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In this paper I outline the characteristics of built environments that are believed to be effective in supporting social activity in physical space. I then discuss the degree to which these features can be translated into digital space. I argue that, although we can learn much from studying place-based communities, simply replicating the appearance of participants, architectural backdrops, and urban forms online is an ineffective strategy. Screen-based social sites should be designed with the specifics of the medium in mind. If we wish to build effective online communities, we also need to gain a better understanding of the complex nature of interpersonal and group communication, and of the social, cultural, political, and physical context in which it takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is focused on a model of an overlapping consensus, ways of its realization in well ordered constitutional democratic societies and possibilities of its adaptation in transition societies on basis of public discourse about basic values. The authors suggest possible ways of citizenship education in transition societies as a way of initializing public discussion on key democratic values and developing an overlapping consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter discusses the concept of territoriality in community. All animals have a need to regulate distance between themselves, and between themselves and other animals. Territoriality is a basic concept of animal behavior by which an animal lays claim to an area and defends it against members of its own species. Man, too, has territoriality. Everything that man is and does is associated with the experience of space. But man's proxemics, unlike that of other animals, is molded and patterned by culture. And people reared in different cultures have different perceptions and values of space. We construct our surroundings to meet particular needs and objectives; our surroundings, in turn, affect our behavior. Therefore, people organize their daily lives and actions within the constraints or opportunities of the established culture, including the social rules about space. There is a direct relationship between the ownership of space and power. Power is expressed in the monopolization of space and the relegation of less powerful groups in a society to less desirable environments. The owners of space exert their power by drawing boundaries which determine who will be included and excluded from their territory. It was pointed out by a social scientist that boundaries actually mark off nothing but an inside and an outside, which did not exist before the boundaries were drawn. Boundaries create a world of opposites and a world of opposites is a world of conflict. Every boundary is a battle line; the firmer the boundaries, the more entrenched are the battles. Most of our problems are problems with boundaries and the opposites they create. So it is with communities of exclusion and excluded communities.

Chapter Sixteen of the book "Internationalization of Curriculum Studies: Selected Proceedings From the LSU Conference 2000," edited by Donna Trueit, William E. Doll Jr., Hongyu Wang, and William F. Pinar is presented. It focuses on the construction and limitations of public space and its difference to private space. It discusses the obstacles and boundaries of public space that limit freedom of participation and identification of opportunities.

The article discusses the use of the concept of territory as a social construct in the study of social exclusion. The Greeks are a prime example of the concept when they conceived their territory as a territory delimited by the polis. During the Greeks and in medieval times, territory is determined by its appropriation by the community, and is political in this sense.

This chapter examines the ways in which homeland images, myths and symbols have been used to nationalize space and territorialize national identity. Although homelands are most often depicted as politically neutral, cultural spaces that are both natural and eternal, in reality homelands are politically constructed places toward which the population is territorialized. Homelands are constructed to instill not only a sense of spatial identity or emotional attachment to an ancestral homeland among the population being territorialized, but also a sense of exclusiveness. Homelands do not come ready-made, but rather are the outcomes of the national construction of social space. Nationalism is fundamentally an ideology and political action program designed to convert land into national territory. Nationalists employ a wide variety of mechanisms in the social construction of national homelands. Along with cartographic representations, those engaged in nationalizing space also frequently personify the homeland with the invention of allegorical masculine and feminine characters. In Kazakhstan, a multicultural Kazakhstani identity or civic nation is promoted by the state at the same time that policies and the changing interethnic relations of daily life are remaking Kazakhstan into a more ethnically exclusionary Kazakh homeland. The selection of symbolic national landscapes in homeland representations also frequently involves a conscious effort at differentiation from the symbolic landscapes and homeland images of ethnonational others. Monuments in the landscape help to project an image of permanence onto the nation and its relationship to the land, and thus reinforce the imagery of primordialism and rootedness.

This article examines how myth and reality impinged on each other at the Mosquito Coast, a place of interactions between pirates, the survivors of stranded vessels, and natives with sympathy for Europeans. A discussion is provided on how the Miskito negotiated social space for themselves in the power struggles of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, and how this negotiation shaped their own ethnic identity and their relations with their aboriginal peoples in Atlantic America. It also offers a look on how their encounters with the British were interpreted in a century that was both fascinated and repelled by the exotic aboriginal and was anxious to stereotype or classify that other within evolving discourses of race and civilization.

This article focuses on the lack of attention paid to the role of the body in social processes. There is a thriving intellectual industry examining the role of the body in a number of ways. Sociologist Brian Turner identifies three areas where the body has been attended to in some detail: the body's symbolic significance as a metaphor for social relationships; as a necessary component in the analysis of gender, sex and sexuality; and in the context of the study of medical issues. However, as Turner notes, within these various enterprises, the body and embodiment remain illusive and ill-defined. Turner provides the broad outlines of what a general sociological theory of the body would require: a complex account of the idea of embodiment which can incorporate the systematic ambiguity of the body as corporeality, sensibility and objectivity; a conceptualization of the social actor as embodied attached to an analysis of how the body image functions in social space, an understanding of embodiment as communal; a sense of the body as a thoroughly historical and cultural entity.

This chapter examines the nature of the territory-behavior relationship in human actors. Humans, like other animals, exist in bounded spatial arenas that affect and are affected by the behavior that takes place within them. Typically the term territoriality is used to refer to spatial behaviors directed at the active defense of a territory. In ethnology it is thus more than the habitual use of a defined area. It is also defined as a behavior characterized by recognition of, use of, and some kind of defensive reaction toward a specific area. When dealing with humans, however, the term has been used in a broader sense, perhaps reflecting the more complex relationship between space and behavior in humans. Here territorial behavior is defined as habitual use of particular spatial locations. Territorial functioning is an interlocked system of sentiments, cognition and behaviors that are highly place specific, socially and culturally determined and maintained, and that represent a class of person-place transactions concerned with issues of setting management, maintenance legibility and expressiveness. Thus, territorial functioning is highly variable across the long term health of a community.

Chapter 93 of the book "Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective," Third Edition, edited by David B. Grusky, Manwai C. Ku and Szonja Szelényi is presented. It discusses the concept of social space which perceives the whole set of points from which ordinary agents see the social world. It also emphasizes the relevance of habitus which is a structuring structure that organizes practices and the perception of practices.

The article focuses on the post-clubbing period of the night in night clubs of Great Britain. The immediate post-clubbing period of the night out is frequently one of reflective recoveries, whether in small groups or alone. While clubbers will have had unique experiences, it can be fun to establish common threads that have run through 'their' nights. Some of the post-clubbing activities and reflections of three clubbers or groups of clubbers have been selected in outlining the important, yet varied nature of this period of 'afterglow'. The clubbing seems to somehow constitute a qualitatively different form, experience or 'mode' of social space from the world 'outside'. Clubbing matters to many young people. There is little stylistic or musical unity across the cultures of clubbing, and the already countless genres of clubbing continue to fragment and multiply. The intensity of the clubbing crowd and the elective and affective identifications that can spin out of this intensity mark out the clubbing crowd as qualitatively different from many other forms of group togetherness. Clubbing is not just about wearing, specific clothing, but also the way that clothing is worn.

The chapter examines the power relation between children and society at large, particularly as it relates to contentions over what physical space a child is allowed to inhabit. With the onset of the baby boom, there was an even larger perceived need to regulate children's space. The child's place in suburbia figured strongly almost from the outset, especially in the discourse of the open space promised by the advertisements. The Blackboard Jungle film, which hit first-run theaters in April 1955 at the height of Davy Crockett's popularity, also heralded the newest facets of teenage culture--rock and roll music and the sexually aggressive dancing that accompanied it. Though seemingly found only in the teenage population, delinquency was also thought to threaten younger children, whose infection seemed imminent. As the suburbs grew in population, various groups were organized to supervise children's leisure time. Another potential tool for keeping children safely with the survey of parents was the latest addition to the suburban home--the television set. By 1955, Walt Disney had become the upholder of traditional American family, valued for his creation of films that helped preserve a child's innocence. Disney entered the medium of television in 1954 with the aptly titled Disneyland, stressing family entertainment. The first episode on Frontierland began a three-part chronicle of the legend of Crockett. Davy's reputation in culture as a free-roaming, fun-loving upstart reaches farther back than these television episodes. Thus, reenacting the legend of Crockett was quickly regarded as a lesson in American history and folklore.

The article explores the social space of disability in the industrial capitalist city, focusing on one important example, colonial Melbourne, Victoria. The article first charts a broad account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism (focusing on England) which highlights the significance of this modal shift for physically impaired people among the lower social strata. The second part situates the phenomenon of disability in the industrial city. Capitalism became the dominant mode of production in Europe only after a prolonged and geographically uneven process of development, whose origins can be traced back to the early stages of feudalism itself. The growth of rural capitalism certainly confronted impaired people with powerfully disabling forces. But the character of peasant social space, in particular, the ability of the lower orders to maintain their home-workplaces as redoubts against market relations-- was to provide impaired people with some protection against the forces of social devalorisation. Although official intolerance of the disabled street beggar hardened as the century progressed, the reverse was probably true of the disabled street trader. Disabled people took to the streets of the industrial city in a struggle for personal autonomy and social inclusion.

The article discusses the concept of mortality. The definition of the human inexorably contracts in accordance with cultural developments. Death is ultimately nothing more than the social line of demarcation separating the dead from the living. Therefore, it affects both equally. Against the senseless illusion of the living of willing the living to the exclusion of the dead, against the illusion that reduces life to an absolute surplus-value by subtracting death from it, the indestructible logic of symbolic exchange re-establishes the equivalence of life and death in the indifferent fatality of survival. The concept of immortality grew alongside the segregation of the dead. For the flip-side of death, this eminent status which is the mark of the soul and superior spiritualities, is only a story that conceals the real extradition of the dead and the rupturing of a symbolic exchange with them. When the dead are there, lifelike but different from the living whom they partner in multiple exchanges, they have no need to, and neither is it necessary that they should, be immortal, since this fantastic quality shatters all reciprocity. It is only to the extent that they are excluded by the living that they quietly become immortal, and this idealised survival is only the mark of their social exile. Immortality is progressive, and this is one of the strangest things. It progresses in time, passing from limited to eternal survival.

A sample of Student Interview Questions that was used in relation to the research discussed in the book "Urban Schools: The New Social Spaces of Resistance" is presented.

An introduction to the book, Contextualizing Transition: Interviews with Contemporary Russian Writers & Critics, is presented. It describes the diversity of life in Moscow, Russia from 1995 to 1996. The emergence of competing interests has dramatically diversified life that the streets of the city looked like a peculiar melange of dilapidated antiquity and thriving novelty. The juxtaposition of novelty and antiquity produced a transitional culture in which the drives to create anew social space. A cultural clash of historical interiority and contemporary surface no doubt adds vitality to the transition process.

A sample of Principal's Interview Questions that was used in relation to the research discussed in the book "Urban Schools: The New Social Spaces of Resistance" is presented.