Stigma is considered to be a social process that gives a mark or attribute to individuals and is characterised by exclusion, rejection, blame or devaluation. Goffman defined stigma as an “attribute that is deeply discrediting and that reduces the bearer from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one”. 1 Considering the literature, it can be clearly seen that patient groups with AIDS...

Presented as the Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 1, 2008, this article rethinks central assumptions of the interaction order as conceptualized by Goffman and others with respect to global domains of activity.1 It proposes two new concepts, that of the synthetic situation and that of time transac...

Drawing on the seminal theoretical work on stigma by Goffman, this article analyzes stigma through the lens of Parker and Aggleton, who call for the joining of Goffman and Foucault to better grasp relationships among stigma, power and social inequality. Studies on the social impact of HIV/AIDS globally have demonstrated that women tend to be blamed for the spread of HIV/AIDS, and as a result, H...

This paper addresses the research question: How do digital backchannels, mediated by Real-Time Communications, facilitate the progress of conference calls? It is argued that whilst the fields of Distributed Work and Computer Supported Collaborative Work have been studied in depth, research into Real-Time Communications (RTC) and Instant Messaging (IM) is at an early stage. There is a paucity of...

This chapter reviews Cooley’s idea of the looking glass self, and Goffman’s elaboration. It can be formulated as a conjecture that links two concepts: shared awareness and the social emotions. Cooley assumed that we live in the minds of others, and named pride and shame as the emotions that resulted. Goffman added embarrassment and humiliation. His basic work, Presentation of Self in Everyday L...