scholarly journals Social representations and ideology: Theories of common sense about COVID-19 among middle-class Brazilians and their ideological implications

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Luiz Gustavo Silva Souza ◽  
Emma O’Dwyer ◽  
Sabrine Mantuan dos Santos Coutinho ◽  
Sharmistha Chaudhuri ◽  
Laila Lilargem Rocha ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
Related Risk ◽  
The Social

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of billions of people worldwide. Individuals and groups were compelled to construct theories of common sense about the disease to communicate and guide practices. The theory of social representations provides powerful concepts to analyse the psychosocial construction of COVID-19. This study aimed to understand the social representations of COVID-19 constructed by middle-class Brazilian adults and their ideological implications, providing a social-psychological analysis of these phenomena while the pandemic is still ongoing. We adopted a qualitative approach based on semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted online in April-May 2020. Participants were 13 middle-class Brazilians living in urban areas. We analysed the interviews with thematic analysis and a phenomenological approach. The social representations were organised around three themes: 1) a virus originated in human actions and with anthropocentric meanings (e.g., a punishment for the human-led destruction of the environment); 2) a dramatic disease that attacks the lungs and kills people perceived to have “low immunity”; and 3) a disturbing pandemic that was also conceived as a correction event with positive consequences. The social representations included beliefs about the individualistic determination of immunity, the attribution of divine causes to the pandemic, and the need for the moral reformation of humankind. The discussion highlights the ideological implications of these theories of common sense. Socially underprivileged groups are at greater COVID-19-related risk, which the investigated social representations may contribute to conceal and naturalise.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

scholarly journals The Jihadi Current and the Lay Thinking: A “Re-Anchorage” Process Hypothesis

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-374
Author(s):  
Dorra Ben Alaya
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Islamist Terrorism ◽  
Familiar Objects ◽  
Theory Of Social Representations

The Jihadi-salafist doctrine which is at the Islamist terrorism origin that affects several countries since the emergence of Al Qaeda in the late 80's, gave birth to the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham/Levant (ISIS/ISIL) established as a Caliphate in 2014. Despite the ISIS official military defeat in 2019, the Jihadi-Salafist current - whose history goes back a long way, is currently behind a number of attacks whether collective or individual, claimed by known organizations or committed in isolation. In our perspective, we try to apprehend the attraction power of the Jihadi narrative issue taking the Theory of Social Representations as a paradigmatic framework. This implies that we dont consider the Jihadi current membership as the manifestation of a deviation from normality or optimal rationality, but as the expression of a certain common sense resonance. More precisely, and taking the case of the Tunisian context, the success of the Jihadi narrative is explained by its effectiveness as an interpretive grid and as a guide for action, making it possible to re-anchor a reality lacking in meaning. This hypothesis of a re-anchoring implies that anchoring as described by Moscovici as one of the two processes at the origin of the social representations formation (with the objectification process), could be not only as a familiarization of the strange by inserting it in an already known pre-existing frame, but by substituting to the frame itself, a new one, in order to be able to insert familiar objects which would have lost their sense precisely because of the old frame itself. This hypothesis could offer a theoretical and heuristic perspective allowing the anchoring process to be conceived as a circular and non-definitive process.

scholarly journals Sexuality of elders with dementia: social representation of nursing students

Rev Rene ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. e44199
Author(s):  
Wanderson Carneiro Moreira ◽  
Vanessa Carvalho Fontinele ◽  
Fernanda Cláudia Miranda Amorim ◽  
Maria do Perpétuo Socorro de Sousa Nóbrega ◽  
Cláudia Maria Sousa de Carvalho ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nursing Students ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Hierarchical Classification ◽  
Education Institution ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Semantic Classes ◽  
The Social

Objective: to learn about the social representation of nursing students about the sexuality of elders with dementia. Methods: qualitative study, based on the Theory of Social Representations, developed with 20 Nursing Graduation students from a Brazilian higher education institution. Data was collected through a focal group, processed in the software IRAMUTEQ and analyzed using a Descending Hierarchical Classification. Results: four semantic classes emerged: Sexuality as a right, The theme was insufficient in graduation, Meanings attributed to sexuality, and Care from the perspective of students. Conclusion: the study showed that the nursing students investigated had polysemic representations about the sexuality of elders with dementia, among which discriminatory and stigmatizing conceptions stood out, socially constructed and anchored in common sense.

Civic Competence in the Logic of Openness: A Phenomenological Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-79
Author(s):  
Igor V. Gibelev
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Subject Knowledge ◽  
Pedagogical Design ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Civic Mindedness

The article offers a phenomenological view on civic competency, openness of education, and values as type of competencies. The need for such a comparison is dictated by the discrepancy between the humanistic meanings of education and the social reality in which they are supposed to be implemented. It is assumed that a phenomenological perspective can present civic competency as a borderline connecting both the areas. This study is methodically supported by explication of the philosophical (transcendental-phenomenological) logic of the concept of openness.The appeal to openness, which is the essence of human subjectivity (autonomy), clarifies the substantive character of civic competency structure.Firstly, the study underlines the connection between openness and universalism as cultural principle (that is, in culture and through culture) of self-determination of the mind, constituting civic mindedness as a universal moral and legal modus of subjectivity. Bringing the civic idea to the competency range is the own task of education, which can be accomplished only in continuous actualization of the concept of openness.Secondly, the article proposes to consider the concept of value in the meaning of “type of competencies” according to the Council of Europe’s “Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture” as a tool for crystallizing the self-determining mind into civic competency. Attention to this document is drawn by the coherence of openness and universalism with educational policies and practices, which is formalized in the pedagogical design of values as a type of competence. The study’s argumentation confirms this connection and ascertains that an open edu­cational system is defined in its essence not by a set of accessible educational environment technologies, but by the depth of its rooting in the logic of openness.Thirdly, the actualization of values as a type of competence in the logic of openness provides an opportunity for phenomenological designing of pedagogical technologies. The essential idea of this approach is that civic competency can be constituted as a semantic determination of different types of subject knowledge and, through their correction, can transform broad social contexts. As an example of that sort of transformative participation, the article presents the values’ influence on the strengthening of human capital in aggregation of new technologies and inequality.

Socio-Technical Approaches for Optimal Organizational Performance

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-70
Author(s):  
Tetiana Shmelova ◽  
Yuliya Sikirda
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Performance ◽  
Psychological Impact ◽  
Technical System ◽  
Civil Aviation ◽  
International Civil Aviation Organization ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Management ◽  
The Impact

In this chapter, the authors present a socio-technical system for optimal organizational performance at aviation enterprises such as air navigation system as socio-technical system. The authors made an analysis of the International Civil Aviation Organization documents on risk assessment and the impact of the social environment on the aviation system. The authors obtained the results of the evaluation of non-professional factors: determination of the social-psychological impact on decision making of human-operator by identifying the preferences for organizational performance. The structural analysis of internal and external management environment of aviation enterprise was carried out. And, as follows from the analysis, inhomogeneous factors that influence the aviation activity were classified, formalized, and systematically generalized using set-theoretical approach. The influence of factors of internal and external management environment on the aviation enterprise's activity was determined.

Of “Takers” and “Makers”: A Social Psychological Analysis of Class and Classism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather E. Bullock ◽  
Harmony A. Reppond
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Attitudes And Beliefs ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Psychological Research ◽  
The Government ◽  
Relationship Of

During the 2012 United States presidential campaign, the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates drew a stark line between “takers” and “makers,” claiming that too many Americans are “takers” because they receive more from the government and society than they contribute. In this chapter, we employ a critical social psychological framework to understand and deconstruct the political discourse surrounding “makers” versus “takers” and to illuminate the social psychology of social class and classism. This chapter focuses on attitudes and beliefs about social class that legitimize economic inequality and class disparities and the relationship of these beliefs to interclass relations and social and economic policy. In doing so, this chapter identifies the important role of social psychological research and justice-oriented frameworks in alleviating class-based disparities and classism.

As Representações Sociais de Graduandos no Curso de Pedagogia Sobre o “Ser Professor” de Ciências nos Anos Iniciais

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 252
Author(s):  
João Luis Dequi Araújo ◽  
Carlos Alberto de Oliveira Magalhães Júnior
Keyword(s):  
Free Recall ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Public University ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
Content Area ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
The Social

O professor oriundo da licenciatura em Pedagogia, geralmente, possui dificuldades para ensinar Ciências, devido à formação deficiente e fragmentada, desta maneira, escolas e universidades são lugares capazes de compartilhar conhecimentos de senso comum e científicos atuando como geradoras de Representações Sociais. O presente trabalho tem por objetivo investigar as Representações Sociais sobre o ser professor de Ciências para os anos iniciais que os licenciandos em Pedagogia de uma Universidade pública do Paraná possuem. Foram utilizadas as técnicas de evocação livre de palavras e questionário como instrumentos de coleta de dados. Utilizou-se a análise de conteúdo e a categorização em elementos centrais e periféricos das Representações Sociais. Identificou-se que a representação social do ser professor envolve, principalmente, o ensinar e o aprender, em um contexto tradicional, de modo que seu o núcleo faz referência à palavra conhecimento e aos elementos periféricos aos conteúdos curriculares na área das Ciências Naturais. Reconheceu-se também que ao comparar as Representações Sociais dos graduandos das séries iniciais e finais do curso de Pedagogia as mesmas se mantiveram.Palavras-chave: Ensino. Formação de Professores. Senso Comum. AbstractTeachers who come  from Pedagogy degrees usually have difficulties  teaching sciences, because of their weak and fragmented preparation in this subject, and thus, schools and universities are places able to share common sense and scientific knowledge acting as social representations generators. This study aims to investigate the social representations about being a teacher Science for the first school years, that undergraduates in Pedagogy in one of Paraná Public university have. The analyses techniques of word free recall and questionnaire as data collection tools  were used for the content analysis in affirmative and categorization in central and peripheral elements of social representations. It was identified that the social representation of being a teacher primarily involves teaching and learning in a traditional context, so that his or her core refers to word knowledge in the act of transmitting it and the peripheral elements to the curriculum content area in Natural Sciences. It was also recognized that when comparing the students’ social representations in the initial years and the last years of the graduation remained the same.Keeywords: Teaching. Teacher’s Training. Common Sense

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