychic Economy of Class in the Discourse of Girlhood Studies

This article questions Angela McRobbie's recent text The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change because it creates some interesting new vocabulary for understanding late modernity's revised sexual and cultural politics. Whilst acknowledging the sophistication of its cultural studies-inspired argument, I consider some consequences of this reading. If theory also performs as a politics of representation, I ask what happens if, in accounting for post-feminism, the theoretical status of class as an antagonistic relation is diminished. I suggest what gender and education discourses can add to a reading of 'new times'

Horizontal Solidarities and Molten Capitalism: the subject, intersubjectivity, self and the other in late modernity

Friendship is a generative topic because it covers questions about the self and the social, so encompassing the political, public, personal and interpersonal negotiation of difference. Friends can embody the resistance as well as the enactment of 'fixing' positions as shown within recent ethnographic work on friendship as identity work (Hey, 1997 , 'The Company She Keeps', Open University Press). Theorised as a practice about making up and breaking up¿about coming to understandings and mis/understandings¿friendship has been taken as a metaphor as well as a statement about the im/possibilities of citizenship (Hey, 2001, 'Dancing Round Hanbags', University of Lisbon)