Exploring Perceptions of Religion and Science among Turkish Academics

The religiosity of academics has been studied for over a decade. With few exceptions, this research has been conducted on American “elite” scientists, and data from non-Western countries is lacking. Drawing from psychological and sociological literature, the present exploratory study investigates the religiosity of Turkish academics (N = 361) and their perceptions on the relationship between religion and science, and associated variables such as interpretation of the Quran, and belief in evolution and creationism. Moreover, we address criticism directed at previous research by probing for different God concepts among believing academics. Although cultural differences can be identified, the results generally support the idea that academics are less religious with 54% identifying as “less religious” or “not religious,” compared to 24.2% self-identifying as “religious” or “extremely religious.”

Urban Space and City Living

This chapter offers a philosophical account of what is distinctive about urban spaces and urban subjectivity. It proposes four features distinctive of city life that concern dwellers’ bodies and how they use and move through space: (1) proximity and shared space with many people, including a wide and diverse range of strangers; (2) unpredictability; and (3) slow locomotion combined with (4) fast switching between skills, stances, and perceptual expectations, which requires a wide, fluid, and flexible set of metaskills for moving between skill sets. Drawing on empirical sociological literature, the chapter explores how city dwellers see and judge risk and safety, order and disorder. It also develops the notion of an urban territory, and explores how territory is claimed, used, and bounded through bodily micronegotiations.

Transformations in American Political Participation

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a critical review of the sociological literature on political participation and, in doing so, to underscore the importance of power dynamics to understanding political engagement in the digital age. The author argues that the focus on social movements, the organizations that animate them, and the conditions under which they emerge and decline made it difficult for sociologists to incorporate digital media into their theorizing. A key problem in this regard is that sociologists have not done a good job of accounting for the ability of individuals and small groups to use technologies to advocate for political change. One way for sociologists to rebalance their theoretical and empirical efforts is to think more critically about the relationship between structure and agency and how this might (dis)empower individuals and groups. The author illustrates the utility of this approach by, first, outlining how power shapes whether and how an individual gets politically involved and, then, discussing how power influences the form a group takes as well as its influence in political processes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of directions for future research.

In search of alternatives for individualised workers: A comparative study of freelance organisations

This article contributes to the debate on the enterprise culture, which is characterised by the celebration of risk-taking and self-realisation, which in turn also implies self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce. It does so by investigating organisations created with the aim of finding alternatives for freelancers, who epitomise the processes of individualisation typical of late capitalism. The organisations studied, both companies and cooperatives, aim to enable freelancers to combine autonomy in running their business with access to labour and social rights and inclusion in a collective. Drawing on a multiple case study conducted in France and Italy, the article investigates how organisations can counteract the processes of self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce by enacting principles typical of alternative organisations. This study thus provides a twofold contribution to critical organisational theory and sociological literature on the individualisation of work and feasible alternatives to it. Our findings show, first, that the enterprise culture can be challenged through alternative organising even when freelancers – a category of workers embodying the contemporary processes of individualisation – are at stake. Second, the study of these emerging organisations also contributes to the flourishing debate on alternative organisations by adding an original empirical contribution to ongoing reflections on alternatives to market capitalism.

How does migratory status affect non-communicable disease risk in a global context? A systematic review

Challenges pertaining to the study of migrant health have been reported in medical and sociological literature. A literature review was thus conducted to gauge what research currently holds about the risk of non-communicable disease within migrant populations globally. The search strategy is outlined; CASP checklists were used to critically appraise articles, and the relevant data was synthesised and analysed. The research identifies several overarching quantitative themes regarding risk patterns. Recommendations are made.

The political signification of riots: A dispositive perspective on the 2011 England riots

This article suggests a new perspective on the political signification of riots, using the 2011 England riots as a case. The sociological literature tends to look for the political signification of riots in the riots themselves. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of the dispositive, the article develops a new approach that analyses the optical grids in which riots are made visible as objects for thought and action that can be either political or apolitical. By analysing the case of the 2011 England riots, the article shows how the dispositives that made the riots visible make it possible to ascribe a both obscure and radical political signification to the riots. The article opens up a new line of inquiry about the relation between riots and politics, and allows us to reconsider the political signification of riots.

Displaying family at a women’s refuge

This article explores the family relationships of mothers and children living at a women’s refuge because of intimate partner violence. Theoretically, the article contributes to the sociological literature analysing family relationships in terms of ‘doing’ and ‘displaying’ rather than ‘being’ a family. Empirically, it is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with children living at a refuge in Denmark. The article shows that family display at the refuge is conducted by both mothers and children and sometimes in conflicting ways, not least when it comes to the question of how to define the position of the father (who has committed the violence) in the family’s future life. This highlights how display – as an evaluative practice – can be done in different ways in order to protect or reject family relationships, both internally and when addressing external audiences. Furthermore, the article analyses family relationships in a semi-public setting (the refuge) where powerful audiences are active interpreters of the family display enacted, and participants in decisions concerning the families’ futures.

Kearifan Lokal dalam Hikayat Komering Pitu Phuyang

The purpose of this study is to explore and describe local wisdom in the Hikayat Komering Pitu Phuyang. The study used a qualitative descriptive method with a sociological literature approach. Source of research data is Hikayat Komering Pitu Phuyang by Himawan Bastari. The data were collected using the reading-note technique, while the content analysis technique carried out the data analysis. The results showed that the Hikayat Komering Pitu Phuyang contains very diverse local wisdom. Local wisdom includes (1) Wangsa Buay Tumi's belief in tambo as a means of information that is believed to be true, (2) the belief system in Belaksa Kepampang and Ikahua as the embodiment of gods, (3) the tradition of giving adok as a form of appreciation, (4) ) the government system in the form of a kingdom, (5) the tradition of slaughtering virgins and virgins as evidence of worship of gods, (6) the caste tradition in royal family marriages as a symbol of honour, (7) the tradition of asceticism at the top of a mountain as a means of approaching oneself to the God, (8) society that has the principles of religious life, full responsibility, and hard work, (9) a residential system that reflects the breadth of the way the people think.

Temporal typifications as an organizational resource: Experiential knowledge and patient processing at the emergency department

The connection between time and power has been studied extensively. A common strategy through which street-level bureaucrats exert power and dominance over their clients consists of imposing protracted waiting and maintaining uncertainty regarding the outcomes of waiting. In this study, I argue that another facet of power in organizations is related to the temporal typification of cases. By exploring the triage work in two emergency departments (EDs), I show that nurses and clerks identify patterns in the temporal distribution of visits and attach clinical and moral meanings to them. The temporal typifications are sense-making devices through which triage workers orient to patients. They form a stock of tacit experiential knowledge that delineates specific expectations about the legitimacy of cases and the worth of patients. These expectations impact the unfolding and structure of triage admission interviews and contribute to the prioritization of cases. The study brings into conversation the sociological literature on time and power with the study of the moral evaluation of patients to examine temporal typifications as an organizational resource in healthcare settings. It contributes to a better understanding of triage workers’ experiential knowledge and the practical accomplishment of moral evaluation in EDs.

Did Residential Racial Segregation in the U.S. Really Increase? An Analysis Accounting for Changes in Racial Diversity

A recent study by UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute (Menendian, Gailes, and Gambhir 2021) came to an astonishing conclusion: Of large metropolitan areas in the U.S., 81% have become more segregated over the period 1990-2019. This finding contradicts the recent sociological literature on changes in segregation in the U.S., which has generally found that racial residential segregation has slowly declined since the 1970s, especially between Blacks and Whites. The major question then is: What accounts for this difference? This paper answers this question in two parts. First, it shows that the preferred segregation measure of the Berkeley study, the “Divergence Index” (Roberto 2015), is identical to the Mutual Information Index M (Theil and Finizza 1971; Mora and Ruiz-Castillo 2009; Mora and Ruiz-Castillo 2011), a measure that is mechanically affected by changes in racial diversity. Given that the U.S. has become more diverse over the period 1990 to 2019, it is not surprising that this index shows increases in segregation. Second, by making use of a decomposition procedure developed in Elbers (2021), the paper shows that once the changes in segregation are decomposed into components that account for the changing racial diversity of the U.S., the findings are in line with the sociological literature. Residential racial segregation as a whole has declined modestly in most metropolitan areas of the U.S., although segregation has increased slightly when focusing on Asian Americans and Hispanics.