What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/download/794/1436

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method is a systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. It brings together three central approaches, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, in order to establish a dialogue between different forms of discourse analysis often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries. The book introduces the three approaches in a clear and easily comprehensible manner, explaining the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach as well as the methodological guidelines and tools they provide for empirical discourse analysis. The authors also demonstrate the possibilities for combining different discourse analytical and non-discourse analytical approaches in empirical study. Finally, they contextualize discourse analysis within the social constructionist debate about critical social research, rejecting the view that a critical stance is incompatible with social constructionist premises and arguing that critique must be an inherent part of social research.

/pdf/discourse-analysis-as-theory-and-method-4envkcrccs.pdf

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method

The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with a series of rheumatoid arthritis patients. Chronic illness is conceptualised as a particular type of disruptive event. This disruption highlights the resources (cognitive and material) available to individuals, modes of explanation for pain and suffering, continuities and discontinuities between professional and lay thought, and sources of variation in experience.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-9566.ep11339939

Chronic illness as biographical disruption

Appreciation of fine arts became a mark of high status in the late nineteenth century as part of an attempt to distinguish highbrowed Anglo Saxons from the new lowbrowed immigrants, whose popular entertainments were said to corrupt morals and thus were to be shunned (Levine 1988; DiMaggio 1991). In recent years, however, many high-status persons are far from being snobs and are eclectic, even omnivorous, in their tastes (Peterson and Simkus 1992). This suggests a qualitative shift in the basis for marking elite status-from snobbish exclusion to omnivorous appropriation. Using comparable 1982 and 1992 surveys, we test for this hypothesized change in tastes. We confirm that highbrows are more omnivorous than others and that they have become increasingly omnivorous over time. Regression analyses reveal that increasing omnivorousness is due both to cohort replacement and to changes over the 1980s among highbrows of all ages. We speculate that this shift from snob to omnivore relates to status-group politics influenced by changes in social structure, values, art-world dynamics, and generational conflict

/pdf/changing-highbrow-taste-from-snob-to-omnivore-55bwi74t20.pdf

Changing highbrow taste: from snob to omnivore*

The time has come to think about sex To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant
topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism,
famine, or nuclear annihilation But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with
the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy
about sexuality Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in
common with the religious disputes of earlier centuries They acquire immense symbolic
weight Disputes over sexual behaviour often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity Consequently, sexuality should be
treated with special respect in times of great social stress

/pdf/thinking-sex-notes-for-a-radical-theory-of-the-politics-of-16zw3vryax.pdf

Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality

Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience. "Powerful, fascinating. Sontag is our outstanding contemporary writer in the moralist tradition". (Sunday Times). "A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering". (The New York Times). "A far-reaching set of ruminations on human suffering, the nature of goodness, the lures, deceptions and truth of images ...in short, a summary of what it means to be alive and alert in the twentieth century". (Independent). "Sontag is on top form: firing devastating questions". (Los Angeles Times). "Simple, elegant, fiercely persuasive". (Metro). One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

Regarding the Pain of Others

I want to describe not what it’s really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and to live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation; not real geography but stereotypes of national character. My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry.

Illness as Metaphor

In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote "Illness as Metaphor," a classic work described by "Newsweek" as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to "Illness""as Metaphor," extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic. These two essays now published together, "Illness""as Metaphor "and "AIDS and Its Metaphors," have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

Illness as metaphor ; and, AIDS and its metaphors

A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. If you enjoyed Against Interpretation and Other Essays, you might like Sontag's On Photography, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A dazzling intellectual performance' Vogue 'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

A sequel, or extended afterthought in the form of an essay, to Susan Sontag's book "Illness as Metaphor", in the light of AIDS. The author analyzes the way society has viewed AIDS, as divine retribution, plague or total war, and dispels racist ideas that AIDS originates from deepest Africa.

Susan Sontag

Papers

Regarding the Pain of Others

Illness as Metaphor

Illness as metaphor ; and, AIDS and its metaphors

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

AIDS and Its Metaphors