▪ Abstract The review focuses on analyses of the creation of culture among poor populations in the United States whose lives have been structured by residing at the center of the global economy. Literature is examined concerning the changing construction of labor, space, time, and identity in the new poverty. Throughout, the review examines the generation of poverty and questions of gender, race, political mobilization, and resistance. This outline of current research provides a framework for an analysis of the violence and conflict generated by the lowering of wages and the reduction of leisure time.

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Programs/Anthropology/Faculty/poverty_homelessness.pdf

Outline of a Theory of Practice.

The construction of poverty and homelessness in us cities

Despite geographers' increasing concern with place-based politics, the effects of place-based social relations on collective political action remain largely untheorized. By emphasizing the free rider problem—why a rational, self-interested individual would engage in collective action when his/her impact is negligible and the benefits of collective action are public and free—rational choice theory correctly problematizes collective action. Its reliance on the essentialist homo economicus model of human nature, however, often leads to untenable solutions that do not consider nonstrategic forms of rationality, collective identity formation, and the crucial effects of place-specific social relations. Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action, in contrast, provides a broader conception of rationality that recognizes communicative as well as strategic and instrumental forms of rationality and focuses on social interaction rather than on isolated individuals. Individuals reach common understandings, ...

Collective action and rational choice: place, community, and the limits to individual self-interest.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/88299/1/582044553.pdf

For a political sociology of water resources management

By allowing any social institution to structure activity in any place, wireless information services break down the traditional mapping between institutions and places. This phenomenon greatly complicates the analysis of context for purposes of designing context-aware computing systems. Context has a physical aspect, but most aspects of context will also be defined in institutional terms. This essay develops two conceptual frameworks for the analysis of context in mobile and ubiquitous computing. The first framework concerns the relation between architecture, practices, and institutions; it directs attention to the complex middle ground in which information services make use of whatever computational resources happen to be in the user's physical surroundings. The second framework is called the capture model; it rationally reconstructs the traditional systems analysis methods, which reorganize work activities to enable a computer to capture the information it needs. Context-aware computing devices that depart from the capture model face a difficult set of design tradeoffs.

/pdf/changing-places-contexts-of-awareness-in-computing-4wtfq2eusz.pdf

Changing places: contexts of awareness in computing

This paper considers how the full range of human experience may catalyze a placebo response. The placebo effect has been characterized as something to control in clinical research, something to cultivate in clinical practice, and something present in all healing encounters. We examine domains in which the term ‘placebo’ is used in discourse: clinical research, clinical practice, media representations of treatment efficacy, and lay interpretations of placebo—an under-researched topic. We briefly review major theoretical frameworks proposed to explain the placebo effect: classical conditioning, expectancy, the therapeutic relationship, and sociocultural ‘meaning.’ As a corrective to what we see as an over-emphasis on conscious cognitive approaches to understanding placebo, we reorient the discussion to argue that direct embodied experience may take precedence over meaning-making in the healing encounter. As an example, we examine the neurobiology of rehearsing or visualizing wellness as a mode of directly (performatively) producing an outcome often dismissed as a ‘placebo response.’ Given body/mind/emotional resonance, we suggest that the placebo response is an evolutionarily adaptive trait and part of healing mechanisms operating across many levels—from genetic and cellular to social and cultural.

Outline of a Theory of Practice.

Citations

The construction of poverty and homelessness in us cities

Collective action and rational choice: place, community, and the limits to individual self-interest.

For a political sociology of water resources management

Changing places: contexts of awareness in computing

Reconsidering the placebo response from a broad anthropological perspective.

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