What do the following three have in common: East Europeans (according to Friedrich Engels), Ronald Reagan (according to his doctor), and sociology (according to this author)? Two things at least. They can be studied by sociologists, and all three have (or had) only an incomplete, fractured awareness of their own history. Engels and other Western European Marxists claimed that particular people ...

This paper is about the relationship between cities and brains: it charts the back-and-forth between the hectic, stressful lives of urban citizens, and a psychological and neurobiological literature that claims to make such stress both visible and knowable. But beyond such genealogical labour, the paper also asks: what can a sociology concerned with the effects of 'biosocial' agencies take from...

This study explores explanations for the approval of euthanasia by assessing differences among individuals and countries, using four main arguments used by opponents and proponents in the public debate over euthanasia. We performed multilevel analysis on data from thirtythree countries, obtained from the European Values Study 1999/2000 and the World Values Survey 2000; we enriched these data wi...

Nutritional sociology uses sociological theories and methods to study and influence food patterns, eating habits, and nutrition. Obesity and weight loss are important topics in nutritional sociology, and stigmatization of the obese is a long-standing interest. Most past sociological work has only described stigmatization, rather than developing ways to facilitate coping with it. A model for cop...

By reconsidering Simmel’s concept of space, this article introduces space into the epistemological field relational sociology to construct a spatiality based on sociology, demonstrating continuity between spatial and approaches in study modernity. It first explains epistemology metropolis, then constructs vis-a-vis two main viewpoints contemporary sociology. Space is nature because it defined b...

Most of studies on the video communications are based on an unproved hypothesis: They take it granted that the full-face images of communicators are the 'sine qua non' in video conversations, and profiles are rather confusing or annoying for them. This paper proves the counter hypothesis that profile images are also useful and they can replace the full-faces under some conditions. Psychological...

We carried out a randomized controlled trial in Bogotá, the recipient of Colombia's highest number of internally displaced people (IDP), to assess whether the use of SMS to communicate eligibility to social benefits fosters the welfare of victimized internal refugees. Only a fraction of IDP are eligible to benefits. We inform eligibility via SMS to a random half of such households, and estimate...