Sociology - Journal Articles
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Item The cognitive neuroscience of nature?: Sociological and historical perspective on environmental neuroscience(Springer Nature, 2024-09-27) Fitzgerald, Des; Kühn, SimoneThis chapter concerns some of the key sociological, philosophical, and historical underpinnings of environmental neuroscience. The chapter first outlines the technological and conceptual developments that preceded environmental neuroscience and grounds the field within a wider context of the “post-genomic” sciences. It then turns to earlier attempts to relate human psychology to experiences within particular physical environments, going back to the nineteenth century, before asking whether recent concerns about urbanization and climate change might have motivated a return to such topics. Lastly, the chapter asks environmental neuroscientists to pay attention to the politics of their field, and especially to the politics of consistently advocating for more “natural” or “traditional” environments for human beings. The chapter concludes, optimistically, with an argument that environmental neuroscience is a field “in the making,” with some scope yet to intervene on what will become its core facts and assumptions.Item Dislocating West-centric feminist-queer politics from Bengal: Bhawaiya and the sexual subaltern(Taylor and Francis Ltd., 2024-11-26) Khandoker, NasrinThis article examines the political and conceptual possibilities of defiance to marriage as a gendered norm through the deviant words expressed in the lyrics of Bangla (Bengali) folk songs, in particular those in the Bhawaiya tradition. Bhawaiya is famous for its lyrics of embodied or sensual love, often in the form of deviant and “illicit” relations outside of marriage, expressed through the female voice of the songs. When performed, the songs can evoke similar deviant emotions in the performers and the listeners, creating an affective atmosphere and constructing a “temporal subjectivity” with the emotions of the female subjects of the songs, which I call the “sexual subaltern.” I argue that throughout the colonial and postcolonial nationalist reforms and the emergence of strict reproductive heteropatriarchy in Bengal, the lyrics of Bhawaiya songs remained popular under the radar and as the artifacts of deviant sexual desire of the female subjects of the songs. This article goes further in examining how the temporal and affective subjectivity of the sexual subaltern, with deviant and defiant emotions, as constructed through these songs, can offer an alternative conceptual tool to dislocate West-centric feminist-queer politics and provide a global feminist remapping.Item End-of-life wind turbine blades and paths to a circular economy(Elsevier, 2025) Deeney, Peter; Leahy, Paul G.; Campbell, Kevin; Ducourtieux, Claire; Mullally, Gerard; Dunphy, Niall P.; Science Foundation Ireland; Irish Research Council; Sustainable Energy Authority of IrelandA structured literature review is used to identify barriers to the recommended methods of processing end-of-life wind turbine blades. The Waste Management Hierarchy recommends firstly avoidance, then repurposing, recycling, energy recovery and lastly, disposal. The review finds that most recent research articles are concerned with recycling, despite its position in third place in the Hierarchy. The review also identifies the following barriers to the first, second and third most recommended processes: misalignment of financial rewards for blade manufacturers making more durable blades; lack of information about blades which could help repurposing and recycling; and lack of financial incentives for any of the top three methods. Based on these findings the following solutions are proposed: alternative payment structures for blade ownership incentivising blade quality and longevity; an information exchange to facilitate the second hand market, repurposing and recycling; and the widespread use of compliance bonds to provide a financial incentive for repurposing and recycling.Item Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Critical Theory Today: One hundred years of the Frankfurt School’(SAGE Publishing, 2024-11-14) Boland, Tom; Stypinska, DianaThe Irish ‘Decade of Centenaries' closed in 2023, coinciding with the centenary of the founding of the Frankfurt School. The SAI Social Theory group gathered members and guests to a Symposium at University of Galway in March 2023 to consider the legacy of the Frankfurt school, marking the centenary of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung). Rather than following a rather well-established academic custom and focusing on commentaries and exegeses, the contributors embraced the ethos of Critical Theory by exploring the present-time relevance of the passions and aspirations of the Frankfurt School scholars. This article introduces the Special Issue ‘Critical Theory Today: One hundred years of the Frankfurt School’, which consists of papers inspired by the symposium, the product of reflections and conversations. The collection centers on the critical conundrum of the contemporary coexistence of the tendencies towards containment and instigation of radical socio-political change.Item Holding ourselves to account: The precarity dividend and the ethics of researching academic precarity(SAGE, 2024-09-19) O’Keefe, Theresa; Courtois, AlineThis article uses critical reflexivity as a method to document and analyse the ethical dilemmas that emerge when researching academic precarity across the permanent/precarious divide. With our project on long-term academic precarity as a case study, and as people who experienced long-term academic precarity, we take as the starting point other researchers’ silences on their positionality and about who does the work in the production of research on academic precarity. Although our small, unfunded project was driven by feminist ethics and transformative feminist praxis, there were some ethical issues we did not foresee, nor could we resolve. We focus on three main ethical dilemmas that arose as moments of discomfort, triggering extensive reflection and discussion: (1) authenticity and subjectivity, (2) disclosure of employment status and (3) complicity in and benefit from the precarisation of academic work, or what we term the ‘precarity dividend’. The article seeks to push the boundaries around how researchers hold themselves to account in the process of knowledge production. We suggest that precarity and especially the precarity dividend must become an inherent ethical consideration in all social scientific research design. It is a call for social researchers to make explicit – in writing, in ethics reviews and in presentations of their work – the labour process and labour conditions of all those involved.
