Sociology Research Collection

In professions of public officials, the LGBTIQ identity might serve as a permanently negotiated border between the private and the public. The forced negotiations of one’s identity within the authority bring about specific forms of activism, performed by state officials. The working paper demonstrates results from the empirical research on public officials in Germany and Russia, focusing on the intersection of LGBTIQ identity and belonging to public offices. By doing so, the working paper detects a special meaning of the private/public divide as essential aspect of LGBTIQ-identity articulation and discusses its relevancy for the activism.

This book is an extraordinarily great success for the Russian intellectual community. It summarizes all the main ideas of Judith Butler's work, from her first book, Gender Trouble, treating fundamental social categories as performative, to the current project in which she proposes a new democracy based on alliances and coalitions instead of aging identity movements. At the same time, the author independently brings together her own ideas, which have always maintained interconnection, but have never been explicitly presented in such a consistent presentation. The relatively small number of translations of Butler's works into Russian largely determines the meager acquaintance with these ideas in the Russian academic environment. Another important obstacle is the confusing and overly specific language of translations, only partly dictated by the original. Although not all of these obstacles have been fully overcome in this edition, the structure of the book and the lecture style of presentation of the material in many respects make it possible to solve these problems and finally get to know the philosopher's theories in Russian quite fully.

One of the most dramatic changes in Irish society over the past two decades has been the substantial increase in the number of women participating in the paid workforce, and the concomitant change in gender roles. This gives rise to the question of whether this change in behaviour is also associated with changes in gender role attitudes. This paper uses data from the 1988, 1994 and 2002 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) ‘Family and Changing Gender Roles’ module to examine changes in Irish gender role attitudes over this period. The analysis presented here demonstrates a decline in support for traditional gender roles over the period. A central issue explored is the relationship between attitudes and behaviour. Are increases in Irish women's labour force participation accompanied by a move away from traditional ideas about the gendered division of labour? Given the significance of ISSP as an important resource both for comparative and national level social science research, and especially given that the module is to be fielded again in 2013, the paper also critiques the wording of the questions in this survey, and the extent to which they accurately measure the complexities of gender role attitudes.

Aims: Social and technical trends are empowering people with diabetes to co-create or self-develop medical devices and treatments to address their unmet healthcare needs, for example, open-source automated insulin delivery (AID) systems. This study aims to investigate the perceived barriers towards adoption and maintaining of open-source AID systems. Methods: This is a multinational study based on a cross-sectional, retrospective web-based survey of non-users of open-source AID. Participants (n = 129) with type 1 diabetes from 31 countries were recruited online to elicit their perceived barriers towards building and maintaining of an open-source AID system. Results: Sourcing the necessary components, lack of confidence in one's own technology knowledge and skills, perceived time and energy required to build a system, and fear of losing healthcare provider support appear to be major barriers towards the uptake of open-source AID. Conclusions: This study identified a range of structural and individual-level barriers to uptake of open-source AID. Some of these individual-level barriers may be overcome over time through the peer support of the DIY online community as well as greater acceptance of open-source innovation among healthcare professionals. The findings have important implications for understanding the possible wider diffusion of open-source diabetes technology solutions in the future.

As a treatment option for people living with diabetes, automated insulin delivery (AID) systems are becoming increasingly popular. The #WeAreNotWaiting community plays a crucial role in the provision and distribution of open-source AID technology. However, while a large percentage of children were early adopters of open-source AID, there are regional differences in adoption, which has prompted an investigation into the barriers perceived by caregivers of children with diabetes to creating open-source systems.Methods: This is a retrospective, cross-sectional and multinational study conducted with caregivers of children and adolescents with diabetes, distributed across the online #WeAreNotWaiting online peer-support groups. Participants-specifically caregivers of children not using AID-responded to a web-based questionnaire concerning their perceived barriers to building and maintaining an open-source AID system. Results: 56 caregivers of children with diabetes, who were not using open-source AID at the time of data collection responded to the questionnaire. Respondents indicated that their major perceived barriers to building an open-source AID system were their limited technical skills (50%), a lack of support by medical professionals (39%), and therefore the concern with not being able to maintain an AID system (43%). However, barriers relating to confidence in open-source technologies/unapproved products and fear of digital technology taking control of diabetes were not perceived as significant enough to prevent non-users from initiating the use of an open-source AID system. Conclusions: The results of this study elucidate some of the perceived barriers to uptake of open-source AID experienced by caregivers of children with diabetes. Reducing these barriers may improve the uptake of open-source AID technology for children and adolescents with diabetes. With the continuous development and wider dissemination of educational resources and guidance-for both aspiring users and their healthcare professionals-the adoption of open-source AID systems could be improved.

This article explores the relationship between gender inequality and the tempo of life around the world. By directly situating tempo in sociological theory, I develop a more consistent, embodied, precise and generalizable measure for the tempo of public life, with gender on the forefront. To do so, I draw on the largest dataset to-date collected on the tempo of life around the world. This allows me to isolate how macro- and micro-level gender inequality matters in different contexts. Contrary to existing literature from the biosciences, my ordinary least squares regression results show that in countries with high levels of gender inequality, women often walk faster than men in public places. Monte Carlo cross-validation tests and parametric bootstrap analyses test the predictive accuracy of the full model. My results illustrate that the tempo of public life cannot be solely reduced to previously-explored economic, cultural and environmental differences between the northern and the southern hemispheres. The consideration of gender is imperative for understanding between-country and within-country differences in tempo. In addition to shedding light on the tempo of public life, my work serves as an important first step toward standardizing the tempo measure, allowing for meaningful comparisons in markedly different contexts.

Facebook announced a community review program in December 2019 and Twitter launched a communitybased platform to address misinformation, called Birdwatch, in January 2021. We provide an overview of the potential affordances of such community based approaches to content moderation based on past research. While our analysis generally supports a community-based approach to content moderation, it also warns against potential pitfalls, particularly when the implementation of the new infrastructures does not promote diversity. We call for more multidisciplinary research utilizing methods from complex systems studies, behavioural sociology, and computational social science to advance the research on crowd-based content moderation.

Holy Catholic Ireland is changing rapidly. Irish Catholics no longer have the same devotion to the Church that their parents had. While institutional affiliation and levels of belief remain high, there has been a decline in practice, particularly in the number going to Mass. This paper analyses recent changes in Catholic belief and practice, compares them with trends among other European Catholics, and links them to findings from a qualitative study of Contemporary Irish Identities. The changes in Irish Catholic religiosity can be associated with an ongoing detachment from the institutional church. An orthodox adherence to institutional rules and regulations appears to be giving way to a collective identification with a religious heritage. What was once defined as á la carte Catholicism seems to be giving way to a more smorgasbord approach in which Catholics not only pick and chose which institutional rules, beliefs and practices they prefer but, increasingly, mix these with ingredients from other religious traditions. These findings suggest a new typology of Irish Catholics.

Dr Iarfhlaith Watson was invited to give a lecture at a public seminar to celebrate forty years of Raidió na Gaeltachta, Indreabhán, Galway 2012. The talks and discussions at the seminar were recorded for broadcast on Raidió na Gaeltachta.

In June 2013, Russian Parliament (the State Duma) adopted the bill 135-FZ meant to "protect children from information that promotes denial of traditional family values." This piece of legislation amended several federal laws and the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation with the final purpose to ban from public access something called "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations".

There is nothing very controversial in the idea that learning to defer gratification is a central element in the socialisation of children. It could be called an individual civilising process, or just ‘growing up’. The argument of this paper is that the deferred gratification is also the central element in Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes as long-term social changes. If he had spoken more about deferred gratification and used the term ‘civilisation’ a bit less, some of the controversy about and misunderstanding of his theory might have been diminished. In Über den Prozess der Zivilisation he set out to demonstrate that the social standard of the capacity to defer gratifcation had over the generations become more demanding; the small child had further to travel in order to attain the standard required to qualify as adult behaviour and feeling.

The paper introduces the often neglected concept of 'claimed co-ethnics' in the analysis of citizenship policies. It argues that this is an interstitial category that further complicates the triadic nexus between national minorities, nationalising states and kin-states. The 'claimed co-ethnics' are defined as people who are recognised by the citizenship (or ethnizenship) conferring state as belonging to its main ethnic group, although they themselves do not embrace that definition. In addition to bringing the issue of claimed co-ethnics into focus, the paper elucidates how citizenship policies can affect groups that challenge the exact fit between ethnicity and nation, showing how national governments through particular citizenship policies and categorisation practices engage in the construction of these groups. The paper shows that the triadic nexus framework, which has had a strong influence on citizenship and minorities scholarship, needs to be revised to include unidirectional relations between the elements of the triadic nexus. The paper is based on the comparison between the cases of ethnic Vlachs (in the context of Albania and Greece) and Bunjevci (in the context of Serbia and Croatia).

Assuming that the conflict of the past thirty years is now drawing to a close, we can, with a certain distance and detachment, attempt to map its parameters, examine its causes and consequences, and seek to learn from it. Why did the conflict initially break out, why did it last so long, and why did it end when it did? Has the Good Friday Agreement finally legitimated Northern Ireland as a political entity, and has violence now been de-legitimated as a weapon in Irish and in Irish-British politics? Is political violence likely to continue in some form and could it conceivably return on the scale of the past thirty years?

In August 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), which generated extensive societal debate and interest in mainstream and social media. Using computational and conceptual text analysis, we examined more than 6,000 English-language posts on Twitter to establish the relative presence of different topics. Then, we assessed their levels of toxicity and sentiment polarity as an indication of contention and controversy. We find first that meat consumption and dietary options became one of the most discussed issues on Twitter in response to the IPCC report, even though it was a relatively minor element of the report; second, this new issue of controversy (meat and diet) had similar, high levels of toxicity to strongly contentious issues in previous IPCC reports (skepticism about climate science and the credibility of the IPCC). We suggest that this is in part a reflection of increasingly polarized narratives about meat and diet found in other areas of public discussion and of a movement away from criticism of climate science towards criticism of climate solutions. Finally, we discuss the possible implications of these findings for the work of the IPCC in anticipating responses to its reports and responding to them effectively.

Aims: To investigate self-reported out-of-pocket expenses (OoPE) associated with insulin and diabetes supplies for people living with type 1 diabetes (T1D) worldwide. Methods: A web-based, cross-sectional survey was conducted from August to December 2020. The analysis included comparisons between responses from countries with no, partial, and full healthcare coverage. Results: 1,066 participants from 64 countries took part in the study. ~25% of respondents reported having underused insulin at least once within the last year due to perceived cost. A significant correlation was observed between OoPEs and reported household income for respondents with partial healthcare coverage. 63.2% of participants reported disruption of insulin supplies and 25.3% reported an increase of prices related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions: This study confirms previous reports of ~25% of people in the United States with T1D using less insulin and/or fewer supplies at least once in the last year due to cost, a trend associated with the extent of healthcare coverage. Similar trends were observed in some middle/low income countries. Moreover, patients reported an increase in insulin prices and disruption of supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study highlights the importance of self-reported OoPEs and its association with underuse/rationing of insulin.

Islamophobic hate speech on social media is a growing concern in contemporary Western politics and society. It can inflict considerable harm on any victims who are targeted, create a sense of fear and exclusion amongst their communities, toxify public discourse and motivate other forms of extremist and hateful behavior. Accordingly, there is a pressing need for automated tools to detect and classify Islamophobic hate speech robustly and at scale, thereby enabling quantitative analyses of large textual datasets, such as those collected from social media. Previous research has mostly approached the automated detection of hate speech as a binary task. However, the varied nature of Islamophobia means that this is often inappropriate for both theoretically informed social science and effective monitoring of social media platforms. Drawing on in-depth conceptual work we build an automated software tool which distinguishes between non-Islamophobic, weak Islamophobic and strong Islamophobic content. Accuracy is 77.6% and balanced accuracy is 83%. Our tool enables future quantitative research into the drivers, spread, prevalence and effects of Islamophobic hate speech on social media.

The focus of this paper has been on examining country difference in level of inequality in access to higher education. I have argued that the conclusions drawn from much mobility research is of limited value for policy makers because of its concentration on cohort studies which renders this research primarily historical. Because of the need to focus on current and recent enrolments and because of the added value which arises from comparative analysis I have been impressed with the potential of the on-going series of Eurostudent studies. Furthermore because of the intractable measurement problems of measuring comparative intergenerational inequalities I have felt that we need to move beyond one-off studies and to seek to validate our conclusions from different studies.

Black Africans across Europe who report higher levels of discrimination in employment encounter systemic resistance in their career pursuits. In this article, discrimination in the Irish labour market is creatively challenged by centring race, and juxtaposing the experiences of migrants of Black African descent against their White counterparts based on information from 32 semi-structured interviews of first generation migrants from Nigeria, Poland, and Spain. Five characteristic experiences identified by synthesising migrants’ interpretation of their journeys to paid employment are presented. The typologies in these trajectories reveal whiteness as a hidden resource that advantages Whites. It also illustrates the prevalence of an ascription of deficiency to Black workers and their credentials. These findings are presented through composite characters following critical race theory’s counter-storytelling.

Irish women are caught in contradictory sexual discourses which create a cultural double bind. The legacy of Catholic Church teaching, in which the sexual honour of women revolves around their innocence and subservience, still lingers. This is gradually being replaced by media messages and images which portray women as sexually equal and independent. However, the media also portray sexually independent women as a threat to sexual moral order. The double bind reproduces double standards. The cultural contradictions in the way women are portrayed are revealed in an analysis of the reporting of events surrounding a court case involving the sexual assault of a woman. This analysis is put within the context of media reporting of other cases of sexually transgressive women.

Following an unprecedented boom that attracted the label 'Celtic Tiger', since 2008 Ireland has experienced the most severe economic and labour market crisis since the foundation of the State. The rapid deterioration in the labour market, alongside stringent austerity measures, had a widespread impact. Considerable debate persists as to where the heaviest burden has fallen. Conventional measures of income poverty and inequality have a limited capacity to capture the impact of the recession. This is exacerbated by a dramatic increase in the scale of debt problems. Our analysis, which focuses on economic stress, provides no evidence for individualization or class polarization. Instead we find that while economic stress level are highly stratified in class terms in both boom and bust periods, the changing impact of class is highly contingent on life course stage. The affluent income class remained largely insulated from the experience of economic stress, however, it saw its advantage relative to the income poor class decline at the earliest stage of the life-course and remain stable across the rest of the life course. At the other end of the hierarchy, the income poor class experienced a relative improvement in their situation in the earlier life course phase and no significant change at the later stages. For the remaining income classes life-course stage was even more important. At the earliest stage the precarious class experienced some improvement in its situation while the outcomes for the middle classes remain unchanged. In the mid-life course the precarious and lower middle classes experienced disproportionate increase in their stress levels while at the later life-cycle stage it is the combined middle classes that lost out. Additional effects over time relating to social class are restricted to the deteriorating situation of the petit bourgeoisie at the middle stage of the life-course. The pattern is clearly a good deal more complex that suggested by conventional notions of 'middle class squeeze' and points to the distinctive challenges relating to welfare and taxation policy faced by governments in the Great Recession.