Full Description
This volume contains an Open Access chapter.
This edited collection showcases the usefulness of symbolic interactionism in examining concurrent social issues which demand researchers' attention - symbolic interactionists demonstrate their roots in pragmatism by examining contemporary social issues, mental health, gun control and the homeless. Although these issues have been around for quite some time, recent changes in social, political, and economic landscapes have escalated the significance of these issues in everyday life.
While these issues have traditionally been examined using a quantitatively "big data" approach, authors here illustrate the usefulness of utilizing the symbolic interactionist methodology, an empirical endeavor that keys on micro interactional developments, in providing understandings of these social issues. Theoretically, chapters showcase the utility of symbolic interactionism, a perspective for investigating the meanings of objects, social relationships, and how objects become linked to social structures, in providing significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge of these social issues. Stressing the importance of examining mental health, gun control and the homeless as social constructs that involve social relationships and communication processes of actors in various structures, the authors utilize theoretical concepts such as reflexivity, interaction, and willfulness as pivot points in analyzing these social issues.
Calling for researchers' attention to study urgent social issues by demonstrating the effectiveness of symbolic interactionism as a research tool both theoretically and methodologically, this is appealing reading for both emerging and established interactionist scholars.
Contents
Part A. Mental Health, Gun Control and the Homeless
Chapter 1. Mental Health, Gun Control, and the Homeless: An Introduction; Antony J. Puddephatt
Chapter 2. What Does It Mean to Be Mentally Healthy? How Practitioners Enact Mental Health in Psychotherapy; Michael Slinger and Michael Halpin
Chapter 3. Policing Mental Illness and the Contradictions of Structural Stigma; Ania Theuer, Stacey Hannem, and Christopher J. Schneider
Chapter 4. Visualizing Faith and Firearms: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Christian Nationalist Images; Chelsea Starr
Chapter 5. Emotion and Reflexivity in Interviews with Homeless Women in France; Berenice Peñafiel
Chapter 6. "Fuck You With Your Recovery!": Identity Work, Symbolic Violence and the Recurrently Homeless; Mette Palm, Roy Gigengack, and Nienke Boesveldt OPEN ACCESS
Chapter 7. Criminalizing Survival: Public Camping Bans, Symbolic Interaction, and the Rhetoric of Homeless Discrimination; Melanie Loehwing
Chapter 8. There's No Place Like Home: Neoliberalism, Homelessness and Reclaiming City Streets as Spaces of Communal Identity within Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys and Olvia Laing's The Lonely City; Holly Parker
Part B. New Interactionist Research
Chapter 9. Dialogic Existentialism and Reflective Processes; Robert Perinbanayagam and Veronica Manlow
