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AbstractMental health professionals working with the dying and bereaved may occasionally feel that a belief in the mind’s persistence after death can function as an important coping device for some of their patients. To facilitate an unbiased reading of the empirical articles in this thematic issue, this essay therefore uses the history of a particularly contested area of ‘survival research’, spirit mediumship, to highlight widely forgotten but pivotal historical contexts and complexities which have failed to inform and balance standard academic receptions of empirical approaches to the mind’s hypothetic survival of death. After sketching diametrically opposed attitudes to mediumship by the founders of modern psychology, William James and Wilhelm Wundt, and psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler’s defences of research with mediums against the dismissive stance exemplified by Emil Kraepelin and Henry Maudsley, I conclude that standard interpretations of any open-minded scientific interest in mediumship and survival research as wishful thinking are asymmetrical and psychologically simplistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a systematic review of the literature examining metajournalistic discourse, a term proposed by Carlson to encompass all public utterances about the nature and boundaries of journalism. After collecting all scholarly output (N = 77) between 2015 and 2023, a content analysis of the articles was conducted, with particular attention paid to two key areas: the components (actors, sites/audiences, and topics) and interpretive processes (definitional control, boundary-work, and legitimation) of discourse. Our findings allow us to make a number of observations regarding the current state of research: 1) the study of metajournalistic discourse is dominated by a Western bias; 2) research approaches remain journalist-centric; 3) boundary-work concerns above all the relationship of journalism to technology and market imperatives; 4) the democratic/societal role of journalism emerges as the main legitimation strategy; 5) the topics of metajournalistic discourse have organic and prompted origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctorate forms the basis for academic careers and the regeneration of academia, and has increasingly become important for other sectors of society. The latter is reflected in efforts on institutional, national as well as supranational levels to change and adapt the doctoral degree to new expectations. As doctoral education is embedded in research, changes in governance and funding of research further affect the doctorate. The evaluation of the doctoral thesis appears, however, to have remained true to the academic tradition: an examination committee exercising their gatekeeping in a ceremonial setting. This study sets out to explore doctoral examination committees' evaluation practices. Insights were gained through six focus group interviews with experienced examination committee members at three large research-intensive universities in Sweden. Of particular interest is how the object of evaluation is formed, the nature of the boundary-work conducted, and variations in examination practices related to different and changing conditions for research and doctoral education. Our results show how the object of evaluation emerges through a gradual interpretation of the thesis and defence, becoming more complex and nuanced as the process of evaluation progresses from its initial stages to the final closed discussions of the committee. The finalised object of evaluation, only fully present at the conclusion of the closed meeting and hence transient in nature, encompasses the research contribution, educational achievement, and academic competence of the candidate. Furthermore, the boundary-work conducted in this process often transcends the object of evaluation to include also supervision and the local context for doctoral education and research, and hence contributes to upholding, and potential changing, norms in research fields, educational contexts, and academia at large. This extended boundary-work intensified as problems and inconsistencies were discovered during the evaluation process. The ceremonial staging underscored the gravity of the decision and the extended boundary-work. Despite changing conditions for the doctorate, our findings highlight the importance of the practice of evaluation committees, and the disciplinary communities to which they belong, for upholding and negotiating norms in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2021, Singapore Press Holding (SPH), the country's newspaper conglomerate, announced its restructuring into a not-for-profit entity in response to the global decline of the news industry. The government pledged an annual S$180m budget to the new SPH Media Trust (SMT), raising concerns about the ability of the news entity to break away from government control, but these were dismissed with political assertions that editorial independence had 'always existed'. This paper analyses the government-led public discourses surrounding SMT, highlighting a two-prong narrative approach: obfuscate the social role of the media in Singapore, and downplay the need for accountability over public funding for SMT. Applying a Foucauldian framework for evaluating discursive practices in governance and measuring these narratives against public service journalism scholarship, this paper probes the constructed determinants of journalism's social role in Singapore. It proposes that similar evaluations can be applied to discourse about journalism in other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do scientists construct the meaning of science as oppositional to politics? How do the institutional contexts of scientists' work environment, training processes, and peer-group interactions reflect scientists' understanding of scientific practices, rules of the scientific field, and themselves as scientists? I argue that scientists' practice of boundary-work between science and politics is institutionally nurtured by a series of processes, which I call boundary-training. Drawing on ethnographic research at a molecular biology laboratory, this article reveals various tactics of boundary-training. Scientists are trained to routinely consume material infrastructure and produce massive scientific data. They internalize productivity-oriented academic life and valorize controllability in science labs to achieve this goal. Individuals' self-reliance and survival become core virtues of scientific enterprise. All combined, scientists are trained to believe that their works are irrelevant to social and political circumstances. This mundane depoliticization of science contributes to the consequence that the scientific field becoming a more efficient apparatus of political and economic powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation Studies possesses a plethora of meta-concepts such as 'online collaborative translation', 'community translation', 'volunteer translation', etc. to refer to phenomena like translation crowdsourcing, fansubbing, fandubbing, etc. The existence of these various meta-concepts reflects an obvious need to categorise and subsume such phenomena under a meta-category. The paper will attempt to explain why this is the case, why categorising in and of itself is vital and how it relates to boundaries and undertaking boundary-work, both crucial processes in academia. The paper will advocate, based on boundary-work, for using 'online collaborative translation' as a meta-category and conclude by presenting a conceptual map of this meta-category and its various sub-categorisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Management of domestic and wild animals is an integral part of conservation and is often based on how an animal is categorised. For example, feral cats are often killed, while valued companion cats and native wildcats are protected. Drawing on qualitative research and using the concept of boundary‐work, this paper examines the complex categorisation and management of cats within conservation in Britain and Aotearoa, New Zealand (NZ). We examine how, both in theory and in practice, valued companion and wildcats are distinguished from unprotected feral cats, and in‐between categories of stray and hybrid cats. We demonstrate that stakeholders draw boundaries between cat categories differently. These differences in boundary‐drawing reflect the inherent blurriness of category boundaries, practical challenges and, importantly, differences in values, in particular whether priority is placed on the life of the cat or the cat's potential victim, particularly native or game birds. This can mean that laws outlining protections for specific categories of animals have limited effect if, in practice, those encountering cats draw boundaries differently. This paper also reports on important differences between the two case studies. In NZ, even cat advocates support the humane killing of unambiguously feral cats while this is less true in Britain. Furthermore, due to the nature of the contexts, conservationists in NZ are more inclined to assume that ambiguous cats are feral whereas conservationists in Britain are more inclined to assume that they are wildcats. This paper demonstrates that values not only shape people's perceptions and treatment of animals but also how they draw boundaries between them. This finding may have important implications for understanding other controversies in conservation and animal management. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Management of domestic and wild animals is an integral part of conservation and is often based on how an animal is categorised. For example, feral cats are often killed, while valued companion cats and native wildcats are protected.Drawing on qualitative research and using the concept of boundary‐work, this paper examines the complex categorisation and management of cats within conservation in Britain and Aotearoa, New Zealand (NZ). We examine how, both in theory and in practice, valued companion and wildcats are distinguished from unprotected feral cats, and in‐between categories of stray and hybrid cats.We demonstrate that stakeholders draw boundaries between cat categories differently. These differences in boundary‐drawing reflect the inherent blurriness of category boundaries, practical challenges and, importantly, differences in values, in particular whether priority is placed on the life of the cat or the cat's potential victim, particularly native or game birds. This can mean that laws outlining protections for specific categories of animals have limited effect if, in practice, those encountering cats draw boundaries differently.This paper also reports on important differences between the two case studies. In NZ, even cat advocates support the humane killing of unambiguously feral cats while this is less true in Britain. Furthermore, due to the nature of the contexts, conservationists in NZ are more inclined to assume that ambiguous cats are feral whereas conservationists in Britain are more inclined to assume that they are wildcats.This paper demonstrates that values not only shape people's perceptions and treatment of animals but also how they draw boundaries between them. This finding may have important implications for understanding other controversies in conservation and animal management. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that one of the reasons the suppression of scientific dissent during the Covid pandemic has been so severe was because the dominant scientific Covid narrative has been turned into a political myth, i.e. a narrative mobilizing groups in support of key moral values. Taking the example of Covid vaccination, I show the key values with which it became linked in Czechia. Questioning vaccination came to be seen as endangering these values, which made scientific dissent appear as particularly dangerous. I further analyse how this schematic discourse dealt with "free-vax" scientists, who were not against Covid vaccination as such but only against its blanket application. I show that their discreditation was mainly carried out by various fact-checking NGOs or social media influencers, who attempted to delegitimize them not by scientific arguments but rather by associating them with more dubious groups of social actors, or labelling their views as "disinformation". This discrediting strategy was largely successful, but it also had some undesirable social and political backfire effects, in that it pushed some of the free-vaxxers out of the liberal democratic mainstream and forced them to seek alliance with more anti-systemic segments of the population in attempts at political resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police wiretaps and taped emergency dispatch calls are just a couple of examples of the kinds of voice recordings that have made their way into criminal and civil proceedings. In some instances, an expert witness may be called upon to identify the person whose voice was captured on tape or digitally recorded. However, this type of forensic analysis – commonly referred to as "speaker identification" – has not been universally accepted by the courts. In this article, I look at several US cases where the efficacy of forensic speaker identification has been brought into question. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Sociolegal Studies, I examine the attempts made by experts to have their methods of voice identification accepted at trial as valid and reliable techniques, and the decisions made by judges to either admit or exclude this evidence. I demonstrate that the various rulings regarding the admissibility of speaker identification evidence reflect the interplay between law and science and is the direct result of the "boundary-work" undertaken by experts and how judges assess these activities. I argue that forensic speaker identification evidence must be understood and conceptualised as "law-science hybrids" that are co-produced over the course of a trial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studies on professions, it has long been understood that relations between professions are charged with competition over jurisdictions. The literature describes several techniques, such as rhetorical boundary-work, that professionals use to expand jurisdictions, gain a monopoly, or protect autonomy. But there still needs to be discovered how professionals cooperate when they are not motivated or threatened by jurisdictional struggle. In this article, we offer an analysis of COVID-19 wards in Poland, where physicians from diverse specialisations were made to work together and treat patients with coronavirus disease. That allows us to expand theoretical debate about professions by showing that in a context free of competition, boundaries between professions become permeable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawn on qualitative findings from discretionary chairpersons of parole boards in Israel, the study aims to theorize parole decision making as time–space boundary-work. Parole decision-makers were found to act within a hybrid professional environment that requires them to process distinct, and possibly conflicting, penal values, competencies and orientations. In order to address their professional tensions, parole decision-makers constantly negotiate their time and space, and thereby their professional identity. First, the parole decision-makers perform temporal boundary-work—conceptualizing their work and identity through qualitative-expansive time. Second, they perform spatial boundary-work—conceptualizing their work and identity through either (a) judicial space or (b) therapeutic space. This time–space work is used both to span and demarcate their boundaries in relation to other penal actors and to increase their visibility and legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the pursuitworthiness of philosophical ideas has changed over time, philosophical practice and methodology have not kept pace. The worthiness of a philosophical pursuit includes not only the ideas and objectives one pursues but also the methods with which one pursues them. In this paper, we articulate how empirical approaches benefit philosophy of science, particularly advocating for the use of qualitative methods for understanding the social and normative aspects of scientific inquiry. After situating qualitative methods within empirical philosophy of science, we discuss how to adapt these traditionally sociological methods to empirically inform philosophical questions. Our aim is to normalize and legitimize qualitative methods for philosophical purposes and discuss how they can elucidate descriptive and normative components of scientific practice in a more generalizable non-idealized manner. We contend that qualitative methods are particularly well suited to philosophical interest in the social norms of science, their achievability, and their mutability. Furthermore, unlike more historical case studies in philosophy, qualitative methods enable more confidence in generalizability, albeit limited, from a concrete sample to a larger class. We conclude by addressing anxieties about the distinctness of empirical philosophy of science from social epistemology and from sociology of science. • Argues for more inclusive boundary-work & a more diverse philosophical methodology. • Motivates disciplinary openness regarding adapting methods to inform philosophical questions empirically. • Discusses the data, explanations, and ideas afforded by qualitative methods. • Incorporates descriptive and normative components to study scientific reasoning and inquiry in practice. • Considers the scope of generalizability for qualitative studies in philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores practices of evaluation in academic recruitment in Swedish as a Second Language (SSL), an expanding and transdisciplinary subject area. As is common elsewhere, Swedish academia relies on a tradition of external expert review intended to ensure a meritocratic process. Here, we present an analysis of 109 written expert reports concerning recruitment to 57 positions in SSL during 2000–20. Because SSL lacks institutional autonomy, and is spread across several sub-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the material encompasses experts with diverse academic backgrounds. The SSL reports are broadly characterized by qualitative assessment. In contrast to other fields, the SSL experts seldom use quantitative proxy measures. Instead, they mainly rely on received conceptions of the boundaries of SSL as a means of justifying their inclusion and exclusion of candidates. This dominant regularity consists of attempts to define and delimit SSL and its core research areas, to locate the candidates in a core-to-periphery scheme with respect to these boundaries, and to rank them accordingly. This mechanism of social closure serves to restrict access to SSL to candidates with qualifications that conform to the experts' own conceptions of SSL. As we show, the experts' internally ambiguous conceptions of SSL tend to be constructed in relation to their own scientific habitus and investments. Beyond evaluating applicants' possession of scientific capital, their distinctive style of reasoning around research qualifications and skills thus involves power-laden boundary-work, which leaves ample room for individual, yet habitus-specific arbitrariness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative interviews with Chinese scientist science communicators (n = 15) and citizen science communicators (n = 15) on Zhihu suggest that there is a struggle between the two groups to be seen as legitimate science communicators online. Public users tried to show their enthusiasm as science communicators, integrate into the circle of science communicators and blur the boundary between scientists and themselves. The participating scientists tend to discount such activity and indicate that they are more legitimate science communicators, possessing the requisite scientific literacy and noble personal morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists are increasingly attacked in response to their work yet they often lack the necessary support and training to protect themselves, their sources, and their communications. Despite this, there has been limited scholarly attention that addresses how journalism schools approach digital security education. This paper draws from an analysis of 106 US programs and 23 semi-structured interviews with journalism students and professors to examine how the next generation of journalists learn about digital security practices. Our findings show that most programs (88.7%) don't offer formal digital security programming and that digital security skills are often deprioritized in favor of skills seen as more significant contributors to post-graduate hiring—a key priority of journalism programs. Additional barriers include a lack of space and time in existing curricula for added digital security coursework, a perception that students are not interested, and few professors with related knowledge. When security education is introduced, it's done so in often informal and ad-hoc ways, largely led by "security champions," both within and outside of journalism, who advocate for its legitimacy. These findings have important implications for journalism education and journalists' capacity to carry out their work amidst a deteriorating safety environment in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 19th century U.S., European ethnics were considered dark‐skinned and working‐class. By the 1950s, they were re‐categorized as White Americans. Assimilation theory suggests that Europeans' intergroup interactions such as socioeconomic attainments and intermarriage with Anglo‐Saxon Whites led to their assimilation and racial re‐categorization. The theory anticipates that class mobility translates into re‐categorization into Whiteness such that non‐Europeans' upward mobility will also propel them into Whiteness. Despite non‐Europeans' successful intergroup interactions, their assimilation and belonging is still up for debate. If both Europeans and non‐Europeans have participated in similar rates of intergroup interactions, which other factor has determined their differential assimilation outcomes? In response, we conceptualize a boundary model for understanding group belonging. To do so, we distinguish between symbolic and phenotype or somatic race. The former provides and attaches meanings to soma. This boundary model comprises the combined effects of individuals' intergroup interactions and majority groups' symbolic racial boundary expansion‐contraction. Assimilation outcome occurs only when majority groups' boundary expands to recognize intergroup interactions as meaningful and to include newcomers as racial group insiders. We revisit the case of European ethnics to show that the symbolic boundary of Whiteness expanded to re‐categorize them as assimilated Whites. Accordingly, we formulate four hypotheses about the possibilities of re‐categorizing groups in and out of a master category such as Whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the deployment of advanced practice nurses (APNs) in healthcare settings highlights significant challenges for APNs transitioning to a broader, less well-defined nursing role in negotiating professional boundaries and a new work identity with other health workers. However, theories of boundary-work and professional identity have been rarely applied to APNs relationships with general nurses and colleagues in lower professional position such as nursing-assistants. APNs relationships with these colleagues remain poorly understood. This article aims to contribute to addressing this gap. It is based on qualitative research on a pilot-project prefiguring the introduction of APN (pre-APN) in the French Health system entitled the Prefiguration of Clinical Nurse Specialists (PrefICS). Data were collected through field observations and interviews with pre-APNs, general nurses, nursing-assistants, doctors and nursing hierarchy, to assess the implementation of PrefICS project in four hospitals, one health centre and one cancer control centre. The analysis shows that facing the risk of their role being limited to collaborations with doctors, pre-APNs engaged in different forms of boundary-work with general nurses and nursing-assistants, to negotiate new professional relationships with these colleagues. Some pre-APNs presented themselves as resource persons and led activities aimed at developing and sharing nursing knowledges and competencies with general nurses and nursing-assistants. Other pre-APNs shaped their work identity around a reformist role in terms of both the nursing profession and work environments. Pre-APNs boundary work with general nurses and nursing-assistants produced work spaces in which pre-APNs interwove their work identity with these colleagues by negotiating new professional ties and brokering knowledges between different professional worlds. Changes in levels of pre-APN self-categorization reflected different views of the nursing and nursing-assistant professions, from which pre-APNs started building new alliances for a shared reflective work on their practice and about caring.

In this article, I explore the opinions of India's stem cell scientists on unproven and unregulated stem cell treatment provision in the country's private health sector. Drawing on interviews, I describe three themes, namely ethical responsibility; exaggerated timelines for stem cell cures; and the scientific method to demonstrate how scientists make distinctions between themselves as producers of ‘good stem cell research’ and treatment providers who practice ‘bad stem cell research’. Excerpts from my interviews with treatment providers interrupt the discussions in the themes, offering insights on conflicting views of medical professionals. I analyse the themes using the conceptual framework of ‘boundary-work’ that Gieryn developed in order to examine how scientists respond to challenges to their intellectual authority in particular scientific fields. A policy environment that promotes product development posed a threat to the integrity of basic science according to stem cell scientists who simultaneously reflected on solutions to advancing India's stem cell field by promoting the role of clinician-researchers as mediators between medicine and science. According to Gieryn, depending on what is at stake such as funding and public support, scientists redraw boundaries in order to secure their position in relation to competing groups. In this instance, I argue that the expectations of translational research, demanded that scientists examine the boundaries drawn between themselves and clinicians with the purpose of also including the latter in stem cell science rather than for excluding contenders, as Gieryn's notion of boundary-work suggested.

Identity construction involves drawing a rhetorical boundary between one's own group and others. Using data gathered from a Finnish online forum for Muslims, I study how the practice of temporary (mutʿa) marriage is used to mark a boundary between Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims. Here, I examine the rhetorical devices used by Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims, combining the principle of meta-contrast with the concept of boundary-markers to propose a general model of intergroup boundary dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many suggestions offered within the literature to decide if a job type is a profession, some using tick box type trait and characteristics analyses to compare the actions and qualities of individuals to a predefined list. However, there is no specific way to resolve what makes or defines a profession. Writers in many disciplines, including radiography, have used these different models, sometimes with conflicting results. This paper explores the use of Bourdieu's replacement of the concept of profession with that of a 'field', meaning a network of occupants with common attributes, in this case radiographers, in an attempt to resolve this issue. In the UK, radiography practitioners and professional bodies generally use the term profession to describe radiography, and this paper explores a defence of the term for radiography. Using Bourdieu's field theory not only helps define a profession, but also explains the difficulties at the boundaries of professions, and the work needed to protect a profession as a credible entity. This paper supports the argument that radiography is a profession when using Bourdieu's field theory. Radiography continues to work to maintain its status by increasing its symbolic capital by increasing the research output and evidence base of the profession and through role extension. Radiographers can perhaps be assured that radiography is a profession when using Bourdieu's field theory. This paper shows how theoretical frameworks and concepts from outside radiography can be used to support new ways of thinking within the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussions concerning the use of #fatacceptance on Instagram are important for observing both the limitations of official content moderation on social media platforms and an emerging group of users who engage in unofficial content moderation through discursive boundary-work. Discursive boundary-work takes the form of users repeatedly centering "true" or "correct" information, referencing experts and studies, and claiming the "other" is misunderstanding and misusing information or spreading (mis)information. However, these boundary-work as content moderation practices are not just about delineating between truth and falsehood; they are about users building and reinforcing norms of use, groups, relationships, and identities as well as the digital space for acceptance. Ultimately, I argue that our understandings of both content moderation and (mis)information need to be expanded and analyzed in consideration of their interplay with users' perspectives or beliefs, collective identities, relationships with other users and groups, and larger sociocultural, political, and activist communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand how COVID-19′s stay-at-home orders impacted youths’ sexual and social development, we conducted five virtual focus groups (n = 34) with adolescent girls’, trans’, and non-binary youths’ aged 16–19 between April-June 2021 in the GTA. We queried experiences of home, privacy, and sexual wellbeing during Canada's third wave. Auto-generated zoom transcripts were coded using an inductive framework with NVivo. Field notes and team discussions on the coded data informed the analysis. This paper explores how sexual wellbeing during the pandemic is practiced in relation to, dependent upon, and negotiated at home. Using intersectionality theory and embodiment theory, this research analyzes how youth's diverse identities shape their understandings and experiences of sexual wellbeing. We found youth needed spaces where they were not only unseen, but importantly, unheard. We argue sound as an important piece of boundary-work that reveals the way youth construct space during precarious times. Youth primarily negotiated sonic privacy through (a) sound-proofing, (b) sound warnings and (c) “silent reassurance”, a term we coined to describe the precursor of silence from other household members in order for youth to feel safe enough to practice sexual wellbeing. We found that white youth cited the bedroom as the best space for sexual wellbeing practices, but BIPOC youth felt the bedroom was only their best available option and still found they had to negotiate privacy. Attending to intersectionality theory, we expand on McRobbie and Garber's (1976) bedroom culture concept and widen Hernes’ (2004) concept of physical, social and mental boundary-work to include sound as a fourth type, which straddles among them. This research shows how privacy, gender and sexual identities were negotiated at home in times of extreme uncertainty, highlighting how implications of home as a ‘place’ during the pandemic, constructs sexual wellbeing. Mapping how and where youth practice embodied sexual wellbeing exposes the ways that private and public understandings of identity relate to sexuality and geographies of home. We understand the home as a complex space that can not only determine sexual wellbeing, but where health promoting boundaries can be negotiated. We conclude with suggestions for supporting adolescent sexual wellbeing, inside and outside the home, during and after COVID-19.

This article sheds light on the processes and tactics used by eighteenth-century electricians in making medical electricity a legitimate remedy in the Dutch Republic. Electricity’s medical value was by no means self-evident in the years following 1746, when the first Dutch patient was treated with it. Understandings of its effects on the body were still unclear and judgements on the efficacy of electrotherapy varied. The subsequent four decades saw the development of various theories, practices, and instruments of electrotherapy across Europe and North America. This development has thus far been little studied in the context of the Dutch Republic, despite the Republic’s prominent role in the wider history of electricity. Understanding how electricity became a legitimate component of the Dutch materia medica provides an insight into the ways transnational scientific knowledge is translated in local contexts. Dit artikel werpt licht op de processen en strategieën die achttiende-eeuwse experts op het gebied van elektriciteit in de Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden aanwendden om de medische inzet van elektriciteit te legitimeren. De medische waarde van elektriciteit was geenszins vanzelfsprekend in de periode rond 1746, het jaar waarin de eerste Nederlandse patiënt met elektriciteit werd behandeld. Een duidelijk begrip van de invloed van elektrotherapie op het lichaam was er op dat moment niet en het oordeel over de effectiviteit ervan varieerde. In de vier daaropvolgende decennia werden diverse theorieën over, praktijken van, en instrumenten voor elektrotherapie ontwikkeld in Europa en Noord-Amerika. De bloei van elektrotherapeutisch onderzoek in de Nederlandse Republiek zelf is tot nu toe echter weinig bestudeerd, ondanks de prominente rol van de Republiek in de bredere geschiedenis van elektriciteit. Dit artikel reconstrueert hoe elektriciteit een legitiem onderdeel van de Nederlandse materia medica werd en biedt inzicht in de verschillende manieren waarop transnationale wetenschappelijke kennis in lokale contexten werd vertaald.

Contemporary media environments are rife with contested information. Unable to rely on contradictory or deliberately distorted media accounts, socially interactive audiences turn to trustworthy others to make sense of the political world outside. This study uses the context of the Russian–Ukrainian conflict, marked by discordant media agendas and ideological narratives, to explore how citizens produce shared understandings of conflicting political issues. It draws upon a series of focus groups with media audiences in Eastern Ukraine to explore the socially embedded, interactive reconstruction and renegotiation of shared meaning. Based on a discourse and conversation analysis of the content, group dynamics, and non-verbal cues in the discussions, the study distinguishes three interaction modes (inquiry, narrative, and avoidance) that define the conditions for audiences' opinion formation. The findings show that cooperation in inquiry mode facilitates deliberation, the adoption of rigid consensual boundaries in narrative mode increases polarization, whereas cynical detachment in avoidance mode preserves confusion. The article concludes by discussing the implications for socially mediated meaning-making and democratic potential of political talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ongoing debate on national minority rights for Croatian Serbs in the spheres of education, identity, and minority language policies. The controversy results from research on legislative acts and integration strategies in the European Union, which are predominantly focused on citizenship issues and the integration of immigrant workers and less on the constitutionally recognised language rights of minorities and the new social space created after the collapse of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A new sense of identity emerged for the Serb minority in Croatia as a result of the post-war environment. The article provides an analysis of in-depth interviews between Croatian Serbs and Croatian cultural and academic professionals through boundary-work that emphasises the importance of cultural values and legal norms for the minority, especially in minority education (Models A, B, and C). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian Ochorowicz (1850–1917) belonged to the first generation of psychologists who regarded this discipline as a scientific, positive endeavor. At the same time, he was a representative of psychic sciences, following a strictly positivist attitude to researching psychic phenomena. This article discusses the key event of his career, experiments with the famous medium Eusapia Palladino, in Warsaw, between late 1893 and early 1894. Ochorowicz's séances with Palladino attracted wide local and international attention and improved his standing as an internationally leading psychic researcher. In Warsaw, however, these experiments were fiercely controversial and, as a result, Ochorowicz was discredited and left the city. As I argue, this dissociation of credibilities was the outcome of a changing media landscape in the late nineteenth century. While Ochorowicz's strategy of boundary‐work and asserting his credibility aimed at scholarly media, it proved fatal when facing intensive, daily coverage in the popular press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We bring a science‐as‐rhetoric framework, which has been used to study the claims of scientists, to examine lay claims about science. Using qualitative content analysis, we scrutinize the rhetoric of science in online reader comments sent in response to New York Times articles covering two recent measles outbreaks. Pro‐vaccine commenters use a variety of rhetorical tactics that simultaneously venerate science and denounce the antivaccination stance. These commenters, thus, participate in the ideological practices of boundary‐work to demarcate science from nonscience for the purposes of defeating their opponents and advancing their agenda. Our analysis foregrounds how and why this publics' demarcation of science is a type of moral crusade, that equates antiscientific beliefs with normative chaos. We situate our analysis in the larger cultural landscape wherein laypeople create "us" versus "them" using "science" as their wedge. The importance of developing sociological accounts of these dynamics has been made especially clear in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic and its many science‐based controversies, including those related to vaccination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I provide a preliminary account of the Yoga Studies Dispositif , that is, that specific apparatus of knowledge production, legitimization, and dissemination that has allowed the birth and development of the discipline of "modern yoga research" as an autonomous field of study and, in turn, has asserted the study of modern forms of yoga as its primary object of inquiry. More specifically, and in line with the constructionist epistemology taken by the "discursive study of religion" approach, I focus on the processes of boundary-work and boundary-object creation of modern yoga research and argue that these are the most influential discursive strategies adopted in the formation of this new discipline. Following on this premise, I contend that similar processes of demarcation and conceptual production are also pivotal to the birth and development of other sub-disciplines within the study of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health care encounters are opportunities for primary care practitioners to identify women experiencing domestic violence and abuse (DVA). Increasing DVA support in primary care is a global policy priority but discussion about DVA during consultations remains rare. This article explores how primary care teams in the United Kingdom negotiate the boundaries of their responsibilities for providing DVA support. In-depth interviews were undertaken with 13 general practitioners (GPs) in two urban areas of the United Kingdom. Interviews were analyzed thematically. Analysis focused on the boundary practices participants undertook to establish their professional remit regarding abuse. GPs maintained permeable boundaries with specialist DVA support services. This enabled ongoing negotiation of the role played by clinicians in identifying DVA. This permeability was achieved by limiting the boundaries of the GP role in the care of patients with DVA to identification, with the work of providing support distributed to local specialist DVA agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a worldwide social movement, skepticism aims to promote science and critical thinking. However, by analyzing texts published in the magazine of the Finnish skepticism movement between 1988 and 2017, we find that the movement carries out its mission in a way that maintains and produces gendered hierarchies. We identify six forms of gendered boundary-work in the data: (1) science as masculine, (2) questioning women, (3) complementary and alternative medicine as feminine, (4) debating the status of gender studies, (5) gender within the skepticism movement, and (6) supporting equality. Gender is an important aspect of the boundary-work undertaken by the movement to establish boundaries between science and nonscience. The forms of gendered boundary-work contribute to the idea of "true" science as a masculine and male-dominated domain, excluding women from both science and the skepticism movement. Even when the exclusions are subtle, hidden, or humorous, they nevertheless produce gendered inequalities by excluding women, belittling women's knowledge production, or granting women-only dismissive recognition. Indeed, our analysis indicates that there is a need to look deeply into science-based social movements: exclusive structural tactics are part and parcel of such movements' mundane activities, as our examples from Skepsis ry's popular magazine demonstrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding the alleged crisis of expertise, scientists increasingly act as expert advisors to governments, while organisations at the boundary between science and policy multiply. Experts in such contexts are often subject to contradictory injunctions, associated with the role of either scientist or public official. Role conflict is particularly intense when decisions informed by scientific advice have negative consequences. In these situations, boundary-work is ubiquitous, as scientists deny responsibility by dissociating themselves from policymaking and victims contest such claims. A better understanding of these dynamics requires that the concept of boundary-work be refined. A central distinction between two types of boundary-work is often neglected: on the one hand, people draw boundaries between cultural categories by defining their abstract features ('Science is X'); on the other, people draw boundaries by identifying concrete things as instances of those categories ('X is science'). Accordingly, when boundaries are unsettled, disputes over the cultural meaning of science can be definitional or identificational. An example illustrating the importance of this distinction is provided by the L'Aquila earthquake trial, a controversy that has been alternatively portrayed as a trial of science and as a trial of bad risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a one-month (April 2020) comparative observation of media content in three Estonian and three Finnish mainstream media sources (two daily newspapers and one weekly women's magazine) along with some examples from an earlier period, the authors analysed the representation of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the media. The analysis showed that the media from the two countries presented CAM both in its various mainstream and more fringe forms, and that pejorative as well as complimentary and attracting undertones were present. The authors conclude that CAM topics were present in the selection of sources as methods for wellbeing and healing but also as entertaining, exoticising, warning, and mystical-metaphorical allusions along with different levels of boundary-work, especially science. The authors also noted interesting differences between the chosen media both within one country and between the two countries in terms of how much CAM was present as well as in which ways it was treated. In the Estonian material, the scale of tones was broader: the texts presented highly sensational, exoticising and othering angles towards approaches that were considered extreme and dangerous but mainly entertainment-oriented, and they positively described healing and wellbeing practices, sometimes with a mystic touch. The Finnish media was more low-key in its representations and tone: the mentions were shorter and less frequent. Although the Finnish material had more positive representations, this does not suggest that CAM is more tolerated in Finland - the Finnish media presented less extreme forms of CAM, which gave less ground for journalistic opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to deal with voices deemed deviant and extremist is a recurring topic of debate, including questions such as whether deviant actors and ideas should be silenced or included in public debates. As with terrorist attacks in other parts of the world, the attacks in Norway on July 22, 2011 ignited discussions on the limits of legitimate debate, including the role of mainstream politicians and news media in setting the boundaries for what is appropriate in public debates. This article explores news debates on right-wing extremism in the decade after the attack, shedding light on how boundaries between legitimacy and deviance were drawn and negotiated. Analyzing articles on right-wing extremism in two national news outlets in Norway (NRK and VG) between 2013 and 2019, the author explores who got to speak and define the debate, to what extent actors deemed extremist were granted a voice, and how boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate political actors were negotiated. First, the analyses show that although the coverage was dominated by elites, actors deemed extremist were relatively prominent sources. Second, political and cultural elites engaged in continuous negotiations over the boundaries of legitimate and appropriate debate. However, third and relatedly, the analysis illustrates that debates concerning possible links between the views of legitimate elite actors--such as politicians in parliament--and deviant extremists were challenging to initiate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ongoing debate on national minority rights for Croatian Serbs in the spheres of education, identity, and minority language policies. The controversy results from research on legislative acts and integration strategies in the European Union, which are predominantly focused on citizenship issues and the integration of immigrant workers and less on the constitutionally recognised language rights of minorities and the new social space created after the collapse of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A new sense of identity emerged for the Serb minority in Croatia as a result of the post-war environment. The article provides an analysis of in-depth interviews between Croatian Serbs and Croatian cultural and academic professionals through boundary-work that emphasises the importance of cultural values and legal norms for the minority, especially in minority education (Models A, B, and C).

Attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most controversial childhood psychiatric condition. With the globalisation of its diagnosis and treatment, Taiwan has followed other medically advanced countries in meeting the challenge of medicalising children's problematic behaviours and encountering the resistance discourses on ADHD. To contribute to the extant literature, this study employs the social worlds framework to decipher the relational dynamics amongst these competing discourses on ADHD, namely the mainstream psychiatry, the critiques of overdiagnosis and the antipsychiatric protest, and to suggest the links between these domestic advocacies and the relevant debates abroad. In addition, the concept of boundary‐work is used to analyse the strategies through which these collective actors pursue legitimacy for their respective claims. Based on the existing research of scientific and ethical boundary‐work, this study argues that when it comes to clinical practices fraught with uncertainties, these two seemingly distinct forms of boundary‐work may become mutually supportive in order to act as arbiters of disputes. Despite the disparity of power amongst these social worlds in this case study with seemingly predictable outcomes of the dispute, representing their heterogeneous narratives and the process of discursive struggle helps to destabilise the seemingly naturalised conceptualisation of biomedical ADHD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circulation of scientific and technical genres in online publics can shape both public opinion and policy deliberation about issues such as global warming. While rhetoric and professional writing scholarship has documented the myriad ways that genres are transformed as they circulate across discursive boundaries, few examine how argument shapes those transformation and circulations. Drawing on Gieryn's concept of boundary-work, this article analyzes arguments in the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles about global warming to document how editors argue about genre as they deliberate over what counts as reliable sources of global warming knowledge. This analysis demonstrates how argument mediates genre uptake and circulation. In doing so, it helps account for how technical and scientific genres circulate in contemporary online publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents and discusses the common denominators of recent publications in German that address epistemological questions and problems relevant to the identity and autonomy of the study of religion. It summarizes the results of a bibliographical research focusing on argumentative convergences among the consulted authors. The text is based on the hypothesis that the consensus identified in the respective publications is a consequence of collective efforts to confirm the status of the study of religion as an independent discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a historical genealogy of EASA and European anthropology. Performing a heuristic exercise of ethnographic epoché, it critically examines European anthropologists' writings on European anthropology and EASA as they appear in different statements and accounts, especially in the Association's newsletters and reports of its conferences, understanding these documents as praxeologically embedded in anthropologists' everyday production of knowledge. Drawing on the sociology of critique and the concept of boundarywork, it argues that EASA created its own 'space of critique', funnelling previous discussions on European anthropology, and becoming a platform for its production and its contestation as a site for the production of 'hierarchies of knowledge'. Those contestations reflect an original and longstanding tension between EASA's inclusive cosmopolitan aspiration and the exclusionary practice of boundary-work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the expansion of pseudoscience, there is a need to understand its mechanisms of diffusion. Our aim was to evaluate how pseudoscience operates among pharmacists. We performed 29 semi-structured interviews to assess the stance of pharmacists regarding pseudoscience. Interview data were analyzed qualitatively to seek common themes. Our results indicate that although pharmacists were broadly opposed to more extreme pseudoscientific practices, some attitudes were detected that may contribute to pseudoscience acceptance. We identified some of the processes by means of which pseudoscience boundaries with science are blurred: the minimization of risk, the hierarchy of health-related pseudoscientific therapies, inappropriate utilization of the notion of "innocuousness," and the use of the placebo effect as a justification for prescription. Discursive patterns typical of pseudoscientific argumentation were also recognized, such as contradictory arguments and the sequndum quid and ad antiquitatem fallacies, which, we conclude, may contribute to a greater acceptance of pseudoscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]