As the use of ‘diaspora’ has proliferated in the last decade, its meaning has been stretched in various directions. This article traces the dispersion of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space; analyses three core elements that continue to be understood as constitutive of diaspora; assesses claims made by theorists of diaspora about a radical shift in perspective and a fundamen...

How do transnational ideas such as human rights approaches to violence against women become meaningful in local social settings? How do they move across the gap between a cosmopolitan awareness of human rights and local sociocultural understandings of gender and family? Intermediaries such as community leaders, nongovernmental organization participants, and social movement activists play a crit...

this paper, through analyzing various scenes from randomly selected films, and of belief that the film subjects, if not complete reflections of social relations of humans, surely demonstrate sections of social reality, attempts to explicate the thoughts of scientists in sociolinguistics and sociology of language like labove, hymes, fishman,… , especially related to the features of social acts o...

At the start of an empirical study into the patient care process (PCP) a number of ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges were identified. The PCP appeared to be an “objective”, manageable, reality which is carried out by individuals with their own “subjective” understanding of the process, its purposes, organisational constraints and their roles. The dual perception of the ...

People use cultural concepts to organize and construct their social worlds. The question asked in this paper is how such constructions are infused with personal meaning and emotions from specific psychobiographies, and how this may facilitate or impede cultural and social changes, for instance, in the form of what one could call a certain inner psychological readiness for some discourses and no...

This article examines how justice and social order are administered and experienced in poor, politically fragile and conflict-affected environments. Taking notions of legal pluralism and public authority as our starting point, we explore how moral and social worlds are understood in places where ‘the law’ is not necessarily a discrete institutionalised process. Drawing upon current debates in t...

This article considers the roles played by ethnic mentions, or ethnonyms, in the discursive reconstruction of a former neighborhood in Easton, Pennsylvania, “Syrian Town.” We argue that these labels engage in the production of ethnic difference by depicting a social world composed of discrete types while presupposing a local class divide and a contrasting neighborhood imagined as elite and priv...

In this paper, I explore what we might mean by the phrase “crossing work practice boundaries by means of electronic communication”. The focus is on the work practice boundaries, and the transformational effects of electronic communication on such boundaries. I begin by defining work practices with respect to the social world or activity system communities for whom such practices make sense. Tak...

To successfully navigate the complex social world, people often need to solve the problem of perspective selection: Between two conflicting viewpoints of the self and the other, whose perspective should one take? In two experiments, we show that four-year-olds use others’ knowledge and goals to decide when to engage in visual perspective taking. Children were more likely to take a social partne...

Social phobia is one of the most frequent psychiatric disorders and is accessible to two forms of scientifically validated treatments: anti-depressant drugs and cognitive-behavioral therapies. Graded exposure to feared social situations (either in vivo or by imagining the situations) is fundamental to obtain an improvement of the anxious symptoms. Virtual reality (VR) may be an alternative to t...