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The article discusses the delivery of functional dystrophin immunity in the case of patients with Duchenne' s muscular dystrophy, an x-linked, genetically inherited disease affecting newborn boys. The monitoring of cellular immune responses should be a top priority in the case of any therapy aimed at increasing the number dystrophin positive fibers in the case of such patients.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.religion.2009.07.001 Byline: Philip A. Mellor (a), Chris Shilling (b) Abstract: Sociological theory has been central to the modern study of religion. In the face of the global resurgence of religious phenomena, however, and the challenge this has presented for the assumptions that characterised much twentieth century sociology, there is a need for new theoretical models to make sense of religion today. This paper contributes to this task by building upon Durkheim's suggestion that religious social facts become fully efficacious only when internalised, and Luhmann's interest in sociological manifestations of 'transcendence' and 'immanence', in order to analyse religion as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon that can be understood through the study of religious body pedagogics. Having outlined the key steps involved in the analysis of body pedagogics, we illustrate the utility of this realist framework through an ideal-typical representation of Christianity and Islam and reflect, via a consideration of several objections that could be directed towards it, upon how this approach can deal with the complexities and contingencies of contemporary religion. In conclusion, it is suggested that this systematic body pedagogic focus on embodied commonalities and differences across diverse religious contexts offers a valuable basis upon which to engage critically with religion today. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK (b) School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, The University of Kent, Cornwallis North East, Canterbury CT2 7NF, UK

Increasing the size and strength of muscles represents a promising therapeutic strategy for musculoskeletal disorders, and interest has focused on myostatin, a negative regulator of muscle growth. Various myostatin inhibitor approaches have been identified and tested in models of muscle disease with varying efficacies, depending on the age at which myostatin inhibition occurs. Here, we describe a one-time gene administration of myostatin-inhibitor-proteins to enhance muscle mass and strength in normal and dystrophic mouse models for >2 years, even when delivered in aged animals. These results demonstrate a promising therapeutic strategy that warrants consideration for clinical trials in human muscle diseases. gene therapy | muscular dystrophy

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00721.x Byline: Chris Shilling (1), Philip A. Mellor (2) Abstract: Abstract Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological 'enframing' of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a 'standing reserve' for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the 'body pedagogics' of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures. Author Affiliation: (1)University of Portsmouth (2)University of Leeds

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00689.x Byline: Chris Shilling (1) Keywords: The rise of the body; classical sociology; unstable bodies; body pedagogics Abstract: Abstract Reflecting developments in consumer culture, the politics of social movements, public health policy, and medical technologies, the body has since the early 1980s become one of the most popular and contested areas of academic study. The following discussion introduces this monograph by positioning the body as a subject within contemporary sociology, accounting for the discipline's historical ambivalence towards embodiment in terms of sociology's foundations, and tracing the factors behind the 'rise of the body' across the social sciences and humanities. Having examined the background to the subject, I then explore how this volume makes three main contributions towards the ongoing embodiment of the discipline. The chapters that follow explicate and build sociologically upon the legacy of sociological, feminist and anthropological approaches towards embodiment. They also apply these approaches to issues such as conflict, health, cultural differences and technology that have become increasingly important in contemporary society. Finally, they demonstrate the empirical utility of taking embodiment seriously via a series of case-studies that focus on body pedagogics. In so doing, they outline a new approach towards the body, able to combine a concern with social power, cultural (re)production, lived experience and physical change. Author Affiliation: (1)University of Portsmouth, UK

This paper revisits Parsons's conception of the `sick role' and examines the relevance of his writings on the cultural understanding of sickness to the consumption of health in the contemporary era. In terms of current developments, I focus on the development of pro-active approaches towards the healthy body, and the growth of `information rich' consumers of health care. These have become prominent themes in sociology, and while Parsons's writings are usually viewed as anachronistic I argue they remain highly pertinent to understanding the emergence of informed, body conscious lay people. If Parsons's analysis of health is more relevant to current circumstances than many critics assume, however, it is not unproblematic. The residual categories associated with the sick role obscure the continued utility of his work on the general cultural values informing health care. It is Parsons's analysis of these values, I suggest, that needs rescuing from restricted understandings of the sick role and highlighting as an important resource for contemporary theorists. KEYWORDS: Parsons; culture; `sick role'; consumption; body; information

Sociological reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide have motivated important theoretical advances in the discipline, and the development of 'structuration theories' and 'analytical dualism' has promoted fresh thought about dominant views of the human agent. These approaches have sought to release sociology from any residual reliance on the oversocialised conception of the individual that formed part of the legacy of Parsonian sociology. It is the argument of this paper, however, that while structuration theory and analytical dualism focus on the creative powers of human reflexivity, as part of their rejection of the 'oversocialised agent', the theoretical weight they place on consciousness neglects the socially shaped somatic bases of action and structure, and results in an undersocialised view of the embodied agent. If the relationship between socialisation and agency needs analysing in terms of embodiment as much as in terms of the cognitive internalisation of norms and values, however, there are good reasons for structuration theory and analytical dualism rejecting attempts to ground subsequent notions of the embodied agent they may develop in dominant, static notions of the habitus. These minimise creativity and make it difficult to analyse social change. An important challenge for future reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide, then, is to construct a sociology which recognises the significance for human agency of a socially shaped form of embodiment, yet which refuses to make the embodied actor a mere product of society. Key words: agency, analytical dualism, embodiment, socialisation, structuration theory.

The study of emotions has attracted an increased amount of attention from mainstream sociologists in recent years, both because of its potential to provide an added dimension to the analysis of such subjects as social conflict, gender inequalities and the organisation of the workplace, and as a result of its relevance to theoretical and methodological debates which have long characterised the discipline. This paper suggests that some of the core questions facing this subject can be interrogated productively by engaging critically with the work of one of the most important 'founding figures' of the discipline, Emile Durkheim. What Collins (1988) refers to as the 'underground wing' of Durkheim's work has yet to be fully utilised or developed by sociologists concerned with emotions, yet it provides us with a suggestive and provocative means of reconceptualising the gulf that often exists within contemporary work on emotions as malleable and controllable, on the one hand, and that concerned with emotions as intransigent 'somatic states of being', on the other. As such, Durkheim's writings constitute an important resource for sociologists concerned with the ongoing project of 'embodying' the discipline.

Analysts of religion should realize that postmodernity is a modernist concept and results from a disembodiment, which has slowly become widespread in Western traditions after the Protestant reformation. The accompanying neutralism overlooks the anthropological in reality of the religious body, the consequence of embodiment in the human attempts to interpret and discover. The analysts should recognize this reality and the tenets of modernity which endangers reality.

Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's (1967) point that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, then to neglect death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed. In this paper we examine the relationship between self-identity, the sequestration of death, and the period Anthony Giddens terms 'late' or 'high modernity', and argue that the organisation and experience of death have become increasingly privatised. This has acquired particular significance as a result of three central characteristics of high modernity: the growing role played by the reflexive re-ordering of biographical narratives in the construction of self-identity (Giddens 1991); the increased identification of the self with the body; and the shrinkage of the scope of the sacred. This is not to argue that people lack survival strategies when dealing with death, but that these strategies become increasingly precarious and problematic in the conditions of high modernity., Introduction Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's [...]

This paper seeks to challenge the marginal status of the body in sociology by examining the place of 'the physical' in the production of social inequalities. After reviewing briefly Bourdieu's concept of embodied capital, I seek to extend his analysis by examining some recent work which looks at gender and the body-society relationship. It will be argued that a social analysis of the body is central to understanding the production of gender inequalities, and that sociologists should take more seriously the multiple ways in which bodies enter into the construction of social inequalities., Introduction Until comparatively recently, sociology displayed a curiously disembodied view of its subject (Turner 1984). Partly as a reaction against variants of biological reductionism, which account for human behaviour and [...]

Sociology has traditionally been concerned with problems of social order and meaning, and with how modern societies confronted these challenges when religion was in apparent decline, yet classical sociologists struggled to reconcile within their analyses the (dis)ordering and meaningful potentialities of eroticism. This ar ticle examines how eroticism has been viewed as a source of life-affirming meanings and as personally and socially destructive. Utilizing the contrasting theories of Weber and Bataille, we explore sociology's ambivalence towards eroticism, and criticize contemporary sociological approaches to the subject, before turning to the writings of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva for alternative models of the religiously informed eroticization of daily life. The perspectives these French theorists bring to the subject, and the issues that remain unresolved in their work, identify new lines of inquiry and re-emphasize the importance of building a sociology of eroticism that can address adequately its relationship to questions of order and meaning.

This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the `lived experience' of embodiment. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists. Many of sociology's central concepts, indeed, evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era. In order to illustrate this argument, I focus on the writings of Durkheim and Simmel. Their work is rarely central to writings on the body, but provides good examples of the diversity of theoretical approaches within sociology that remain relevant to body theorists. Specifically, I want to use it to develop the outlines of a theory of embodiment as a medium for the constitution of society which has at its centre a concern with human experience. I conclude by reassessing the strategic options sociologists of the body confront in developing their analyses.

The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues Simon J. Williams and Gillian Bendelow, Routledge, London, 1998, 15.99 £, x + 261pp. The explosion of writings on the body over the [...]

Theories focusing on the link between human agency and social structure have been central to many debates within sociology but they have two major limitations. First, their disembodied view of the agency overemphasizes cognition and minimizes the importance of emotional dimensions of interaction for social structure and human action. Second, most are unable to adequately examine the interplay between 'people' and 'parts'. A new study argues that these problems are related and attempts to explain the structure/agency relationship.

It can be argued that Emile Durkheim's 'The Elementary Forms of Religious Life' offers a multidimensional approach to morality. It presents the construction of moral orders as mediated by groups of embodied people both cognitively and emotionally involved in their social world. Issues regarding the sources of moral action can be seen as central to the basis of sociology, and this centrality is particularly clear in Durkheim's work. It is suggested that his notions of homo duplex and collective effervescence are significant because they highlight the ambivalent sociological repercussions of human embodiment.