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Queer has existed in academia since the late twentieth century and has developed into a prominent theoretical orientation and subject of academic inquiry. Although queer theory originates within critical spheres of the humanities, social work has tepidly adopted it and subsequently domesticated it. This paper considers what might be dangerous about a tamed, academic queerness. Equally, what might be exciting for social work about a combative and wholly unknowable version of queer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of visual media, cities, and society are represented, experienced, and interpreted through images. The need for interdisciplinary visual approaches, therefore, is indisputable. By focusing on cinema, this paper aims to develop a conceptual, methodological framework through which theory helps a broad range of researchers in social sciences, humanities, and arts interpret the represented phenomenon. Based on Peirce's model of signs, the framework provides the basis for a dynamic interpretation of the city and society. This paper shows that Peircean cinesemiotics takes advantage of theory in three ways: First, as the basis that provides scholars with clues necessary for identifying eligible "image-signs"; second, as the guiding framework that helps them reach a final interpretation; third, as ideas are being criticized from visual perspectives. As an example of its application, using Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," the final part of the paper applies Peircean cinesemiotics to an image-sign from Death Wish (2018) and interprets it as the representation of safety/crime in a neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Veteran community engagement is an evolving discipline informed by traditional community-based participatory research, veteran studies, and veterans themselves. This Special Issue suggests that research collaborations including military veterans, soldiers, and their families as co-researchers is a critical next step toward a design thinking perspective in social and healthcare systems for this population. This Special Issue was conceptualized through a veteran community-academic partnership formed over a decade ago. This partnership hosted several Warrior Summit conferences from 2013 to present, with the last of this series calling for academic contributions. The resulting papers drawn from the conference and other authors form this issue, and include a wide range of topics: veteran microdosing and psychedelic self-medication; a historical view of the impact of education exchange between U.S. and South Korean military nurses; strategies for engaging veterans in research of a theater-based intervention for PTSD; interprofessional approaches to addressing veteran identity considerations through collaborations between chaplain service and psychologists in the VA Healthcare System; an international perspective exploring a community collaborative with veterans in Montréal, Canada; efforts to build long-term and sustainable models for veteran engagement in health services research; community-engaged strategies to address veteran homelessness within broader housing stability efforts; and examining the role of veteran peer mentorship programs in alcohol recovery. These projects represent an emerging movement and offer a multidisciplinary roadmap toward honoring veterans voices in research, clinical services, and program development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a number of linked articles and monographs over the last decade (e.g. Love, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017), literary scholar and critic Heather Love has called for a descriptive (re)turn in the humanities, repeatedly taking up examples of descriptive methods in the social sciences as exemplifying what that (re)turn might look like and achieve. Those of us working as sociologists, anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars and researchers in allied social science fields thus find ourselves reflected back in Love's work, encountering our own research practices in an unfamiliar light through it. In a period where our established methods and analytical priorities are subject to challenges on many fronts from within our own disciplines, it is hard not be struck by Love's provocative invocation of the social sciences as interlocutors and see in it an invitation to contribute to the debate she has sought to initiate by revisiting our own approaches to the problem of description. Inspired by Love's intervention, the eight papers that form this Special Issue demonstrate that by re-engaging with description we stand to learn a great deal. While the articles themselves are topically distinct and geographically varied, they are all based on empirical research and written to facilitate a reorientation to the role of description in our research practices. What exactly is going on when we describe an ancient papyrus as present or missing, a machine as intelligent, noise as music, a disease as undiagnosable, a death as good or bad, deserved or undeserved, care as appropriate or inappropriate, policies as failing or effective? As the papers show, these are important questions to ask. By asking them, we find ourselves in positions to better understand what goes into 'indexing and making visible forms of material and social reality' (Love, 2013: 412) as well as what is involved, more troublingly, in erasing, making invisible and dematerialising those realities or even, indeed, in uncovering those erasures and the means by which they were effected. As this special issue underlines, thinking with Love by thinking with descriptions is a rewarding exercise precisely because it opens these matters up to view. We hope others take up Love's invitation to re-engage with description for that very reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Veteran community engagement is an evolving discipline informed by traditional community-based participatory research, veteran studies, and veterans themselves. This Special Issue suggests that research collaborations including military veterans, soldiers, and their families as co-researchers is a critical next step toward a designing thinking perspective in social and healthcare systems for this population. This Special Issue was conceptualized through a veteran community-academic partnership formed over a decade ago. We briefly describe the activities of this partnership from 2008 to present in order to frame the praxis considerations within this issue. The partnership hosted several Warrior Summit conferences from 2013 to present, with the last of this series calling for academic contributions. The resulting papers drawn from the conference and other authors form this issue, and include a wide range of topics: Arts- and theater-based interventions for PTSD; engaging veteran college students in higher education; combining strengths of the chaplaincy and psychology to address changes in veteran identity after moral injury; multi-sector community coalitions for veteran reintegration in the US and Canada; veteran volunteering as a reintegration strategy; examining experiences of US military nurses; veteran collaboratively designed mindfulness groups in a VA healthcare system; engaging veterans on Community Advisory Boards; using photovoice to highlight veterans issues; collaborative research on veteran homelessness; veteran self-medication with psychedelics; community engaged addictions research; and collaboratively designing veteran peer support curricula. These projects represent an emerging movement and offer a multidisciplinary roadmap toward assisting and honoring veterans in their transition back into the civilian world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with patterns in past human behaviour, what they are, and how this relates to the detection of patterns in data by means of computation. Theorists have not given patterns the attention they deserve. Therefore it is far from clear what patterns are and to what purpose scholars may use them. This paper presents eight propositions on patterns which hold true for patterns found ‘by hand’ and patterns found ‘by computation’. One such is that a pattern is discernible in behaviour when we subject it to the intentional stance, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues. Here behaviour is part of an intentional system. This paper’s argument is that the patterns found ‘by computation’ too are part of an intentional system. To substantiate this claim this paper discusses two important examples of detecting computational patterns in the domain of the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper written as a dialogue between two interlocutors, Julie and a Student, deals with Understanding and its role in the social sciences. The fictional dialogue takes place in Hannover, Germany, and the interlocutors are exchanging arguments about Verstehen and how it should be conceptualized in the philosophy of the social sciences. A range of different approaches is discussed and a naturalistic strategy emerges as a defensible alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that narrative knowledge (or ‘storyknowing’) is marginalized within the English school system, because it is misunderstood and often not recognized as knowledge. We track the changing status of storytelling through some key moments in recent educational history, particularly focusing on its gradual erosion during the progressive era, the onset of the National Curriculum (despite the impact of the National Oracy Project), and the post-2000 period with its conflicting drives towards compliance and creativity. To understand the consequences of this marginalization, we build up a picture of the value of narrative knowledge, drawing firstly on the body of theorists who have investigated narrative. We then look to our long-term practice research with three groups of ‘low-ability’ 11–14-year-old pupils, in particular their own observations on storytelling made during a focus group. Both sources lead us to challenge the currently dominant perception that pupils listening to a whole narrative are in a passive role. Indeed, we provide evidence that reasserting the value of storyknowing may restore aspects of agency, autonomy and knowledge creation to both teachers and pupils which may not be afforded by overtly ‘active’ learning strategies. We conclude by considering the conditions in which storyknowing, as characterized by the pupils and theorists, might flourish within schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epigenetics has considerable potential to transform social science by embedding mutually regulative reciprocal connections between biological and social processes within the human activities it studies. This paper highlights common epigenetic methods and outlines practical considerations in the design of ‘social epigenetics' research addressing the identification of biomolecular pathways, statistical inference of causality, conceptualization of the environment as a biochemical event, heritability of epigenetic alterations and intergenerational accountability, and concept of time implied by attempts to capture complex, non-linear gene-environment interactions. Finally, we reflect on the social epigenome as a conceptual space and try to identify barriers to translation, and practical and ethical issues raised by epigenetics research. In order for social epigenetics and social science to contribute to the emergence of this putative ‘science of social science’’ and to capture meaningful human experience they will both need to change significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and objective: Presentations of MS in fictional literature have not been previously researched. This paper surveys and analyses these portrayals of the disease for the first time. Material and methods: Relevant works in English and German were identified by means of keyword searches in online public access catalogues and search engines as well as old-fashioned research. The neurological and literary evaluation of these 7000 pages of text combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Results: Between 1954 and 2012 at least 55 literary works appeared with an MS motif (35 novels, 18 poems, one novella and one drama). The authors were predominantly female and a third of them suffered from the disease. Patients in the novels largely reflect real epidemiology as regards symptoms and disease progression, while diagnostic and therapeutic options play a secondary role. From a literary point of view, ‘entwicklungsromane’, ‘relationship novels’ and ‘young adult books’ can be discerned. MS is often portrayed in metaphoric language as the enemy: a demon, an animalistic being, prison or an abyss. Conclusion: The MS motif evidences a medicalization of the literature as well as a literary portrayal of anthropological experiences. Well-written novels can contribute to the de-stigmatization of MS and impart basic medical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 21st century quite a few social scientists and scholars in the humanities are arguing that we should pay more attention to things material. For, as they say, not only humans act but so, too, do materials. Joining this discussion, in this paper we will use the case of omega-3 fatty acids to address the questions of how materials may act; in which ways this is relevant; and what is linked up with it. Hence, we will come to speak about research in prisons where inmates were badly nourished; fish being caught in the Global South for Scandinavian flsh pills; and the urgency of shifting from the verb 'to act' to a differentiated list of modes of doing. Learning from the natural sciences, we will argue, requires that their methods and concerns be carefully attended to. Taking matters seriously comes with the obligation of tracing where such matters come from and where they go. And talking about 'action', finally, demands that, beyond liberal notions of isolated individual actors, it be creatively retheorised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]