1,721,067 research outputs found
Ken Plummer: la sessualità come costruzione sociale
No full textL’idea che la definizione della sessualità, e delle questioni ad essa connesse, vari nel tempo e nello spazio, e che non sia quindi possibile affrontare il tema in termini puramente biologici, è stata esposta ed argomentata dal professor Ken Plummer dell’Università di Essex (UK) nel corso di un incontro seminariale promosso dalla professoressa Rosalba Perrotta. L’evento, che si è svolto a Catania presso il dipartimento di Studi Politici della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche il 6 giugno 2008, era inserito tra le attività didattiche del master in Studi Criminologici e Penitenziari
Journeying with Ken Plummer through radical constructionism, critical humanism, and intimate counterpublics
Get PDFKen Plummer’s life work has had a major impact on the development of the sociology of sexuality. While being firmly rooted in and committed to the traditions of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism – which chimes nicely with his philosophical stance of critical humanism – Ken Plummer openly engaged in a critical dialogue with many theoretical perspectives. This renders his work a rich resource for researchers working on sexualities from within different paradigms. This paper engages in a critical appraisal of some of Plummer’s most significant concepts through autobiographical reflection on my personal experience of working with Ken Plummer as a PhD student, further tracing the influence his work has had on my own writing on consensual non-monogamies, LGBTQIA+ activism and queer film festivals. Using autoethnography and memory work, the essay highlights the powerful potential residing in Plummer’s path-breaking contributions to social constructionism (script theory and narrative power), methodology (personal documents), narrative sociology (sexual stories), critical humanism (dialogical ethics and cosmopolitan sexualities) and political sociology (intra-movement conflict, intimate citizenship, counter publics, and age standpoints). The essay argues that these ideas – and Plummer’s overall legacy as a scholar and theorist – bear a strong significance for future research in sexuality studies
Book Review: Ken Plummer, <i>Narrative Power: The Struggle for Human Value</i>
No full textSociologists have always enjoyed stories, especially in qualitative research. Ken Plummer is perhaps the champion storyteller among us, with his impressive back catalogue of tales about sexuality, illness and documents of life. In this new volume, Narrative Power, he moves from the micro to the macro by examining the role of stories in political and cultural life. Echoing Mills’ famous dictum about relating private troubles to public issues, Plummer argued that social stories form a point of connection between inner and outer worlds.Building on his theoretical perspective of critical humanism, Plummer suggests that the personal stories told by individuals can be linked to wider value systems, such as humanitarianism, emancipation, compassion and empowerment. In this way, stories have the power to perform social actions and create social change – whether for the better or for the worse. This book is an exploration of the different ways in which people can perform ‘narrative acts’ and the social consequences this brings. Staying true to his symbolic interactionist roots, Plummer argues that these acts are negotiated and contingent upon the social process, nested and networked within relational systems of power.</p
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Book Review: Ken Plummer, <i>Narrative Power: The Struggle for Human Value</i>
No full textSociologists have always enjoyed stories, especially in qualitative research. Ken Plummer is perhaps the champion storyteller among us, with his impressive back catalogue of tales about sexuality, illness and documents of life. In this new volume, Narrative Power, he moves from the micro to the macro by examining the role of stories in political and cultural life. Echoing Mills’ famous dictum about relating private troubles to public issues, Plummer argued that social stories form a point of connection between inner and outer worlds.Building on his theoretical perspective of critical humanism, Plummer suggests that the personal stories told by individuals can be linked to wider value systems, such as humanitarianism, emancipation, compassion and empowerment. In this way, stories have the power to perform social actions and create social change – whether for the better or for the worse. This book is an exploration of the different ways in which people can perform ‘narrative acts’ and the social consequences this brings. Staying true to his symbolic interactionist roots, Plummer argues that these acts are negotiated and contingent upon the social process, nested and networked within relational systems of power.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Queering Counterpublics and Intimate Citizenship: On the Queer Legacy of Ken Plummer’s Scholarship
No full textKen Plummer, a pioneer of LGBTIA+ studies in the UK and Europe, died on 4 November
2022. His work has been influential and inspiring and making possible a critical engagement
with non-heterosexual ways of life in a climate shaped by social and institutional
homophobia, lesbophobia, and biphobia. This paper evaluates the legacy of Ken’s work for
critical scholarship in gender and sexuality studies, and specifically for queer studies. Ken’s
relationship to queer studies was highly ambivalent, evidenced in his consistent criticism of
queer theory, originating from his firm commitment to symbolic interactionism and his
primary interest in material, fleshy embodiment, rather than the theoretical abstraction he
associated with queer theory. The chapter argues that this ambivalence notwithstanding,
Ken’s work carries much potential for a critically engaged queer scholarship. Through a
queer reading of Ken’s concepts of counter-publics and intimate citizenship, I show that his
radical emphasis on the body sparks a truly ‘queer’ potential for considering sexualities in the
public sphere. Comparing Michael Warner’s and Ken Plummer’s theorisation of counterpublicity, I argue that despite his distrust in queer poststructuralist abstraction and because of
his assertive endorsement of fleshy embodiment at the heart of social theorising, his work
paradoxically invites a stimulus for queering citizenship and public sphere theories (including
his own). Rather than simply claiming Ken as a ‘queer theorist’, the chapter engages in
theoretical boundary work (following a method proposed by Clare Hemmings) in exploring
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the epistemological effects of reading Ken through a queer lens, demonstrating the queer
legacy of his way of theorising
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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