BSJ

The Butler Scholarly Journal

Category: Sociology

  1. Jane Eyre: A novel of resistance and rebellion? by Millicent Jarvis- Scott

    In this thoughtful and incisive essay, Millicent explores resistance in Jane Eyre. Featured Image is Jane Eyre by Liz Lux, flickr creative commons. Literature which can be described as rebellious and resistive should be willing to go beyond social norms in a revolutionary way for the time period, something I would argue that Bronte is successful in doing in her novel ‘Jane Eyre’. Even the action of writing ‘Jane Eyre’ in 1847 could easily be considered to be an action of resistance, against both a literary culture which placed less value on female narratives, and a society which reinforced these…

  2. Pandemic Papers: Coronavirus’ Impact on US Politics

    In this article, Jessica Pabon will explore the effect the pandemic has had on US politics in a thoughtful, engaged way. [Featured image credit: ‘Jackson: Capitol Building’, by Visit Mississippi] ‘Coronavirus’: the term that will haunt the world for years to come, eliciting memories of a global pandemic in modernity, which was allowed to senselessly cause over a million death in its first year of existence. The pandemic has influenced every aspect of human life, resulting in quarantines, added stress on societal norms, and divides between individuals, both physical and ideological, where they did not exist before. There is nowhere…

  3. Star-crossed lovers crossing cultures: a comparative anthropological analysis

    This study proposes to examine the invention and reinvention of the classic tragic story of love in various cultural settings and how it the story was affected by the local environment. Shakespeare’s phenomenal Romeo and Juliet and its incarnations as the American West Side Story and Russian Could One Imagine? will be examined. This study is anthropological in nature as it is interested in the cultural context of the stories. Firstly, the notion of love as we understand it must be interrogated. Romantic love in Euro-American society is understood as the deep feelings shared by two individuals who idolize one…

  4. ‘The Power of Human Activity in Shaping English Place Names’

    The complexity of the origin of the English language has led to vast variations in the backgrounds of place names on a national scale. As a consequence of the immeasurable influences from a plethora of exogenous forces, place names stem from a variety of geneses, of which will be explored. The influence of the monarchy and royalty on English place names has undeniably been vast. Primarily, it seems plausible to focus on the addition of ‘Regis’ to the names of English towns. Stemming from the Latin for ‘of the King’, this term signifies the historical presence of royal manors or…

  5. The impact of time on the accuracy of eyewitness memory

    Eyewitness testimony is a statement given by people after they witness an occurrence (McLeod, 1970), and is often used in court cases to identify a suspect, or to recount information experienced during an event. This testimony is vital as it may turn a verdict in a court case: it may be one of the strongest pieces of evidence to support an explanation of the event, and this recount is still used as a reliable source of the witness’ memory of the occurrence. Hugo Münsterberg first recognised the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and noted that a witness is expected to recall…

  6. Queering Healthy Eating

    Challenges to assumptions about what it means to be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ are commendable, but usually rely on an understanding of sex as the fixed, biological basis upon which flexible, sociological ‘gender’ is constructed. Judith Butler asks us to question this understanding. She writes that “gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established” (Butler, 2006, p. 10). Why should oestrogen define what it is to be a ‘woman’, especially when there are so many other complicating factors, and what does it mean to be a woman anyway? Similarly, why should calories (or fat…

  7. Identity and Emergence: A Radical Relationship

    The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue – Antisthenes Throughout the twentieth century the social sciences underwent a shift toward symbolic and cultural studies, which placed the issue of identity at the core of these disciplines. The dismissal of identity as an essential property rooted in stable characteristics led scholars to focus on the social processes through which the self emerges, and the factors involved in them. Although this paradigmatic shift might seem obvious nowadays, it has had, and still has, profound and radical consequences in regards to how the…

  8. Social policy and evidence-based practice: Ne’er the Twain shall meet?

    Much like two pandas in a zoo, science and the law can often be reluctant bedfellows, to the detriment of quality output; be it informed policies or baby bears. Often it would appear that the law is in stark contrast with what research has shown to be effective, resulting in a system that fails many who pass through it. One such example is the employment of a youth justice system that has been shown to actively increase risk of reoffending in youths rather than reducing it. Youth offenders institutions act on the belief that the best way to deal with…

  9. HIV Stigma: The Importance of Talking About Sex

    When we think about HIV, what may immediately springs to mind is the situation in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the infection is spreading dramatically. Most of us will be aware of the devastating situation there, with extreme death rates and only a small percentage of people aware that they have the infection. Though rates of infection have dropped, around 1.2 million people in the area are dying each year, which is still an alarming and tragic statistic. This seems a world away from the situation in the UK and much of the Western world, where HIV has been controlled much better….

  10. The Roma Community: Prejudices and Inequalities

    The Roma people, a group that rarely enters the public consciousness in the UK, have hit international headlines over the past couple of weeks. It all started with “Maria”, the blond-haired, blue-eyed four-year-old girl in Greece who was taken away from her dark-complexioned Roma family by the police, largely on the basis that she couldn’t possibly be their biological child as she looked so different – and if she wasn’t their biological child, they must have kidnapped her. Maria was put into the care of an NGO while police carried out DNA tests, which confirmed that she was not biologically…