Social Research articles from September 1998

Social Research archives from September 1998

Conversation.
September 22, 1998... The remarkable English poet William Cowper (1731-1800) is perhaps best known today for lyrics of isolation and despair, such as his poem on Alexander Selkirk ("I am monarch of all I survey") and his long meditative poem, "The Task." These...

In a Conversational Idiom.
September 22, 1998... This essay is only one half of an example of what it is concerned with--a conversation; as with all essays that pass themselves off as contributions to a conversation, the reader must provide the other half. Like all such essays, this essay...

Contentious Conversation(*).
September 22, 1998... Ayodhya, India, long sheltered a sixteenth-century mosque, Babri Masjid, named for the first Mughal emperor, Babur. Ayodhya attracted worldwide attention on December 6, 1992, when Hindu militants destroyed Ayodhya's Muslim shrine, began...

Conversational Evidence for Rethinking Meaning(*).
September 22, 1998... A recurring theme in the humanities and social sciences in recent years has been the proposal that meaning and truth aren't at all what the average person (or even the average academic) seems to think they are. Literary theorists, philosophers...

Body Torque(*).
September 22, 1998... Conversation analysis is concerned with understanding the structures and practices of conversation--the setting that to my mind constitutes the primordial site of sociality and social life on the one hand, and, on the other, the fundamental...

Is There Hope for the Public Realm? Conversation as Interpretation.
September 22, 1998... Publicness as Argument and Conversation In the classical liberal tradition, to produce public discourse is to provide reasons for one's assertions. To provide reasons is to render one's claims shareable, public. To provide reasons is to be...

Private Conversation, Public Meaning.
September 22, 1998... CONVERSATION is a form of relationship, not just a form of speech. Although we know that it can further such "public" goals as competition, self-display, and ambition, we tend in the twentieth century to think of conversation as belonging to the...

"Oh Talking Voice That Is So Sweet": The Poetic Nature of Conversation(*).
September 22, 1998... Poets, playwrights, and listeners to stories told in conversation are in love with the speaking human voice. In poems, in plays, and in telling friends about something that happened, people strive to capture the lilt, the verbal twist, the...

The Say of Things.
September 22, 1998... In search of a chemical conversation, we are on a farm in Uniow, a little Ukrainian village in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, just before the onset of World War I. In the farm yard we see a big, steaming, lead-lined iron pot. The men have mixed some...

Between Conversation and Situation: Public Switching Dynamics across Network Domains.
September 22, 1998... Social action is interaction that induces interpretations and thus builds continuing relations. Thus, discourse is the stuff of social networks. While this observation is not new, it has yet to trigger a coalescence between research...