Managing sleep and wakefulness in a 24 hour world

This article contributes to literature on the sociology of sleep by exploring the sleeping practices and subjective sleep experiences of two social groups: shift workers and students. It draws on data, collected in the UK from 25 semi-structured interviews, to discuss the complex ways in which working patterns and social activities impact upon experiences and expectations of sleep in our wired awake world. The data show that, typically, sleep is valued and considered to be important for health, general wellbeing, appearance and physical and cognitive functioning. However, sleep time is often cut back on in favour of work demands and social activities. While shift workers described their efforts to fit in an adequate amount of sleep per 24-hour period, for students, the adoption of a flexible sleep routine was thought to be favourable for maintaining a work–social life balance. Collectively, respondents reported using a wide range of strategies, techniques, technologies and practices to encourage, overcome or delay sleep(iness) and boost, promote or enhance wakefulness/alertness at socially desirable times. The analysis demonstrates how social context impacts not only on how we come to think about sleep and understand it, but also how we manage or self-regulate our sleeping patterns

Resilience and well-being among children of migrant parents in South-East Asia

There has been little systematic empirical research on the well-being of children in transnational households in South-East Asia—a major sending region for contract migrants. This study uses survey data collected in 2008 from children aged 9, 10 and 11 and their caregivers in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam (N=1,498). Results indicate that while children of migrant parents, especially migrant mothers, are less likely to be happy compared to children in non-migrant households, greater resilience in child well-being is associated with longer durations of maternal absence. There is no evidence for a direct parental migration effect on school enjoyment and performance. The analyses highlight the sensitivity of results to the dimension of child well-being measured and who makes the assessment.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Researching ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, ‘illegal’ migrants and ‘crimmigrants’

Both immigration and criminal laws are, at their core, systems of inclusion and exclusion. They are designed to determine whether and how to include individuals as members of society or exclude them from it, thereby, creating insiders and outsiders (Stumpf 2006). Both are designed to create distinct categories of people — innocent versus guilty, admitted versus excluded or, as majority would say, ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ (Stumpf 2006). Viewed in that light, perhaps it is not surprising that these two areas of law have become inextrica- bly connected in the official discourses. When politicians and policy makers (and also law enforcement authorities and tabloid press) seek to raise the barriers for non-citizens to attain membership in society, it is unremarkable that they turn their attention to an area of the law that similarly func- tions to exclude the ‘other’ — transforming immigrants into ‘crimmigrants’.1 As a criminological researcher one then has to rise up to the challenges of disentangling these so-called officially constructed (pseudo) realities, and breaking free from a continued dominance of authoritative discourses, and developing an alternative understanding of ‘crimmigration’ by connecting the processes of criminal is ation and ‘other ing’ with poverty, xe no-racism and other forms of social exclusion (see Institute of Race Relations 1987; Richmond 1994; Fekete 2001; Bowling and Phillips 2002; Sivanandan 2002; Weber and Bowling 2004)

Generalized coordinates on the phase space of Yang-Mills theory

We study the suitability of complex Wilson loop variables as (generalized) coordinates on the physical phase space of $SU(2)$-Yang-Mills theory. To this end, we construct a natural one-to-one map from the physical phase space of the Yang-Mills theory with compact gauge group $G$ to a subspace of the physical configuration space of the complex G^\C-Yang-Mills theory. Together with a recent result by Ashtekar and Lewandowski this implies that the complex Wilson loop variables form a complete set of generalized coordinates on the physical phase space of $SU(2)$-Yang-Mills theory. They also form a generalized canonical loop algebra. Implications for both general relativity and gauge theory are discussed.Comment: TeX, 11pp, revised version (minor clarifications added, Comment after (2.9) inserted); to appear in Class. Quant. Grav

Masculinity at work: The experiences of men in female dominated occupations

This paper presents the findings of a research project on the implications of men's non-traditional career choices for their experiences within the organization and for gender identity. The research is based on 40 in-depth interviews with male workers from four occupational groups: librarian-ship, cabin crew, nurses and primary school teachers. Results suggest a typology of male workers in female dominated occupations: seekers (who actively seek the career), finders (who find the occupation in the process of making general career decisions) and settlers (who settle into the career after periods of time in mainly male dominated occupations). Men benefit from their minority status through assumptions of enhanced leadership (the assumed authority effect), by being given differential treatment (the special consideration effect) and being associated with a more careerist attitude to work (the career effect). At the same time, they feel comfortable working with women (the zone of comfort effect). Despite this comfort, men adopt a variety of strategies to re-establish a masculinity that has been undermined by the 'feminine' nature of their work. These include re-labeling, status enhancement and distancing from the feminine. The dynamics of maintaining and reproducing masculinities within the non-traditional work setting are discussed in the light of recent theorising around gender, masculinity and work

Pregnancy and childbirth in English prisons : institutional ignominy and the pains of imprisonment

© 2020 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL.With a prison population of approximately 9000 women in England, it is estimated that approximately 600 pregnancies and 100 births occur annually. Despite an extensive literature on the sociology of reproduction, pregnancy and childbirth among women prisoners is under‐researched. This article reports an ethnographic study in three English prisons undertaken in 2015‐2016, including interviews with 22 prisoners, six women released from prison and 10 staff members. Pregnant prisoners experience numerous additional difficulties in prison including the ambiguous status of a pregnant prisoner, physical aspects of pregnancy and the degradation of the handcuffed or chained prisoner during visits to the more public setting of hospital. This article draws on Erving Goffman's concepts of closed institutions, dramaturgy and mortification of self, Crewe et al.'s work on the gendered pains of imprisonment and Crawley's notion of ‘institutional thoughtlessness’, and proposes a new concept of institutional ignominy to understand the embodied situation of the pregnant prisoner.Peer reviewe

Equivariant cohomology over Lie groupoids and Lie-Rinehart algebras

Using the language and terminology of relative homological algebra, in particular that of derived functors, we introduce equivariant cohomology over a general Lie-Rinehart algebra and equivariant de Rham cohomology over a locally trivial Lie groupoid in terms of suitably defined monads (also known as triples) and the associated standard constructions. This extends a characterization of equivariant de Rham cohomology in terms of derived functors developed earlier for the special case where the Lie groupoid is an ordinary Lie group, viewed as a Lie groupoid with a single object; in that theory over a Lie group, the ordinary Bott-Dupont-Shulman-Stasheff complex arises as an a posteriori object. We prove that, given a locally trivial Lie groupoid G and a smooth G-manifold f over the space B of objects of G, the resulting G-equivariant de Rham theory of f boils down to the ordinary equivariant de Rham theory of a vertex manifold relative to the corresponding vertex group, for any vertex in the space B of objects of G; this implies that the equivariant de Rham cohomology introduced here coincides with the stack de Rham cohomology of the associated transformation groupoid whence this stack de Rham cohomology can be characterized as a relative derived functor. We introduce a notion of cone on a Lie-Rinehart algebra and in particular that of cone on a Lie algebroid. This cone is an indispensable tool for the description of the requisite monads.Comment: 47 page

Combinatorial Hopf algebras in quantum field theory I

This manuscript stands at the interface between combinatorial Hopf algebra theory and renormalization theory. Its plan is as follows: Section 1 is the introduction, and contains as well an elementary invitation to the subject. The rest of part I, comprising Sections 2-6, is devoted to the basics of Hopf algebra theory and examples, in ascending level of complexity. Part II turns around the all-important Faa di Bruno Hopf algebra. Section 7 contains a first, direct approach to it. Section 8 gives applications of the Faa di Bruno algebra to quantum field theory and Lagrange reversion. Section 9 rederives the related Connes-Moscovici algebras. In Part III we turn to the Connes-Kreimer Hopf algebras of Feynman graphs and, more generally, to incidence bialgebras. In Section10 we describe the first. Then in Section11 we give a simple derivation of (the properly combinatorial part of) Zimmermann's cancellation-free method, in its original diagrammatic form. In Section 12 general incidence algebras are introduced, and the Faa di Bruno bialgebras are described as incidence bialgebras. In Section 13, deeper lore on Rota's incidence algebras allows us to reinterpret Connes-Kreimer algebras in terms of distributive lattices. Next, the general algebraic-combinatorial proof of the cancellation-free formula for antipodes is ascertained; this is the heart of the paper. The structure results for commutative Hopf algebras are found in Sections 14 and 15. An outlook section very briefly reviews the coalgebraic aspects of quantization and the Rota-Baxter map in renormalization.Comment: 94 pages, LaTeX figures, precisions made, typos corrected, more references adde