“Es fundamental que la información que se transmita sea confiable”

El flamante Doctor Honoris Causa de la UNLP, Emilio Luque Fadón, de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, fue uno de los conferencistas de CACIC 2017. Durante su estadía por la ciudad de La Plata, el español habló acerca de las nuevas tecnologías, su tolerancia a los fallos y el consumo energético.Facultad de Informátic

Body projects and the regulation of normative masculinity

Drawing on interviews with 140 young British males, this paper explores the ways in which men talk about their own bodies and bodily practices, and those of other men. The specific focus of interest is a variety of body modification practices, including working out (at a gym) tattooing, piercing and cosmetic surgery. We want to argue, however, that the significance of this analysis extends beyond the topic of body modification to a broader set of issues concerned with the nature of men’s embodied identities. In discussing the appearance of their bodies, the men we interviewed talked less about muscle and skin than about their own selves located within particular social, cultural and moral universes. The surfaces of their bodies were, as Mike Featherstone (1991) has argued, charged primarily with ‘identity functions’, allowing men to establish a place for themselves in contemporary society. Using a social psychological approach which can be characterised as a discursive analysis (Henwood, Gill & McLean, 1999; Lupton, 1998), this paper makes connections between men’s private feelings and bodily practices, and broader social and cultural trends and relations. It shows that in talking about seemingly trivial questions such as whether to have one’s nose pierced or whether to join a gym, men are actively engaged in constructing and policing appropriate masculine behaviours and identities; above all, in regulating normative masculinity. We identify five key discourses or ‘interpretive repertoires’ (Wetherell & Potter, 1992) which together construct the meanings for these men of attempts to modify the appearance of the body. The five discourses or repertoires were focused on the themes of individualism and ‘being different’; libertarianism and the autonomous body; unselfconsciousness and the rejection of vanity; a notion of the ‘well-balanced’ and unobsessional self; and self-respect and the morally accountable body. Our analysis lends support to the claim that the body has become a new (identity) project in high/late/postmodernity (e.g. Shilling, 1993; Featherstone, 1991), but shows how fraught with difficulties this project is for young men who must simultaneously work on and discipline their bodies while disavowing any (inappropriate) interest in their own appearance. The analysis highlights the pervasive individualism of young men’s discourses, and the absence of alternative ways of making sense of embodied experiences

Genre as tool in the transmission of practice over time and across professional boundaries

In this article, we are concerned with the processes through which a central activity in the natural sciencesclassificationis instantiated in the writing practices of psychotherapists. We examined several psychotherapists\u27 grammatical, lexical, and rhetorical strategies for writing their initial evaluations of their clients\u27 problems. Using membership categorization device analysis from ethnomethodology, we examined several therapists\u27 written initial evaluations for their use of microlevel categories and categorizations derived both from clients\u27 own (oral) representations and the therapists\u27 professional repertoire. The resulting analysis suggests that clients\u27 emic, contextually grounded expressions are absorbed into a monological account reflecting the therapist\u27 s professional interpretive framework. The therapist thus translates the client\u27 s concerns into a set of meanings compatible with the classifications of psychopathology of the American Psychiatric Association\u27s (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.). The resulting written account supports a billable diagnosis thereby fulfilling its institutional purpose. It fails, however, to serve another important purpose to many therapists, which is helping the therapist to guide the therapy process by providing a record of the client\u27s perspective of his or her lifeworld. Copyright © 1997, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition

After Lashley: neuropsychology, metaphors, promissory notes.

The argument is that the rhetoric of psychology needs to be analysed in order to understand the processes of persuasion within the discipline. The work of the neurologist Karl Lashley is used to examine the ways in which a particular problem, the localization of memory, was characterized around 1950. An account is given of the holographic metaphor which was regarded as the solution to such a problem. It is suggested that such a metaphor could be regarded as a promissory note which was unfulfilled and rejected around 1980. A discussion is then given of the ways in which Lashley's work is currently being characterized. It is suggested that the assumption of modularity, or the `boxes in the brain' metaphor, could be regarded as another promissory note, and a number of the incentives offered for the acceptance of such a promise are reviewed