Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinities and Mutual Exoticization within Grindr Tourism Interactions: "Everyone in Tel Aviv is a Muscle God".

Dating apps are spaces where masculinities are communicated digitally, affecting inequalities around gender expressions. This study aims to identify the masculinities communicated within Grindr tourism interactions in Tel Aviv and analyze how masculinities shape relations among international tourists and locals. Methods consist of interviews and audio diaries with nineteen tourist, local, and immigrant Grindr users in Tel Aviv. Theories of affordances, hegemonic masculinities, and relational sociology are used to analyze the data. In discussion of the results, the concept of mutual exoticization is put forth to interpret the social dynamics valued within Grindr tourism interactions, thereby revealing oppositional fantasies tied to nationalities and masculinities. The study also explores ethnicity's association with social and erotic capital in digital circulations of a localized Mizrahi masculinity. Findings reveal that while hegemonic masculinities are circulated on Grindr, resistance is also a part of Grindr tourism relations around masculinities. This research concludes by shedding light on masculinity inequalities within digital spaces where different nationalities co-congregate, revealing everyday negotiations of gender regimes. Grindr is the site of both reproduction of and resistance to social inequalities around masculinities.

Children picturing their own worlds: Using photovoice to amplify children's voice in sociological research.

This research note highlights an emerging transdisciplinary research method-photovoice-and why it is particularly suited for sociological studies of children and youth. Traditional social science data collection methods can be limited in their ability to capture both the depth and breadth of childhood experiences and children's perceptions of their experiences. We describe an emerging method, photovoice, that is used more frequently in other disciplines, and its suitability for sociologically studying youth and children. We describe the limitations of traditional social science methods and how photovoice can help overcome some of these limitations. Photovoice engages participants as lived experts who contribute to both the data collection and analysis in an individual and collective manner. Through taking photos and discussing their meaning, participants can share abstract feelings and discuss sensitive topics in an imaginative format and express themselves creatively. We describe how previous research has used photovoice to work with youth from vulnerable circumstances and those who have experienced trauma as well as demonstrate how photovoice is well situated to bolster the tenets of sociological research.

The Cost of Dying Exhibition: public, professional and political reactions to a visual exhibition depicting experiences of poverty at the end of life.

Public health approaches to palliative care are internationally endorsed for their potential to improve the social determinants of dying such as energy costs, transport and housing. Enhancing public understanding of inequities in end of life experiences, which exist even in economically advanced countries, is vital if the value of public health approaches are to be endorsed and invested in. Visual exhibitions have a strong tradition of raising awareness and influencing public health discourse. The UK-based Cost of Dying exhibition (April-August 2023) presented real examples of how financial hardship and deprivation intersect with end of life experience through professional portraits, photovoice imagery taken by individuals at the end of their lives, and digital stories co-produced with bereaved relatives. Three iterations of the exhibition were displayed at public venues and a health conference. Evaluation methods comprised anonymous feedback cards (n=208), panel discussions and social media reactions. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes within the feedback. The emotional resonance of the exhibition was a key theme, with attendees expressing sadness, anger, empathy and hope. Visitors found the exhibition thought-provoking and expressed that it countered existing stereotypes about what it means to experience financial hardship at the end of life. The exhibition spurred calls for change, with some attendees questioning in what capacity they could help. Individuals with expertise in end of life care reported that the imagery validated their professional experiences. In conclusion, the Cost of Dying exhibition made visible the struggles endured by individuals confronting financial hardship and material deprivation at the end of life. Such exhibitions can challenge the traditional view of dying as a swift process taking place sequestered in institutions, revealing that it often unfolds over time and individuals may continue to live at home in the community, struggling with unmet needs and unresponsive state services.

"Value-Conditioned Interest": Secularity, Institutional Support, and the Sociology of Religion in Graduate Departments.

Although religion once played a central role in sociological inquiry, today it has fallen from prominence and now occupies a marginal space in the field. Sociologists of religion suggest that this neglect can be explained by the unusual irreligiosity of academia. However, some are hopeful that changes to graduate training and other institutional interventions can overcome this propensity and encourage more sociological engagement with religion, one of the most influential forces in contemporary society. Drawing on a new dataset of 473 sociology graduate students in the top 25 departments in the United States, we assess how personal secularity and departmental support for religious inquiry predict sociological engagement with religion. Personal secularity is a strong predictor of the decision to study religion and of the overall perception of the relevance of religion in contemporary society. Coming from a department where religion is discussed and faculty pursue research on religion predicts the perception of religion's relevance for the secular majority. Our findings contribute to the understanding of sociological knowledge creation and how individual and institutional proclivities-together-shape what we deem important enough to study.

The Representation of Giving Actions: Event Construction in the Service of Monitoring Social Relationships.

Giving is a unique attribute of human sharing. In this review, we discuss evidence attesting to our species' preparedness to recognize interactions based on this behavior. We show that infants and adults require minimal cues of resource transfer to relate the participants of a giving event in an interactive unit (A gives X to B) and that such an interpretation does not systematically generalize to superficially similar taking events, which may be interpreted in nonsocial terms (A takes X). We argue that this asymmetry, echoed in language, reveals the operations of a mechanism of event construction where participant roles are encoded only when they are crucial to rendering an action teleologically well-formed. We show that such a representation of giving allows people to monitor the direction (who gave to whom) and kind (what was given) of resource transfer within a dyad, suggesting that giving may be interpreted as indicative of a relationship based on long-term balance. As this research suggests, advancing the study of the prelinguistic representation of giving has implications for cognitive linguistics, by clarifying the relation between event participants and syntactic arguments, as well as social cognition, by identifying which kinds of relational inferences people draw from attending to acts of sharing.

LAND-USE FILTERING FOR NONSTATIONARY SPATIAL PREDICTION OF COLLECTIVE EFFICACY IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT.

Collective efficacy-the capacity of communities to exert social control toward the realization of their shared goals-is a foundational concept in the urban sociology and neighborhood effects literature. Traditionally, empirical studies of collective efficacy use large sample surveys to estimate collective efficacy of different neighborhoods within an urban setting. Such studies have demonstrated an association between collective efficacy and local variation in community violence, educational achievement, and health. Unlike traditional collective efficacy measurement strategies, the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) Study implemented a new approach, obtaining spatially-referenced, place-based ratings of collective efficacy from a representative sample of individuals residing in Columbus, OH. In this paper we introduce a novel nonstationary spatial model for interpolation of the AHDC collective efficacy ratings across the study area, which leverages administrative data on land use. Our constructive model specification strategy involves dimension expansion of a latent spatial process and the use of a filter defined by the land-use partition of the study region to connect the latent multivariate spatial process to the observed ordinal ratings of collective efficacy. Careful consideration is given to the issues of parameter identifiability, computational efficiency of an MCMC algorithm for model fitting, and fine-scale spatial prediction of collective efficacy.

Becoming a matter of veterinary concern.

Horses in Great Britain are living into increasingly older age and are often regarded as friends or family members by their owner. The horse is reliant on their owner to meet their needs and this paper discusses how horse owners frame an issue that becomes a matter of veterinary concern within the context of the older horse. Qualitative methods were used to explore the experiences of owners and veterinarians. Data were collected and analysed using a grounded theory approach during the period 2019-2022. Analysis identified that owners undertook an ongoing and iterative process of assessment, monitoring and decision making in relation to the animal and any changes they observed. Matters that became a veterinary concern required the owner to formulate the issue as something that fell within the knowledge domain of the veterinarian. Veterinarians had a medicalised view of older horse health and their perspectives on socially acceptable care were shaped by their understanding of species-specific needs, and whether owners were providing appropriately for those needs. The formulation of a matter of veterinary concern was itself shaped by an owner's experiential knowledge of both veterinary matters and their horse. The extent to which owners felt like they and their individual horse mattered during interactions with veterinarians affected whether they adopted veterinary advice and the nature of future veterinary employment. Findings demonstrate how matters of health, disease, and the role of professionalised forms of medical knowledge, are not static but constantly changing and interacting over time. An issue that became a matter of veterinary concern was contextual, and rooted in individual relationships. The significance of veterinarian-owner interactions in shaping future consumption of veterinary health care may be underestimated.

The eating model in contemporary Taiwan: Destructuration or a new insight into compressed food modernity in Asia.

In contemporary societies with diverse but often conflicting values attached to eating, it is important to scrutinise what eating well means to a given population. While such attempts have been pioneered, mostly in Western countries, Asia has been rarely explored. Moreover, food scholars in Western countries have called for in-depth analysis of the impacts of food modernisation on our everyday eating models, but empirical data about Asia and its implications for the plurality of food modernisation have been limited. To narrow this knowledge gap, we replicated Ueda's previous survey in Japan by utilising the same web-based questionnaire in a study of the Taiwanese population (n = 920, aged 20-69) to elucidate their eating model across all dimensions; that is, not only meal content but also the temporal, spatial, social, qualitative and affective facets. It was found that, similarly to other parts of the world, the Taiwanese have experienced the so-called 'destructuration' of their eating model, including two out of five habitually skipping meals; one out of four eating out 14 times or more in a week; and three out of five eating alone for breakfast. The destructuration also extended to their dietary norms, which marked a sharp contrast with other countries, such as Japan and France, where many eaters experience dilemmas due to high ideals and reality. We argue that this interesting phenomenon is due to the 'compressed' food modernity that Taiwan experienced. This study is the first attempt to provide comprehensive data about the eating model in Taiwan. Further empirical studies, particularly in other Asian regions, are expected to advance our thinking about a complex relationship between food modernity and well-being.

Global Governance for Personalized Medicine, Politics of Uncertainty, and Pierre Bourdieu.

How we choose to respond to uncertainty matters for robust and responsible science. New laws and consensus reports are popular instruments for global governance of emerging technology and attendant uncertainty. However, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted that "[t]he judicial situation operates like a neutral space that neutralizes the stakes in any conflict through the de-realization and distancing implicit in the conversion of a direct struggle between parties into a dialogue between mediators." Put in other words, while law and legal modes of reasoning are certainly useful for conflict resolution and closure, their overprivileging in emerging technology and uncertainty governance can potentially bring about depoliticization by transforming the struggles and dissent necessary for democratic governance into a "dialogue between mediators." Hence, the critical sociological gaze offered by Bourdieu is particularly relevant for democratization of global governance of multiomics technologies and timely with the current uptake of personalized medicine. For example, in May 2023, the Romanian government introduced a law to give patients the right to personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is related to the larger umbrella concept and field of theranostics, the fusion of therapeutics and diagnostics. It is therefore timely to reflect on a "right for theranostics in planetary health," considering the potential for future pandemics and ecological crises in the 21st century. Rather than forcing consensus or convergence in an innovation ecosystem, dissent grounded in rigorous political theory, sociology of law and critical legal studies can strengthen democratization and global governance for personalized medicine and multiomics technologies.

Shared insights for heat health risk adaptation in metropolitan areas of developing countries.

Global warming has led to a surge in heat health risks (HHRs), the impacts of which are particularly pronounced in metropolitan areas of developing countries. In the current study, six metropolitan areas - Beijing, China; Cairo, Egypt; Jakarta, Indonesia; Mumbai, India; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Tehran, Iran - were selected as the study area to further differentiate the built-up landscapes by utilizing the concept of local climate zones. Moreover, we assessed the similarities and differences in HHR associated with the landscape. Results revealed a 30.67% higher HHR in compact built-up landscapes than in the open built-up type. Urban green spaces played an effective but differentiated role in mitigating HHR. That is, low vegetation in urbanized areas and trees in suburban areas significantly mitigated HHR. Collectively, our findings emphasize the role of effective planning and management in addressing HHR and provide empirical support for implementing HHR mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Moral landscapes and morally meaningful encounters: how interaction ritual connects conversation analysis and cultural sociology.

This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similarly rooted in Durkheim, Goffman's theory of interaction ritual provides an analytic pivot between EMCA and the strong program. The broader theoretical argument is illustrated using data from interviews with adults about their most recent encounter with a rude strangers in public space, which are here treated a breaches of the interaction ritual of civil inattention. Members readily draw on the specifics of a particular stranger interaction gone awry to reflect on the nature of life in public and to expound on their understandings of the ethics of face-to-face interaction and everyday morality more generally. Where EMCA focuses on the discoverability of the organizational features of everyday interaction, the position developed here is concerned with the organization of members' interpretations of everyday interaction. While centered on specific kinds of interactional breaches, by finding common ground between EMCA and cultural sociology, the argument advances a potentially more broadly applicable approach that treats everyday encounters as morally meaningful and everyday lifeworlds as moral landscapes. Developing a comprehensive understanding of copresent interaction as a basic building block of society requires attention to both the organizational dynamics of copresent encounters and to the interpretive resources that ordinary members use to account for and justify their own and others' conduct.

Children's descriptions of their involvement within everyday food practices.

BACKGROUND: The way in which children interact with food has a profound impact on their health and wellbeing. However, most research, strategy and policy where food is the focus are derived from adult perspectives. There is limited understanding of children's perspectives of the nature of their everyday food practices, and their level of involvement and influence. This work garnered children's (8-12 years old) descriptions of, and involvement in, their everyday food practices. METHODS: Forty-two children from 28 families from across Brisbane (Australia) participated in qualitative creative draw-and-tell interviews and 20 of these children (from 15 families) also completed Photovoice data collection. Data were abductively analysed through a social practice theory lens. RESULTS: Children reported engaging in food planning, acquisition, preparation, consumption and tidy-up practices, to varying degrees of 'less involved', 'in partnership with adults or other children' or 'independently'. This was influenced largely by the willingness of adults to relinquish control and children's desire to participate, as well as other contextual factors. Children were more independent in consumption practices, as well as packing lunchboxes and preparing food spaces (as preparation practices). Partnerships were established more so within food acquisition and preparation practices, with less involvement described within planning and tidy-up practices. CONCLUSIONS: The findings add new knowledge and depth and breadth to that already obtained from parents, teachers and adult researchers, highlighting the importance of privileging children's voices when investigating their food experiences. This work may be used to guide adults to invite and support children to be involved in food practices that they report being less involved in, as well as inform how best to work with and include children in future research and food and nutrition strategies and policies.

A scoping review of sociology of voluntary blood donation.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Maintaining stable blood supplies presents an increasing challenge for blood collection agencies (BCAs). Novel and multidisciplinary approaches and research have been called for to understand the mechanisms underlying the trends. The current body of sociological research on blood donation is a potentially valuable resource, but it is dispersed over different publications and theoretical frameworks. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a scoping review of sociological research on voluntary, non-remunerated blood donation to identify insights and practical applications for researchers and BCAs. RESULTS: Four organizing themes were identified: donated blood, blood donors, organizations and blood service systems. Key challenges associated with the organization of voluntary blood donation exist at the institutional and systems levels, and they may not be readily resolved by interventions focussed solely on the individual donor level. We identified opportunities for organizations to build trust with donors and the public through communications and working with communities to promote inclusion in blood donation. CONCLUSION: The results support a multidisciplinary approach and research for BCAs to move forward and find novel ways to ensure safe, resilient blood service systems.

Interdisciplinary co-teaching as a sustainable model for health humanities pedagogy.

Academics and students from marginalised identities encounter challenges and barriers at all levels of participation in the settler colonial university, in both practices of teaching and learning. While this observation holds true for courses in the health humanities, their unique interdisciplinary position and context creates space for challenging dominant norms in society and in academia. In this paper, we describe our experiences as two black and queer graduate students developing and co-teaching an online interdisciplinary course, 'Race and Medicine'. The idea for co-teaching originated as a means of ensuring continuity and sustainability in the course (AvB was expecting her first child and contending with the possibility of unplanned preterm birth) and emerged into what we suggest, in line with the transformative pedagogical theory of bell hooks, was a micro-scale transgressive learning community. We argue that our co-teaching partnership facilitated practices of revealing, mitigating and disrupting oppressive structures in the white heteropatriarchal academy, in addition to offering unique learning opportunities for students. The intersections of difference and similarity between our disciplinary, professional and social identities transformed and enhanced the types of conversations and learning activities we held with the class and were a feature of the course which was rated highly in evaluations. We conclude by suggesting co-teaching as a possible model of sustainable pedagogy for the health humanities, one that is especially valuable for racialised graduate students who are developing professional identities as instructors and exploring careers in the health humanities. In addition to facilitating interdisciplinary student learning, co-teaching and the subsequent formation of micro-scale transgressive learning communities challenges the dominant power structures of the academy by making space for teaching and learning in the contexts of solidarity, care and sustainability.

Epidemic intelligence in Europe: a user needs perspective to foster innovation in digital health surveillance.

BACKGROUND: European epidemic intelligence (EI) systems receive vast amounts of information and data on disease outbreaks and potential health threats. The quantity and variety of available data sources for EI, as well as the available methods to manage and analyse these data sources, are constantly increasing. Our aim was to identify the difficulties encountered in this context and which innovations, according to EI practitioners, could improve the detection, monitoring and analysis of disease outbreaks and the emergence of new pathogens. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study to identify the need for innovation expressed by 33 EI practitioners of national public health and animal health agencies in five European countries and at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). We adopted a stepwise approach to identify the EI stakeholders, to understand the problems they faced concerning their EI activities, and to validate and further define with practitioners the problems to address and the most adapted solutions to their work conditions. We characterized their EI activities, professional logics, and desired changes in their activities using NvivoⓇ software. RESULTS: Our analysis highlights that EI practitioners wished to collectively review their EI strategy to enhance their preparedness for emerging infectious diseases, adapt their routines to manage an increasing amount of data and have methodological support for cross-sectoral analysis. Practitioners were in demand of timely, validated and standardized data acquisition processes by text mining of various sources; better validated dataflows respecting the data protection rules; and more interoperable data with homogeneous quality levels and standardized covariate sets for epidemiological assessments of national EI. The set of solutions identified to facilitate risk detection and risk assessment included visualization, text mining, and predefined analytical tools combined with methodological guidance. Practitioners also highlighted their preference for partial rather than full automation of analyses to maintain control over the data and inputs and to adapt parameters to versatile objectives and characteristics. CONCLUSIONS: The study showed that the set of solutions needed by practitioners had to be based on holistic and integrated approaches for monitoring zoonosis and antimicrobial resistance and on harmonization between agencies and sectors while maintaining flexibility in the choice of tools and methods. The technical requirements should be defined in detail by iterative exchanges with EI practitioners and decision-makers.