Interacting for the environment:Engaging Goffman in pro-environmental action

Whilst there are profound disagreements about how more sustainable forms of living might be achieved, most research on pro-environmental action recognises it as a fundamentally social challenge – demanding shifts not merely in individuals’ attitudes and behaviours, but also in social norms, contexts and practices. Despite the social nature of the challenge, perhaps the most fundamental social medium – social interaction - remains under-theorised in this area. To address this gap, this paper applies Erving Goffman’s understandings of social interaction to an ethnographic case study of a pro- environmental change initiative called Environment Champions. The analysis shows that social interaction plays a crucially important role in shaping responses to pro-environmental change processes that has the potential to both help and hinder the spread of pro-environmental action. The paper concludes by exploring how Goffman’s ideas develop and extend current debates about pro- environmental behaviour change

Neither playing the game nor keeping it real: media logics and Big Brother

Sam Pepper, one of the contestants in Big Brother 11, at one point accused fellow housemates Josie and John James of feigning romantic feelings for each other in order to cash in on lucrative deals with celebrity magazines such as OK! and Hello!. The provocation caused much apparent offence, and led to a prolonged and predominantly rancorous debate about authenticity and inauthenticity, soon extending to revelations that other housemates (Rachel, Corinne) aimed to appear in soft pornography titles like Nuts and Zoo, and as such, ‘couldn’t be trusted’. The clear subtext was that any economic motivation was considered a breach of the rules of the Big Brother game – not the explicit parameters of the competition, but the spirit in which it should be played. Being a worthy winner is a matter of who you are rather than what you do, which raises the question of how we came to know Josie and co, as well as how we come to know celebrity selves generally. If BB has taught us anything about the formation of mediated selves, it is that an authentic mediated self cannot exist – and yet authenticity still matters. This piece reflects on this tension and its implications for our increasingly reflexive media culture

Political and Media Discourses about Integrating Refugees in the UK

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article addresses political and media discourses about integrating refugees in the UK in the context of the “refugee crisis”. A discursive psychological approach is presented as the best way to understand what talk about the concept is used to accomplish in these debates. A large corpus of political discussions (13 hours of debate featuring 146 politicians) and 960 newspaper articles from the UK were discourse analysed. The analysis identified five dilemmas about integration: Integration is positive and necessary, but challenging; Host communities are presented as welcoming, but there are limits to their capacity; Refugees are responsible for integration, but host communities need to provide support; Good refugees integrate, bad ones don't; Refugees are vulnerable and are skilled. All are used to warrant the inclusion or exclusion of refugees. The responsibility of western nations to support refugees is therefore contingent on the refugees behaving in specific ways

Narratives of self and identity in women's prisons: stigma and the struggle for self-definition in penal regimes

A concern with questions of selfhood and identity has been central to penal practices in women's prisons, and to the sociology of women's imprisonment. Studies of women's prisons have remained preoccupied with women prisoners’ social identities, and their apparent tendency to adapt to imprisonment through relationships. This article explores the narratives of women in two English prisons to demonstrate the importance of the self as a site of meaning for prisoners and the central place of identity in micro-level power negotiations in prisons

Superconducting atomic contacts inductively coupled to a microwave resonator

We describe and characterize a microwave setup to probe the Andreev levels of a superconducting atomic contact. The contact is part of a superconducting loop inductively coupled to a superconducting coplanar resonator. By monitoring the resonator reflection coefficient close to its resonance frequency as a function of both flux through the loop and frequency of a second tone we perform spectroscopy of the transition between two Andreev levels of highly transmitting channels of the contact. The results indicate how to perform coherent manipulation of these states.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, to appear in special issue on break-junctions in JOPC

Health professionals' perceptions of cultural influences on stroke experiences and rehabilitation in Kuwait

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Informa UK Ltd.Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the perceptions of health professionals who treat stroke patients in Kuwait regarding cultural influences on the experience of stroke and rehabilitation in Kuwait. Health professionals interviewed were from a variety of cultural backgrounds thus providing an opportunity to investigate how they perceived the influence of culture on stroke recovery and rehabilitation in Kuwait. Method: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 12 health professionals with current/recent stroke rehabilitation experience in Kuwait, followed by thematic analysis of the verbatim transcripts. Results: The health professionals identified several features of the Kuwaiti culture that they believed affected the experiences of stroke patients. These were religious beliefs, family involvement, limited education and public information about stroke, prevailing negative attitudes toward stroke, access to finances for private treatment, social stigma and the public invisibility of disabled people, difficulties identifying meaningful goals for rehabilitation, and an acceptance of dependency linked with the widespread presence of maids and other paid assistants in most Kuwaiti homes. Conclusion: To offer culturally sensitive care, these issues should be taken into account during the rehabilitation of Kuwaiti stroke patients in their home country and elsewhere

Unsettling Appearances: Diane Arbus, Erving Goffman and the Sociological Eye

Both the photographer Diane Arbus and sociologist Erving Goffman were fascinated by the way we present ourselves to others and this paper sets out how each understood the drama of human interaction. It begins by exploring how their work parallels some developments in the sociology of deviance, and notes how Goffman was one of the earliest critics of this field, before briefly sketching out Arbus’s controversial career and then turning to a more detailed look at three of her images. It concentrates on how the gap between intention and effect, or what Goffman terms the difference between the impressions we ‘give’ and those we actually ‘give off’, are at the core of her work and this sociological insight animates her compositions. The paper then describes how their work unsettles ‘normal appearances’ and provides rich resources for understanding human conduct

Does My Stigma Look Big in This? Considering the acceptability and desirability in the inclusive design of technology products

This paper examines the relationship between stigmatic effects of design of technology products for the older and disabled and contextualizes this within wider social themes such as the functional, social, medical and technology models of disability. Inclusive design approaches are identified as unbiased methods for designing for the wider population that may accommodate the needs and desires of people with impairments, therefore reducing ’aesthetic stigma’. Two case studies illustrate stigmatic and nonstigmatic designs

Performative embodiment and unravelling grandparent-grandchild relationships

This article seeks to intertwine women’s embodied experiences of wartime, dancing, and chronic illness. The author introduces “Granny” through the unraveling rhythms of grandparent–grandchild relationships. Through narrative poems, the author shares Granny’s dramatic stories of World War II. Bodies are socially and historically located, which therefore illuminates the ways in which her past is sedimented into her body and provides an understanding into the multi-layered ways her wartime, her performing bodily experiences, and asthma, encompass the past, the present, and the anticipated future. The author reflects on how some of these stories echo the breathless battle weary heroes referred to by Homer in the Illiad, which is where asthma can be traced back to

The selfie and the transformation of the public–private distinction

The selfie is a contemporary form of self-portraiture, representing a photographic image of the human face. The selfie is created for the purpose of reproduction and to communicate images visually with others from a distance. The proliferation of web 2.0 technologies and mobile smart phones enables users to generate and disseminate images at an unprecedented scale. Coupled with the increasing popularity of social media platforms, these technologies allow the selfie to be distributed to a wide audience in close to real time. Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s approach to the study of face-to-face social interaction, this article presents a discussion of the production and consumption of the selfie. We draw upon Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, to explore how the ‘presentation of self’ occurs in the context of a selfie. Next, we consider how the selfie as a form of visual communication holds critical implications for mediated life online as individuals go about doing privacy. We conclude by reflecting on the role of the selfie and its impact on the boundaries between public and private domains in contemporary social life